The occasion has ever so much to do with the making of the man. Approaching the bed, Jamie doffed his cap and proceeded:—“O Lord, Thou kens best Thy nainsel’ how the case stands atween Thee and auld Eppie; and sin’ Ye hae baith the heft and the blade in Yer nain hand, just guide the gully as best suits her guid and Yer nain glory. Amen.”
It was a poacher’s prayer in very truth, but a bishop could not have said more in as few words.
But it is easy to be expressive in Scotch, for it is peculiar to the native idiom that the simpler the language employed the effect is the greater. Think how this is manifested in the song and ballad literature of the country. In popular ballads like “Gil Morrice,” “Sir James the Rose,” “Barbara Allan,” and “The Dowie Dens o’ Yarrow”; in Jane Elliot’s song of “The Flowers of the Forest”; in Grizzel Baillie’s “Werena my heart licht I wad dee”; in Lady Lindsay’s “Auld Robin Gray”; in Lady Nairne’s “Land o’ the Leal”; in Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne”; in Tannahill’s “Gloomy Winter”; in Thom’s “Mitherless Bairn”; and in Smibert’s “Widow’s Lament.” I do not mean to say that the making of these songs and ballads was a simple matter; but the verbal material is in each case of the simplest character, and the effect such that the pieces are established in the common heart of Scotland. Burns did not go out of his way for either language or figures of speech to describe Willie Wastle’s wife, yet see the graphic picture we have presented to us by a few strokes of the pen:—
“She has an e’e—she has but ane,
The cat has twa the very colour;
Five rusty teeth, forbye a stump,
A clapper-tongue wad deave a miller;
A whiskin’ beard about her mou’,
Her nose and chin they threaten ither—
Sic a wife as Willie has,