'Riven hose and ragged hools, Sour milk and girnin' gools, Psalm beuks and cutty stools'
After a time of dearth, however, Scottish poetry began to revive; and one of the earliest signs was the attention that began to be paid to the anonymous ballads of the country. It is curious that the first printed collection of them should have been almost contemporary with that merging of the Parliaments of the two kingdoms, which, according to the fears and beliefs of the time, was to have made an end of the nationality and identity of the smaller and poorer of the countries. It was in 1706--the year before the Union--that James Watson's _Serious and Comic Scots Poems_ made their appearance, prompted, conceivably, by the impulse to grasp at what seemed to be in danger of being lost.
Of infinitely greater importance in the history of our ballad literature was the appearance, some eighteen years later, of Allan Ramsay's _Evergreen_ and _Tea-Table Miscellany_. It was a fresh dawning of Scottish poetry. Warmth, light, and freedom seemed to come again into the frozen world. The blithe and genial spirit of the black-avised little barber-poet was itself the greatest imaginable contrast to the soured Puritanism and prim formalism that for half a century and more had infested the national letters. But the author of _The Gentle Shepherd_ himself--and small blame to him--did not fully comprehend the nature and extent of his mission. He did not wholly rid himself from the prevalent idea that the simple natural turn of the old verse was naked rudeness which it was but decent and charitable to deck with the ornaments of the time before it could be made presentable in polite society; indeed he himself, in later editions especially, tried his hand boldly at emendation, imitation, and continuation.
For a generation or two longer, the ballad suffered from these attentions of the modish muse. Yet the original spark of inspiration was not extinct; in the Border valleys especially--its native country, as we have called it--there were strains that 'bespoke the harp of ancient days.' Of Lady Grizel Baillie's lilts, composed at 'Polwarth on the Green' or at Mellerstain--classic scenes of song and of legend, both of them--mention has been made; they have on them the very dew of homely shepherd life, closed about by the hills, of 'forest charms decayed and pastoral melancholy.' The Wandering Violer, also, 'Minstrel Burne,' from whom Scott may have taken the hint of the 'last of all the bards who sang of Border chivalry'--caught an echo, in _Leader Haughs_, of the grief and changes 'which fleeting Time procureth.'
