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tradition or common fame, and moving the strings of their harp with sounds that sank into a nation's heart. How fine an illustration of this is that passage in Don Quixote, where the knight and Sancho, going in search of Dulcinea, inquire their way of the countryman, who was driving his mules to plough before break of day, "singing the ancient ballad of Roncesvalles." Sir Thomas Overbury describes his country girl as still accompanied with fragments of old songs. One of the best and most striking descriptions of the effects of this mixture. of national poetry and music is to be found in one of the letters of Archbishop Herring, giving an account of a confirmationtour in the mountains of Wales.

"That pleasure over, our work became very arduous, for we were to mount a rock, and in many places of the road, over natural stairs of stone. I submitted to this, which they told me was but a taste of the country, and to prepare me for worse things to come. However, worse things did not come that morning, for we dined soon after out of our own wallets; and, though our inn stood in a place of the most frightful solitude, and the best formed for the habitation of monks (who once possessed it) in the world, yet we made a cheerful meal. The novelty of the thing gave me spirits, and the air gave me appetite much keener than the knife I ate with. We had our music too; for there came in a harper, who soon drew about us a group of figures that Hogarth would have given any price for. The harper was in his true place and attitude; a man and woman stood before him, singing to his instrument wildly, but not disagreeably; a little dirty child was playing with the bottom of the harp; a woman in a sick night-cap hanging over the stairs; a boy with crutches, fixed in a staring attention, and a girl carding wool in the chimney, and rocking a cradle with her naked feet, interrupted in her business by the charms of the music; all ragged and dirty, and all silently attentive. These figures gave us a most entertaining picture, and would please you or any man of observation; and one reflection gave me a particular comfort, that the assembly before us demonstrated that even here the influential sun warmed poor mortals, and inspired them with love and music."

I could wish that Mr. Wilkie had been recommended to take this group as the subject of his admirable pencil; he has painted a picture of Bathsheba, instead.

In speaking of the old Scotch ballads, I need do no more than mention the name of Auld Robin Gray. The effect of reading this old ballad is as if all our hopes and fears hung upon the

last fibre of the heart, and we felt that giving way. What silence, what loneliness, what leisure for grief and despair!

"My father pressed me sair,

Though my mother did na' speak;
But she looked in my face

Till my heart was like to break."

The irksomeness of the situations, the sense of painful dependence, is excessive; and yet the sentiment of deep-rooted, patient affection triumphs over all, and is the only impression that remains. Lady Ann Bothwell's Lament is not, I think, quite equal to the lines beginning

"O waly, waly, up the bank,

And waly, waly, down the brae,
And waly, waly, yon burn side,
Where I and my love wont to gae.

I leant my back unto an aik,

I thought it was a trusty tree;
But first it bow'd, and syne it brak,
Sae my true-love's forsaken me.

O waly, waly, love is bonny,

A little time while it is new;
But when it's auld, it waxeth cauld,
And fades awa' like the morning dew.
Whan cockle-shells turn siller bells,
And muscles grow on every tree,
Whan frost and snaw sall warm us aw,
Then sall my love prove true to me.

Now Arthur seat sall be my bed,

The sheets sall ne'er be fyld by me:
Saint Anton's well sall be my drink,
Since my true-love's forsaken me.
Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw,
And shake the green leaves aff the tree?
O gentle death, whan wilt thou cum
And tak' a life that wearies me?

"Tis not the frost that freezes sae,
Nor blawing snaw's inclemencie,

'Tis not sic cauld, that makes me cry,

But my love's heart grown cauld to me.

Whan we came in by Glasgow town,

We were a comely sight to see,

My love was clad in black velvet,
And I myself in cramasie.

But had I wist, before I kist,

That love had been sae hard to win;
I'd lockt my heart in case of gowd,
And pinn'd it with a siller pin.
And oh! if my poor babe were born,

And set upon the nurse's knee,
And I mysel in the cold grave!

Since my true-love's forsaken me."

The finest modern imitation of this style is the Braes of Yarrow; and perhaps the finest subject for a story of the same, kind, in any modern book, is that told in Turner's History of England, of a Mahometan woman, who, having fallen in love with an English merchant, the father of Thomas à Becket, followed him all the way to England, knowing only the word London, and the name of her lover, Gilbert.

But to have done with this, which is rather too serious a subject. The old English ballads are of a gayer and more lively turn. They are adventurous and romantic; but they relate chiefly to good living and good fellowship, to drinking and hunting scenes. Robin Hood is the chief of these, and he still, in imagination, haunts Sherwood Forest. The archers green glimmer under the waving branches; the print on the grass remains where they have just finished their noontide meal under the green-wood tree; and the echo of their bugle-horn and twanging bows resounds through the tangled mazes of the forest, as the tall slim deer glances startled by.

"The trees in Sherwood Forest are old and good
The grass beneath them now is dimly green:
Are they deserted all? Is no young mien,
With loose-slung bugle, met within the wood?

No arrow found-foil'd of its antler'd food—

Struck in the oak's rude side?-Is there nought seen
To mark the revelries which there have been,

In the sweet days of merry Robin Hood?

Go there with summer, and with evening-go

In the soft shadows, like some wand'ring manAnd thou shalt far amid the forest know The archer-men in green, with belt and bow, Feasting on pheasant, river-fowl, and swan, With Robin at their head, and Marian.” *

* Sonnet on Sherwood Forest, by J. H. Reynolds.

LECTURE VIII.

ON THE LIVING POETS.

"No more of talk where God or Angel guest
With man, as with his friend, familiar us'd
To sit indulgent."-

GENIUS is the heir of fame; but the hard condition on which the bright reversion must be earned is the loss of life. Fame is the recompense not of the living, but of the dead. The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men. Fame itself is immortal, but it is not begot till the breath of genius is extinguished. For fame is not popularity, the shout of the multitude, the idle buzz of fashion, the venal puff, the soothing flattery of favour or of friendship; but it is the spirit of a man surviving himself in the minds and thoughts of other men, undying and imperishable. It is the power which the intellect exercises over the intellect, and the lasting homage which is paid to it, as such, independently of time and circumstances, purified from partiality and evilspeaking. Fame is the sound which the stream of high thoughts, carried down to future ages, makes as it flows-deep, distant, murmuring evermore like the waters of the mighty ocean. He who has ears truly touched to this music is in a manner deaf to the voice of popularity. The love of fame differs from mere vanity in this, that the one is immediate and personal, the other ideal and abstracted. It is not the direct and gross homage paid to himself, that the lover of true fame seeks or is proud of; but the indirect and pure homage paid to the eternal forms of truth and beauty as they are reflected in his mind, that gives him confidence and hope. The love of nature is the first thing in the mind of the true poet: the admiration of himself the last. A man of genius cannot well be a coxcomb; for his mind is too

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