Much more did fancy change facts in days before the printing-press.

Kinmont Willie.

O have ye na heard o' the fause Sakelde?

O have ye na heard o' the keen Lord Scroope? How they hae ta'en bauld Kinmont Willie, On Hairibee to hang him up?

Had Willie had but twenty men,

But twenty men as stout as he,

Fause Sakelde had never the Kinmont ta'en,
Wi' eight score in his cumpanie.

They band his legs beneath the steed,

They tied his hands behind his back; They guarded him, fivesome on each side,

And they brought him ower the Liddel-rack.

They led him thro' the Liddel-rack,

And also thro' the Carlisle sands;
They brought him to Carlisle castell,

To be at my Lord Scroope's commands.
'My hands are tied, but my tongue is free.
And whae will dare this deed avow?
Or answer by the Border law?

Or answer to the bauld Buccleuch ?'

'Now haud thy tongue, thou rank reiver! There's never a Scot shall set ye free: Before ye cross my castle yate,

I trow ye shall take farewell o' me.'

'Fear na ye that, my lord,' quo' Willie :

'By the faith o' my body, Lord Scroope,' he said,

'I never yet lodged in a hostelrie,

That an English lord should lightly me?
'And have they ta'en him, Kinmont Willie,
Against the truce of Border tide?

And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch
Is Keeper here on the Scottish side?

'And have they e'en ta'en him, Kinmont Willie, Withouten either dread or fear?

And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch
Can back a steed or shake a spear?

'O were there war between the lands,
As well I wot that there is none,
I would slight Carlisle castell high,
Tho' it were builded of marble stone.
'I would set that castell in a low,
And sloken it with English blood!
There's nevir a man in Cumberland

slight

level, demolish

Should ken where Carlisle castell stood.

slake

'O mony a time,' quo' Kinmont Willie,

'I have ridden horse baith wild and wood; But a rougher beast than Red Rowan, I ween my legs have ne'er bestrode.

And mony a time,' quo' Kinmont Willie,
'I've pricked a horse out ower the furs;
But since the day I backed a steed,
I never wore sic cumbrous spurs !'
We scarce had won the Staneshaw-bank,
When a' the Carlisle bells were rung,
And a thousand men, in horse and foot,

Cam wi' the keen Lord Scroope along.

away

ask

rent

mad

over the furrows

Buccleuch has turn'd to Eden water,

Even where it flow'd frae bank to brim,
And he has plunged in wi' a' his band,
And safely swam them through the stream.
He turn'd him on the other side,

And at Lord Scroope his glove flung he—
'If ye like na my visit in merry England,
In fair Scotland come visit me !'
All sore astonish'd stood Lord Scroope,
He stood as still as rock of stane;
He scarcely dared to trew his eyes,
When through the water they had gane.
'He is either himsell a devill frae hell,
Or else his mother a witch maun be;

I wad na have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie.'

The date of the event is April 13, 1596 (Tytler's History of Scotland, ix. 430; Lord Scroope's Dispatch). Scott of Satchells (History of the Name of Scott, 1688) either borrowed from the ballad, or, if any one distrusts Sir Walter Scott, then he borrowed from Satchells! Sir Walter confessedly combined and emended versions, and the present writer, like Professor Child, recognises his hand in stanzas 10, 11, 12; perhaps we may add 17, 31, 39, if not 46.

Mary Hamilton.

Marie Hamilton 's to the kirk gane,

Wi' ribbons in her hair;

The King thought mair o' Marie Hamilton Than ony that were there.

Marie Hamilton 's to the kirk gane,

Wi' ribbons on her breast;

The King thought mair o' Marie Hamilton Than he listen'd to the priest.

Marie Hamilton 's to the kirk gane,

Wi' gloves upon her hands;

The King thought mair o' Marie Hamilton Than the Queen and a' her lands.

She hadna been about the King's court

A month, but barely one,

Till she was beloved by a' the King's court,

And the King the only man.

She hadna been about the King's court

A month, but barely three,

Till frae the King's court Marie Hamilton,

Marie Hamilton durst na be.

The King is to the Abbey gane,

To pu' the abbey tree,

To scale the babe frae Marie's heart;

But the thing it wadna be.

O she has row'd it in her apron,

And set it on the sea

'Gae sink ye, or swim ye, bonny babe,

Ye's get na mair o' me.'

