CHAPTER IV. THE BORDER MINSTRELSY, AND THE LAY OF T THE LAST MINSTREL. HERE can be no doubt that the Scottish Minstrelsy exerted on poetry in general a most healthful influence. The book seemed a fresh well, a 'diamond of the desert' newly opened amid the dry sandy wastes and the brackish streams of a literary wilderness. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads had appeared a few years previously, but had hitherto made very little impression on the public mind. Lewis' Tales of Terror, and translations from the German, had been over-stimulating, and were beginning to pall. It was not surprising that, in such a dreary dearth, a few bunches of wild flowers, culled as it were from the walls of a ruined. castle, but with the scent of free winds, and the freshness of the dew, and the tints of the sun upon the leaves, shot suddenly into the hands of men, should attract notice and awaken delight; that, while rejected by some of the fastidious, and the idolaters of Pope and Dryden, they should refresh the dispirited lovers of poetry; and that, while the vain and the worldly passed them by, if they did not tear and trample them under foot with fierce shouts of laughter, the simple-hearted on both sides of the Border took them up and folded them to their bosoms. Had the Minstrelsy appeared as an original work, we doubt if it would have met with such success. But, issued under the prestige of antiquity, criticism was disarmed: the prejudice men feel in favour of the old was enlisted in behalf of the new, and the book assumed the interest at once of a birth and a resurrection. One main merit of these ballads lay in their relation to the period when they were sung, and in their thorough reflection of the manners, feelings, superstitions, and passions of a rude age. This, joined to the literary excellence possessed by most of its specimens, renders the old ballad by far the most interesting species of poetry. The interest springs from the primitive form of society described in it,— a society composed of a few simple elements, of the baron's ha', the peasant's cot; the feudal castle, the little dependent hamlet beside it; the sudden raids made by one hostile chief upon another; the wild games, gatherings, and huntings which relieved ever and anon the monotony of life; the few travellers, chiefly pilgrims or soldiers, moving through the solitudes of the landscape; the Monastery with its cowled tenants, and the Minster with its commanding tower from the glimpses given of an early and uncultivated nature; of dreary moors, with jackmen spurring their horses across to seize a prey; of little patches of culture shining like spots of arrested sunshine on the desolate hills; of evening glens, down which are descending to their repose long and lowing trains of cattle from the upland pastures; and of ancient forests of birch, or oak, or pine, blackening along the ridges, half-choking the cry of the cataracts, and furnishing a shelter for the marauders of the time, if not also for the disembodied dead, or evil spirits from the pit: from the superstitions of that dark age,-ghosts standing sheeted in blood by the bedside of their murderers; fairies footing it to the light of the moon, and the music of the midnight wind; witches dwelling in caves communicating with hell; and portents of the sky-the new moon in the old one's arms, double suns, and tearless rainbows: and from the view supplied of fierce and stormy passions, boiling in hot aboriginal hearts, ever prompting to deeds of violence, yet mingled with thrills of generous emotion, and touches of chivalric grace. Then there was the build of the ballad, so simple yet striking, full even in its fragmentariness, bringing out all main events and master-strokes with complete success, often breaking off with an unconscious art at the very point where it was certain to produce the greatest effect; its very splinters, like those of aromatic wood, smelling sweetest at the fracture; its lyrical spirit, so changeful, gushing, bird-like ; and its language, so native, simple, graphic, yet in its simplicity powerful, and capable of the grandest occasional effects; reminding you of an oak sapling, which in the hands of a strong yeoman has often turned aside the keen point of the rapier, dashed the claymore to the dust, and deadened the blow of the mighty descending mace. Not inferior, besides, to any of these elements of interest, is the figure projected on our vision of the Minstrel himself, wandering through the country like a breeze or a river at his own sweet will, with a harp, which is his passion, pride, and passport, in his hand; now pausing on the rustic bridge, and watching the progress of the haunted stream, which had once ran red with gore in some ancient skirmish; now seated on the mountain summit, and seeing in the castles, abbeys, and towers which dot the landscape on every side, as well as in the cottages, villages, braes, and woods, a subject for his muse; and now beheld in a tower or castle, which even then had been for centuries a ruin, silent in its age, like that solemn Kilchurn Castle, standing at the base of Cruachan like a hoary penitent before God, but soothed amidst remorse and anguish by the sympathetic murmur of the dark Orchay and the silver ripple of the blue Loch Awe, meditating over other times, and passing his hand across his lyre at intervals, with a touch as casual and careless, yet music-stirring as that of the breeze upon the nettles and the ivy which in part adorn and in part insult the surrounding desolation,—or to view, in another aspect still, the manifolded Minstrel, his figure seen now entering a cottage at eventide, and drawing the simple circle as if in a net around him, as he sings Of old, unhappy, far-off things, or as he touches the trembling chords of their superstition by some weird tale of diablerie; now admitted, like Scott's famous hero, into the lordly hall, and there surrounded by bright-eyed maidens, and stimulated by the twofold flatteries of sugared lips and generous wines, pouring out his highwrought, enthusiastic, yet measured and wellmodulated strains; now meeting some brother |