in Aberdeenshire; and Alexander Geddes, a Roman Catholic priest in Morayshire,-the songs of these local poets were more spontaneous, and proved themselves to have a correspondingly greater vitality. Of Skinner's songs in particular, few in number but all real in their impulse, full of verve and manly strength of heart and intellect, Burns was an ardent admirer. In one of those complimentary epistles which it was the fashion of the day for poets to interchange, Burns regretted that he had not been able to pay in person 'a younger brother's dutiful respect to the author of the best Scotch song Scotland ever saw-Tullochgorum's my delight!' and hailed Skinner as the sole surviving possessor of that 'certain something' which to his mind distinguished old Scotch songs 'not only from English songs but from the modern efforts of song-wrights, in our native manner and language.' Burns was also much struck with the pathos of The Ewie wi' the Crookit Horn; he would have seen another quality in it if he had been in the secret, preserved by tradition, that the Ewie lamented was a whisky still captured by the exciseman; but the fact that to any one not in this secret the lament should have seemed so natural and touching, is an evidence of the delicacy with which the humorous double-meaning is sustained. Burns was perhaps prejudiced by the direct unaffected strength of Skinner's songs, and the large-hearted philosophy of life which inspired them, into paying him a compliment that the technical excellence of his verse hardly warrants. Among Burns's contemporaries there were certainly others besides Skinner who possessed the secret of the certain indescribable something which makes a song a permanent addition to popular literature. Burns himself speaks of one of the most enduring of Scotch songs, There's nae luck about the house, which was first sung upon the streets and sold in a broadsheet about 1771 or 1772, as 'one of the most beautiful songs in the Scots or any other language.' It is still one of the mainstays and props of homely sentiment in Scotland. Its authorship is uncertain, but the weight of evidence assigns it to a poor schoolmistress, Jean Adams, who closed an unfortunate career in an almshouse. Another song of equally enduring qualities, Auld Robin Gray, which became popular about the same date, was believed for some time by antiquaries to be as old as the time of David Rizzio, but proved to be the work of a girl hardly out of her teens, Lady Ann Lindsay, daughter of the Earl of Balcarres. The same mistake of ascribing popular songs to remote antiquity was made in the case of Ca the Yowes to the Knowes, a pastoral song in a very different key of sentiment, which was really written by Isabel, or Tibbie, Pagan, an Ayshire cottager, described as a woman of deformed person, saturnine temper, and dissolute habits, rendered formidable by her sarcastic wit and attractive by her powers of song. Two plaintive songs, to the air of The Flowers of the Forest, were from the first assigned to their true authors, Miss Jane Elliot, sister of the Sir Gilbert Elliot who afterwards became Lord Minto, and Miss Rutherford, afterwards Mrs. Cockburn, daughter of a Roxburghshire laird. Mrs. Cockburn's version had reference to a contemporary commercial disaster of the same nature as the Glasgow Bank failure, but both have become associated in the popular mind with the defeat of Flodden. This may have contributed to their popularity, but the strength of their appeal to the melancholy romantic side of the Scotch character would probably have alone sufficed to preserve them. To the same period belongs the marching song of the 42nd Regiment, The Garb of Old Gaul. This stirring martial lyric was first printed in The Lark, a miscellany published in Edinburgh in 1765, and was the composition of a young officer, Harry Erskine, who afterwards entered political life, and whose son was promoted to the peerage as Earl of Rosslyn. I have drawn attention to the various social positions of the song-writers of that period, to whom we owe the best and most enduring Scotch songs, the songs which have taken most hold of the people, and have moulded their character, in order to show how universal was the passion for song-writing in the eighteenth century. If we turn to the productions of less happy faculty, the works of ambition and ingenious endeavour, we find abundant evidence of the same fact. Before Burns the lyric tendency is everywhere conspicuous, and naturally after Burns it increased for a time rather than abated. We have seen that Sir Gilbert Elliot's sister was a successful song-writer; the diplomatist and statesman himself in his youth contributed a pastoral to Yair's Charmer, My Sheep I neglected—I lost my sheep-hook, in which he vowed to 'wander from love and Amynta no more.' This pastoral still holds its place in collections of Scotch songs. Andrew Erskine, a younger brother of the Earl of Kellie, wrote many songs, and one, How sweet this lone vale, which Burns pronounced 'divine.' Sir John Clerk, a Baron of the Exchequer, did not consider it beneath his dignity to put tags to old songs, and words in his native dialect The to old tunes. Dr. Austin, a fashionable physician in Edinburgh, consoled himself for the loss of a lady who jilted him in a song which has supported many in similar circumstances, For Lack of Gold. Alexander Wilson, who afterwards attained fame as an ornithologist, began life as a pedlar and strung breezy lyrics together as he wandered on cheerfully from door to door with his pack on his back. 'Balloon' Tytler-so called from his aeronautic experiments-chemist, mechanician, original editor and principal compiler of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, showed in Loch Erroch Side, and The Bonnie Brucket Lassie, that scientific pursuits had not dimmed his freshness of feeling. Blind Dr. Blacklock, who kept a boarding-school, warbled 'in the manner of Shenstone,' about the harvest that waves in the breeze and the music that floats on the gale. Richard Hewitt, Blacklock's amanuensis, emulated the work of his master in the same vein. famous song, Hey Johnnie Cope, which deserves to be ranked among the best songs of the period, was the composition of Adam Skirving, a wealthy Haddingtonshire farmer. John Lowe, a gardener's son, wrote Mary, weep no more for me. John Mayne, a compositor, wrote Logan Braes. A song-writer of wider culture was the Rev. John Logan, Minister of Leith, the writer of the most eloquent sermons which the Scotch Church has produced. It is difficult in reading Logan's poetry to divest oneself of sympathy with the story of his unhappy life, but there seems to be more in his verse than mere general literary facility. He was a writer of sacred as well as 'profane' songs, but his essays in the latter direction, though they disturbed his relations with his brethren, help to redeem the Ministers of the Scotch Kirk from the reproach of having contributed less than any other class in the community to the national lyric movement of the eighteenth century. W. MINTO. TULLOCHGORUM. JOHN SKINNER. Born 1721; died 1801.] Come gie's a sang, Montgomery cried, For what's been done before them? To drop their Whig-mig-morum ; O, Tullochgorum's my delight, And ony sumph' that keeps up spite, In conscience I abhor him. For blythe and cheery we's be a, And mak' a happy quorum. For blythe and cheery we's be a', There needs na' be sae great a phrase, I wadna gi'e our ain strathspeys morose person. • dull. 3 gloomy. They're douff and dowie at the best, They canna please a Scottish taste, Let warldly minds themselves oppress To the reel of Tullochgorum? May choicest blessings still attend And a' that's good watch o'er him! May peace and plenty be his lot, Peace and plenty, peace and plenty, May peace and plenty be his lot, And dainties a great store o' 'em ; May peace and plenty be his lot, Unstain'd by any vicious spot! And may he never want a groat That's fond of Tullochgorum. But for the dirty, yawning fool, And nane say wae's me for 'im ! |