Word is to the kitchen gane,

And word is to the ha', And word is to the noble room, Amang the ladyes a',

'Often have I dress'd my Queen,

And often made her bed;
But now I've gotten for my reward
The gallows tree to tread.

'I charge ye all, ye mariners,
When ye sail ower the faem,

Let neither my father nor mother get wit, But that I'm coming hame.

'I charge ye all, ye mariners, That sail upon the sea,

Let neither my father nor mother get wit This dog's death I'm to die.

'For if my father and mother got wit,
And my bold brethren three,

O mickle wad be the gude red blude
This day wad be spilt for me!

'O little did my mother ken,
The day she cradled me,
The lands I was to travel in,

Or the death I was to die!'

Professor Child (vol. iii. 382-384) regarded this as 'one of the very latest of the Scottish ballads,' yet one of the very best.' Like Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe and Mr Courthope, he thought that it was based on the death of a Mary Hamilton for child-murder, at the court of Peter the Great, in March 1719. Professor Child's later published remarks on the objection of the present writer to this theory are in vol. V. p. 299 (compare Blackwood's Magazine, September 1895, p. 381 et seq). The facts of the Scottish case-an apothecary and a French maid of Mary's being the culprits-are in State Papers (Foreign), Elizabeth, December 21, 1563, p. 637. The apothecary occurs in a variant in the Abbotsford MSS. This could hardly have happened if, for some unknown reason, our ballad was based, about 1720, on a report of a contemporary event in Russia, and yet accommodated to the circumstances of Mary Stuart's reign. The apothecary is a clear trace of the historical facts of 1563. Professor Child therefore thinks the improbability of the modern date and origin of the ballad 'considerably greater' than the improbability of the chance coincidence of a child-murder by a real Mary Hamilton, a Russian maid of honour. There was no Hamilton among the Queen's Maries, who were Mary Seton, Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming, and Mary Livingstone, and the scandal about one of those ladies, circulated by John Knox, has been disproved by contemporary documents. Scott's patched version is selected as classical. extraordinary number of variants, with the Duke of York and the Duke of Argyll introduced as fathers of the heroine, demonstrate the wide circulation, antiquity, and manifold corruption of the ballad. These things do not suit a ballad of 1720 based on a Russian scandal.

The

ANDREW LANG.

E

ROM Shakespeare to Milton— from Elizabeth to Cromwellthe parallelism of the two changes at once suggests the influence exercised upon literature by the external forces which control the religious and political life of the time. Whatever be the causes which lead to the production of great literature or great art at a given place or time, it may safely be averred that it demands the concurrence of a virile energy, strung to its highest pitch, with the moderating influence of ideas which impose limitations on the worker or the thinker, and preserve the sanity of those who act upon their contemporaries in the world of external achievement as well as in the world of mental conception. It was this combination which, on the one hand, sent forth the members of a single Athenian tribe to fight in one year in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, and on the soil of Greece itself, at a time when the most thorough political revolution had been carried out by constitutional methods unstained by the horrors of civil war; and, on the other hand, manifested itself alike in the counsels of Pericles, the graving-tool of Phidias, and the written word of Sophocles.

The Elizabethan age in England showed an energy as intense as that of Athens, displaying itself in a far wider field. With an outlook upon a new world still to be won to the use of civilised mankind, a religion or rather, more than one religion-claiming not to be national but universal, the nobler Elizabethan found the boundary lines of thought and of moral rectitude pushed forward beyond the limits which had satisfied his ancestors. It is hardly strange that these spacious times' gave birth to the greatest of dramatists, who worked, not only for an age, but for all time,' and who, whilst he gave with unerring touch vitality to all his characters, limited their action by nothing less. than the forces of nature herself, whether acting by external compulsion or by the influence of individual character.

Shakespeare's largeness of view was shared by

the greatest of his contemporaries. It was on nature and her material laws that Bacon strove to found the new science. It was on nature and her moral laws that Hooker strove to found

ecclesiastical peace. One voice, however, in the Elizabethan choir sounded a note apart. Shakespeare, Bacon, and Hooker alike deal with men and things as they are. Spenser aimed at depicting men as they ought to be, and it was the Spenserian tradition which was taken up by Milton in his earlier poems. With Milton, from the beginning, it is not the real individual man, acting in harmony with his own nature and controlled by the forces of the external world, but the individual man idealised looking forth on a world also idealised. So it is with the verses on the deaths of Bishops Andrewes. and Felton (1626), with L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (1632?), and with Comus (1634). The last-named poem is especially characteristic of Milton's frame of mind at this period of his life. In it not merely is virtue exalted and vice scorned, but the inward purity of mind is represented, as by Plato and Spenser, as holding sway over the outward appearance :

So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity
That, when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream and solemn vision
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear ;
Till oft converse with heavenly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence
Till all be made immortal.

