Was he the man who made it a common thing to speak in ballads of “combing her yellow hair”?
What a poet, too, was he who put that touch into “Bewick and Grahame,” where the father throws down his glove as a challenge to his son and the son stoops to pick it up, and says—
“O father, put on your glove again,
The wind hath blown it from your hand.”
It is one of the most delicate things, and with it the stanza in the same ballad where the father praises the son for his victory over a friend, but the son, hating the battle which would not have been fought if the fathers had not quarrelled in their wine, says—
“Father, could ye not drink your wine at home
And letten me and my brother be?”
And the mind of a poet is to be seen in the whole of some ballads and in every detail, as for example in the three perfect verses—
“O lang, lang may their ladies sit