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of his notes to those old Scotish ballads which he published in 1781; and the late Mr Headly, more than so seems in that collection of ancient English ballads, which he soon after gave to the press. We find there an idiot-preference of the rude, and, in itself, valueless foundation, on which Prior raised one of the loveliest poetic edifices in our language, the Henry and Emma. With equal insolence and stupidity, Mr Headly terms it "Matt's versification Piece," extolling the imputed superiority of the worthless model. It is preferring a barber's block to the head of Anti

nous.

Mr Pinkerton, in his note to the eldest Flowers of the Forest, calls it, very justly, an exquisite poetic dirge; but, unfortunately for his decisions in praise of ancient above modern Scotish verse, he adds,“The inimitable beauty of the original, induced a variety of versifiers to mingle stanzas of their own composition; but it is the painful, though necessary duty of an editor, by the touchstone of truth, to discriminate such dross from the gold of antiquity;" and, in the note to that pathetic and truly beautiful elegy, Lady Bothwell's Lament, he says the four stanzas he has given appear to be all that are genuine. It has since, as you observe, been proved, that both the Flodden Dirges, even as he has given them, are modern. Their beauty

was a touchstone, as he expresses it, which might have shewn their younger birth to any critic, whose taste had not received the broad impression of that torpedo, antiquarianism.

You, with all your strength, originality, and richness of imagination, had a slight touch of that torpedo when you observed that the manner of the ancient minstrels is so happily imitated in the first Flowers of the Forest, that it required the strongest positive evidence to convince you that the song was of modern date. The phraseology, indeed, is of their texture, but, comparing it with the border ballads in your first volume, I should have pronounced it modern, from its so much more touching regrets, so much more lively pic

tures.

Permit me too to confess, that I can discover very little of all which constitutes poetry in the first old tale, which you call beautiful, excepting the second stanza, which gives the unicorns at the gate, and the portraits, "with holly aboon their brie." To give them, no great reach of fancy was requisite; but still they are picture, and as such, poetry.

Lord Maxwell's Good Night is but a sort of inventory in rhyme of his property, interspersed with some portion of tenderness for his wife, and some expressions of regard for his friends; but

pa

the first has no picture, and the latter little thos. That ballad induced me, by what appeared its deficiencies, to attempt a somewhat more poetic leave-taking of house, land, and live-stock. My ballad does not attempt the pathetic, and you will smile at my glossary Scotch.

Mr Erskine's supplemental stanzas to the poem, asserted to have been written by Collins on the Highland superstitions, have great merit, and no inferiority to those whose manner they

assume.

In the border-ballads, the first strong rays from the Delphic orb illuminate Jellom Grame in the 4th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 20th stanzas. There is a good corpse-picture in Clerk Saunders, the rude original, as you observe, of a ballad in Percy, which I have thought furnished Burger with the hint for his Leonore. How little delicate touches have improved this verse in Percy's imitation!

"O! if I come within thy bower

I am no mortal man!

And if I kiss thy rosy lip

Thy days will not be long*

And now, in these border ballads, the dawn

*This stanza has no rhymes, but we do not miss them, so harmonious is the metre-S.

of poesy, which broke over Jellom Grame, strengthens on its progress. Lord Thomas and fair Annie has more beauty than Percy's ballad of that title. It seems injudiciously altered from this in your collection; but the Binnorie, of endless repetition, has nothing truly pathetic; and the ludicrous use made of the drowned sister's body, by the harper making a harp of it, to which he sung her dirge in her father's hall, is contemptible.

Your dissertation preceding Tam Lane, in the second volume, is a little mine' of mythologic information and ingenious conjecture, however me→ lancholy the proofs it gives of dark and cruel superstition. Always partial to the fairies, I am charmed to learn that Shakespeare civilized the elfins, and, so doing, endeared their memory on English ground. It is curious to find the Grecian Orpheus metamorphosed into a king of Winchelsea.

The Terrible Graces look through a couple of stanzas in the first part of Thomas the Rhymer "O they rade on," &c. also " It was mirk, mirk night;" and potent are the poetic charms of the second part of this oracular ballad, which you confess to have been modernized; yet more po tent in the third. Both of them exhibit tende touches of sentiment, vivid pictures, landscapes

from nature, not from books, and all of them worthy the author of Glenfinlas.

"O tell me how to woo thee" is a pretty ballad of those times, in which it was the fashion for lovers to worship their mistresses, and when ballads, as you beautifully observe, reflected the setting rays of chivalry. Mr Leyden's Cout Keelder pleases me much. The first is a sublime stanza, and sweet are the landscape-touches in the 3d, 10th, and 11th, and striking the wintersimile in the 9th. The picture of the fern is new in poetry, and to the eye, thus,

"The next blast that young Keelder blew,

The wind grew deadly still;

Yet the sleek fern, with fingery leaves,
Wav'd wildly o'er the hill."

The "wee Demon" is admirably imagined.

And now the poetic day, which had gradually risen into beauty and strength through this second volume, sets nobly amidst the sombre, yet oftenilluminated grandeur of Glenfinlas.

Permit me to add one observation to this already long epistle. The battle of Floddenfield, so disastrous to Scotland, has been, by two poetic females, beautifully mourned; but your boasted James the Fourth deserved his fate,