The change in the poet's point of view from Perdita and Miranda to the lady of the Comus is obvious; and it is no less obvious that it is no mere deflection in the stream of literary taste with which we have to reckon. Milton was other than Shakespeare, primarily, of course, because the two men were born different, but also because the times in which they lived were different. The world was no longer in the Miltonic age a mystery and a wonder. The Western Continent was no longer

the home of men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, but the abode of very prosaic English colonists in Virginia and New England. England no longer confronted the world in arms, but was called on to work out her own domestic problems at home. The world had grown smaller, and the boundary of political action had been drawn closer. Puritanism, which had furnished to the Elizabethan one of the phenomena of which he had to take account, threatened in the reign of Charles to absorb all others. It is unnecessary to argue that Puritanism, conceived as an ecclesiastical system, with its unbending theology and its strict discipline, was hostile to literary effort. No great work was ever inspired by the tone of thought which expressed itself in the Admonition to Parliament or in the Westminster Confession. Even the moral restrictions of Puritanism were too sternly pressed to be congenial to the artistic nature. 'Touch not, taste not, handle not,' seems best answered by the flippant comment, 'Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?' Yet the essence of Puritanism did not lie in its prohibitions but in its aspirations, in its desire to avoid the excess and riot of the world around. It was this, for instance, that imposed on men like Baxter the name of Puritan. Baxter, as he himself tells us, ‘never scrupled common prayers or ceremonies, nor spoke against Bishops, nor ever so much as prayed but by a book or form, being not even acquainted then with any that did otherwise ; but only for reading Scripture when the rest were dancing on the Lord's Day, and for praying by a form out of the end of the Common Prayer Book-in his house, and for reproving drunkards and swearers, and for talking sometimes a few words of Scripture and the life to come, he was reviled commonly by the name of Puritan, precisian, and hypocrite.'

The aims of such men were of necessity individualistic. They sought to strengthen and purify the soul rather than to increase the power of their country or to spread its influence abroad. For such the imposition of the stern Puritan discipline upon the conscience was almost a necessity lest, becoming merely selfcentred, they should loosen the bonds which imposed some check on the divergencies of thought and action and hindered the dissolution of the nation into a thousand hostile sects. Yet, checked as it might be, the sense of individuality was there, and bore with increasing

force upon the art as well as upon the mind of Milton.

Such a system of thought could not fail to be as repulsive to one order of minds as it was attractive to another. Hostility, not to the moral tendencies but to the intellectual fetters of Puritanism, developed itself amongst scholars at the universities, where the students of Patristic literature were familiarised with thoughts very different from those which inspired Calvinistic theology. The attack on that theology led to a somewhat uncertain progress in the direction of intellectual freedom, whilst those who carried it on sought, in their reverence for external forms of worship, for that fixed order which was accepted by their opponents as residing in the sphere of intellectual belief. The English world was entering on a period of unrest and controversy, and for the first time religious. controversy, which had found its way into Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, left its mark on a truly great poem in Lycidas (1637). The lines in which the Laudian system is attacked can hardly be regarded as enhancing the merits of that splendid verse, yet it must be acknowledged that in introducing them Milton had too fine an artistic sense to take notice of the more prominent subjects under discussion at the time, and contented himself with dwelling on the neglect of duty which he ascribed to a hireling clergy. The highest poetry refused to touch satirically. on such topics as the position of the communion-table or the wearing of the surplice.

Yet, on the other side, reverence rendered it possible to touch on them, if only by a tour de force. The tendency to subordinate thought to words had shown itself in the quaintness of Donne and Andrewes, and it was but a step further in George Herbert when he subordinated thought to symbolism:

Mark you the floor? That square and speckled

stone

Which looks so firm and strong
Is Patience :

And th' other black and grave, wherewith each

one

Is checkered all along,
Humility.

The gentle rising, which on either hand
Leads to the Quire above,

Is Confidence:

But the sweet cement, which in one sure band
Ties the whole frame, is Love
And Charity.