With the Union of the Crowns, Sir Walter Scott half sadly reminds us in _Nigel_, one stream of Scottish romance and song ran dry; the end of the Kingdom became the middle of it; and as his namesake, Scott of Satchells puts it, the noble freebooter was degraded to be a common thief. But even the Reformation and the Union did not wipe out original sin or alter human nature. The kingdoms might have outwardly composed their quarrels; but private feuds remained, and even the Martyrs and the Covenanters had their relapses, and loved and sang and slew under the impulse of earthly passion. _The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow_--perhaps the most moving and most famous of the Scottish ballads--is supposed to have sprung, in its present shape at least, out of a tragic passage that occurred by that stream of sorrow so late as 1616.
Away in the North, what we may call the ballad-yielding age, if it came later and had a less brilliant flowering time, endured longer. They had a fighting 'Border' there that lasted until the '45. The Gordons, of their own hand, have furnished a ballad literature as rich, if not quite so choice, as that of the Douglases themselves. _Glenlogie_ and _Geordie_ were of the 'gay Gordons,' and had the 'sprightly turn' that is held to be an inheritance of the race. _Edom o' Gordon_--Adam of Auchindoun--did his ruthless work in 1571. It was in one of their interminable quarrels, begun on the farther side of Spey, that, in the year 1592, the _Bonnie Earl o' Moray_ fell so far away as Donibristle, in Fife. The mystery of the _Burning of Frendraught_ took place in 1630; the tragedy of _Mill o' Tiftie's Annie_--one of the few dramas in which the balladist is content to take his characters from humble life--is dated, from the tombstone in Fyvie churchyard, in the year following, and is placed in Gordon country, and under the shadow of the Setons that became Gordons. _The Bonnie House o' Airlie_ treats of one of the incidents of the Civil War, and, for a wonder, in the true ballad fashion; and it turns, as the balladists are apt to do, a crooked and misliking look on the 'gleyed Argyll'; while that fine Deeside ballad, _The Baron o' Bracklay_, deals with an encounter between Farquharsons and Gordons in the period of the Restoration.