'Riven hose and ragged hools,
Sour milk and girnin' gools,
Psalm beuks and cutty stools'
of Whiggery.
After a time of dearth, however, Scottish poetry began to revive; and one of the earliest signs was the attention that began to be paid to the anonymous ballads of the country. It is curious that the first printed collection of them should have been almost contemporary with that merging of the Parliaments of the two kingdoms, which, according to the fears and beliefs of the time, was to have made an end of the nationality and identity of the smaller and poorer of the countries. It was in 1706—the year before the Union—that James Watson's Serious and Comic Scots Poems made their appearance, prompted, conceivably, by the impulse to grasp at what seemed to be in danger of being lost.
Of infinitely greater importance in the history of our ballad literature was the appearance, some eighteen years later, of Allan Ramsay's Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany. It was a fresh dawning of Scottish poetry. Warmth, light, and freedom seemed to come again into the frozen world. The blithe and genial spirit of the black-avised little barber-poet was itself the greatest imaginable contrast to the soured Puritanism and prim formalism that for half a century and more had infested the national letters. But the author of The Gentle Shepherd himself—and small blame to him—did not fully comprehend the nature and extent of his mission. He did not wholly rid himself from the prevalent idea that the simple natural turn of the old verse was naked rudeness which it was but decent and charitable to deck with the ornaments of the time before it could be made presentable in polite society; indeed he himself, in later editions especially, tried his hand boldly at emendation, imitation, and continuation.
For a generation or two longer, the ballad suffered from these attentions of the modish muse. Yet the original spark of inspiration was not extinct; in the Border valleys especially—its native country, as we have called it—there were strains that 'bespoke the harp of ancient days.' Of Lady Grizel Baillie's lilts, composed at 'Polwarth on the Green' or at Mellerstain—classic scenes of song and of legend, both of them—mention has been made; they have on them the very dew of homely shepherd life, closed about by the hills, of 'forest charms decayed and pastoral melancholy.' The Wandering Violer, also, 'Minstrel Burne,' from whom Scott may have taken the hint of the 'last of all the bards who sang of Border chivalry'—caught an echo, in Leader Haughs, of the grief and changes 'which fleeting Time procureth.'
'For many a place stands in hard case
Where blyth folks ken'd nae sorrow,
With Humes that dwelt on Leaderside,
And Scotts that wonned in Yarrow.'
His song, with its notes of native sweetness and its artificial garnishing of classic allusions, marks the passing of the old ballad style into the new.
Jane Elliot, too, a descendant of that Gibbie Elliot—'the laird of Stobs, I mean the same'—who refused to come to the succour of Telfer's kye, listened to the murmuring of the 'mining Rule' and looked up towards the dark skirt and threatening top of Ruberslaw, as she crooned the old fragment which her fancy shaped into that lilting before daybreak of the lasses at the ewe-milking, turned ere night into wailing for the lost Flowers of the Forest. Her contemporary, Mrs. Cockburn, who wrote the more hackneyed set of the same Border lament, was of the ancient race of Rutherford of Wauchope in the same romantic Border district,—a district wherein James Thomson, of The Seasons, spent his childhood from almost his earliest infancy, and where the prototype of Scott's Dandie Dinmont, James Davidson of 'Note o' the Gate,' sleeps sound under a green heap of turf. To trace the Teviotdale dynasty of song further in the female line, Mrs. Cockburn's niece, Mrs. Scott, was that 'guidwife o' Wauchope-house,' who addressed an ode to her 'canty, witty, rhyming ploughman,' Robert Burns, with an invitation to visit her on the Border—an invitation which the poet accepted, and on the way thither, as he relates, chanced upon 'Esther (Easton), a very remarkable woman for reciting poetry of all kinds, and sometimes making Scots doggerel of her own.'
Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, the search for and the study of the remains of the old and popular poetry was making progress. With this had come a truer appreciation of its beauty and its spirit, and the return of a measure of the earlier gift of spontaneous song. The fancy of Scotland was kindled by the tale of the '45. Her poetic heart beat in sympathy with the 'Lost Cause'—after it was finally lost; even while her reason and judgment remained, on the whole, true to the side and to the principles that were victorious. Men who were almost Jacobin in their opinion—Robert Burns is a prime example—became Jacobite when they donned their singing robes. The faults and misdeeds of the Stewarts were forgotten in their misfortunes. In the gallant but ruinous 'cast for the crown' of the native dynasty, the national lyre found once more a theme for song and ballad. 'Drummossie moor, Drummossie day' drew laments as for another Flodden; and 'Johnnie Cope,' in his flight from the field of Prestonpans, was pursued more relentlessly by mocking rhymes than by Highland claymores.
A rush of Jacobite song, which had the great good fortune to be wedded to music not less witching than itself, followed rather than attended the Rebellion; and has become among the most precious and permanent of the nation's possessions in the sphere of poetry. Whichever side had the better in the sword-play, there can be no doubt which has won the triumph in the piping. Song and music have given the Stewart cause its revenge against fortune; and Prince Charlie, and not Cumberland, will remain for all time the hero of the cycle of song that commemorates the last romantic episode in our domestic annals. Jacobite poetry has been lyrical for the most part. But the ballad—narrative in form and dramatic in spirit—has not been neglected.