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 the public, should attract notice and awaken delight; that, while rejected by some of the fastidious and the idolaters of Dryden and Pope, 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 took them up and folded them to their bosoms, Such a bunch was the Percy Ballads, and such their reception. Lord Jeffrey, in some of his articles in the Edinburgh Review, as in that very able one on " Ford's Dramas," attributes the commencement of our emancipation from an artificial style of poetry to Cowper; but the Percy Ballads had preceded his works, and began a reaction in favour of truth and simplicity, which Cowper's influence strengthened, and which, through the aid of Bowles and the Lake Poets in the end of the eighteenth century, terminated in a complete and final triumph. Had the Percy Ballads appeared as an original work, we doubt if they 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.

As an original work in the eighteenth century they certainly never could have appeared, since one of their main merits lies 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 poetic qualities 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' and the peasant's cot'-the feudal castle-the little dependent village 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, mostly 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 them 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 allusions to the superstitions of that dark age, to ghosts standing sheeted in blood by the bedside of their murderers of fairies footing it to the light of the midnight moon, and the music of the midnight wind-of witches (like her of Wokey) hiding

"In the dreary dismall cell

Which seem'd and was ycleped hell:

Whare screeching owls oft made their nest,
While wolves its craggy sides possest-

Night howling through the rock".

and to the portents of the sky, such as that so picturesquely introduced in "Sir Patrick Spence "

"Late, late yestreen I saw the new moone

Wi' the auld ane in hir arme,

And I feir, I feir, my deir mastèr,

That we will com to harme "

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, as in the noble exclamation of Percy over the dead Douglas

"To have savyde thy lyffe I wold have pertyd with

My lands for years thre,

For a better man of hart, nare of hande

Was not in all the north countrè."

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, and 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 so powerful, and capable of the grandest occasional effects, reminding you of an oak-sapling, which, in the hands of a strong man, 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 land like a breeze or a river, at his own sweet will, with a harp, which is his passion, pride, and passport in the land-now pausing on the rustic bridge, and watching the progress of the haunted stream, which had once run 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, the villages, the braes, and the woods, a theme for his muse—and now beheld in a tower or castle, which even then had been for centuries a ruin, silent in its age (as that solemn Kilchurn Castle, standing at the base of Cruachan, like a penitent before a God, but soothed amidst remorse and anguish by the sympathetic murmur of the dark Orchay, and farther off by 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 musical 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 the manifolded minstrel, his figure seen now entering a cottage at even-tide, and, drawing the simple circle, like a net, in around him, as he sings

"Of old unhappy far-off things,

And battles long ago "

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 flattery of sugared lips and generous wines, pouring out his highwrought, enthusiastic, yet measured and well-modulated strains-now meeting some brother-bard, and exchanging, by the lonely mountain wayside, or in some rude hostelry, their experience and their songs-now firing warriors, on the eve before, or on the morn of battle, by a Tyrtæan ode-now soothing the soul of the departing soldier, as did Allan Bane Roderick Dhu, by some martial strain, which seems to the dying ear like the last echo of the last of a hundred fights— now singing his dirge after death, as did also the grey-haired seer and songster when he cried

"Oh woe for Alpine's honour'd Pine!
Sad was thy lot on mortal stage !—
The captive thrush may brook the cage,
The prison'd eagle dies for rage.
What groans shall yonder valleys fill !
What shrieks of grief shall rend yon hill!
What tears of burning rage shall thrill.
When mourns thy tribe thy battles done,
Thy fall before the race was won,

Thy sword ungirt ere set of sun !"

and now, in fine, himself expiring, with the whole fire of the minstrel spirit mounting up to his eye, and with the harp and the cross meeting over his dying pillow, as emblems of his joy on earth and of his hope in heaven, and typical also of that happier era in the history of the world, when genius and religion shall embrace each other, and when, as some astronomers tell us, the constellation of the Lyre and the Cross of the South, shining both together in our hemisphere, shall attest and signalise the blessed union. All these, and far more than all these ideas, images, and associations, must be remembered and appreciated ere we understand the full meaning and magic of the words "Ballad-poetry." Add to this the fact that these ballads have, as Fletcher said long ago, been the real laws of a country-that they have pervaded every rank of society-mingled, like currents of air, with men's loves, hatreds, enthusiasms, patriot-passions--passed from the mouth

of the minstrel himself to that of the ploughman in the field— the maid by the well (singing, perchance, as in that exquisite scene in "Guy Mannering"

"Are these the links of Forth, she said,

Or are they the crooks of Dee ;

Or the bonnie woods of Warroch-head,

That I sae fain wad see?")

the reaper among the yellow sheaves-the herdsman in the noontide solitude of the hill, or in the snow-buried shielingthe child in the nursery, or in her solitude, how strange and holy, with God for her only companion! while wandering to school, through woods or wildernesses-and the soldier, resting after the fatigues of a day of blood, or returning to his mountain home when the wars are over, to the music of one of its own unforgotten songs! Who remembers not the husbandman in "Don Quixote," who, as he goes forth to his morning labour, is singing the "ancient ballad of Ronces Valles?" And add still farther, as an illustration of the power and charm of ballad-poetry, not only that Homer, the earliest, and all but the greatest of poets, was a ballad-maker; and not only that Shakspeare condescended to borrow songs, and plots, and hints, from old English ballads-but that many of the noblest of modern poetic productions, such as the most of Scott's verses, Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Rime of the Anciente Marinere," Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads,” Southey's "Old Woman of Berkeley," Allan Cunningham's best lyrics, Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," and innumerable more, are imitations, in style, or in spirit, or in manner—or in all three of those wild, early, immortal strains.

So much for the general merit, power, and popularity of such ballads as are found in Percy's collection. We come now, instead of considering the merits of the ballads individually, to say a few words about the origin and history of balladminstrelsy and minstrels-remarks intended simply as supplementary to, or explanatory of, the very interesting essay of Percy. The minstrels of the middle ages may be regarded as a cross between the bards or scalds of the ancient Scandinavian world, and the actors and public singers of modern times. To