Among the Old Scotch Minstrels. By William McDowell. (David Douglas,
Edinburgh.)—This little volume is as satisfactory as it is unpretentious. While acknowledging—or, at all events, not questioning—the value of the criticism, literary as well as historical, which has had the effect of reducing many of our best ballads to a condition not unlike that of the Homeric literature, he has preferred to accept them "as the genuine utterances of men who made it their business and their pleasure to instruct and entertain the public, and had full faith in their mission." Mr. McDowell has made a new classification of the Scotch ballads. He divides them into,—(1), " Historical and Warlike," such as " Sir Patrick Spens " and " Lord Maxwell's Good-Night "; (2), " Border and Warlike," like "Johnnie Armstrong" and " Kinmonnt Willie;"
(3), " Tragical," of which "Gil Morice" may be taken as a specimen ; (4), "Amatory and Tragical," like "Helen of Kirkconnel-Lee ;" (5), " Melodramatic," like " Burd Helen ;" and (6), " Mythological," like " Thomas the Rhymer " and " The Cruel Mother." The classification is a good one, as it enables Mr. McDowell to bring together various ballads for the romantic interest that is common to them, not for chronological or other minor historical reasons. Mr. McDowall further tells and annotates the story of each ballad as he gives it, and this permits him sometimes to give extracts where extracts only are necessary or readable. Perhaps Mr. McDowell should have exercised his editorial rights of pruning and weeding to more purpose than he has done in dealing with the ballad which tells the still mysterious story of the burning of Frendraught Tower on Deeside in 1630, with six persons, including some with whom Crichton, the proprietor of the tower, had been at feud. One of the victims of what at the time was believed to be arson with a view to assassination, says :—
" My eyes are southering in my head, My flesh wasting also, My bowels are boiling with my blood ISM that an awful woe?"
Mr. McDowell says this is " terrific in its literalism ;" but is it not grotesque as well ? An enthusiasm, however, which is blind to such things is to be commended rather than condemned. No author, not even a Scotch author, has written at once so lovingly and so discriminatingly of the old Scotch minstrels, and we know no better or more popular selection from them than this one, which we have no hesitation in recommending as a guide-book into the fairyland of Northern romance,—a, romance which passion and cruelty and selfishness render at times only too realistic. Our English Shores-: being Recollections of Watering-Places on the Coasts of England. By William Miller. (Oliphant, Edinburgh.)
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