HISTORY AND POETRY OF THE SCOTTISH BORDER.* IT cannot be

going far amiss in the way of classification to describe the author of that admirable book, The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, as a Scottish Wordsworthian in the * The History and Poetry of the Scottish Border : their Main Features and Relations. By john Veitoli, LL.D., Professor of Logic and Rhetoric in the University. of Glasgow. New and Enlarged Edition. 2 vols. Edinburgh and LondonWilliam Blackwood and Bons. 1823. sense rather that the late Principal Shairp was, than that Professor Knight is,— a practical exponent of the Lake philosophy more than a painstaking literary critic and ex- positor. He is evidently as ardent a believer in the sanative effects of open air and breezy objectivity generally as his countryman, Emeritus Professor Blackie; but his belief is not marred by anything that savours of personal eccentricity. He never seems to play the part of a buffo Socrates. Even, there- fore, had Professor Veitch not been a son—and a devoted son —of the Border, he would probably have found in it—its history, its romance, its unique natural charm, its transactions, ever since it had poets of its own, with fairy-land—a source both of joy and of inspiration, as Wordsworth and Shairp found Yarrow and Traquair before him. But being a son of the Border, having tramped, it is evident, over every mile of it, the author of The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry was the very man to produce a manual of the region in which that feeling is keenest, and has found its supreme literary expres- sion. Such a work is that now before us.

We are not unmindful that The History and Poetry of the Scottish Border is, in the strictest sense, not a new book, but a new and enlarged edition. Professor Veitch published a work bearing the same title in 1878. But even a hasty comparison of it with that which now bears the same name will show that the latter is, in a very real sense, a new book. For one thing, it is nearly double the size of the original, For another, it contains a number of discoveries of a literary and antiquarian kind which Professor Veitch has been able to make during the past fifteen years. Thus, the seventh chapter contains a full account of "The Catrail or Picts Work Ditch," a remarkable fosse or ditch extending through Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire, forty-eight miles from the Peel Fell, one of the Cheviots, to the Gala Water. Professor Veitch has measured it several times, and in his new book presents us with the results of these measure ments, which differ considerably from the conclusions of previous investigators, including those of Alexander Gordon, who first publicly noticed it in 1726. But these researches are chiefly of value for their bearing upon the important theory of the original purpose of the Catrail, which has been the subject of a considerable amount of controversy among antiquarians. He dismisses the two theories that the Catrail was an ancient roadway, and that it was a boundary-line between different tribes, and he comes to the conclusion—a very important one, from the historical point of view—that it represented the shortened boundary of the Britons, consolidated into the Kingdom of Strathclyde- Damnonii, Gadeni, Ottadeni of Ptolemy, all of Cymric speech.

The territory to the north of the Southern Wall, and west- wards to the slopes of the mountains of Teviotdale, Ettrick, Yarrow, and Tweed, was held by the encroaching Angles of Bernieia. " The defeated Britons were able to withdraw west- wards to their high and remote mountain fastnesses. They now threw up this work as a boundary-line in haste, perhaps, with breaks and difficulty. They flanked it as frequently as they could with their rude rounded hill-forts, and behind the line they patiently waited the issue of events This ditch of the Oatrail was their outside line of defence, and how- ever imperfectly constructed amid obvious natural difficulties, yet with their nimbleness, readiness to descend on their crescent line of ramparts and hill-forts, they would doubtless prove a formidable foe to Angle combination. And this they did through many centuries, for it was not until fully four hundred years after the date of the ramparts that they were merged, not in the Angles of Northumbria, but in the mixed Scandinavian and Angle people of the Lowlands of Scotland; and their long-maintained independence finally passed away, not through hostile conquest, but through a final absorption in the princedOm of Earl David, and then in the monarchy of Scotland." Another important discovery of a literary kind is also given at length by Professor Veitch in his second volume. Editors of the original poetry of the Border have experienced a con- siderable amount of difficulty in accounting for the historical basis of the two best-known ballads of the Yarrow,—" Rare Willy's drowned in Yarrow," and the more famous " Dowie Dens," with its incomparable stanza :— "0 gentle wind that bloweth south,

From where my love repaireth, Convey a kiss from his dear mouth, And tell me how he fareth."

There is a want of continuity about both which suggests their being of a composite character. Thus, the first stanza of" Rare Willy" points to a maiden lover as the chief personage in it, while the second points to a matron. In the different versions of "The Dowie Dens" also, there is a similar confusion. Some of the stanzas refer, and can only refer, to betrothed Persons; others as certainly refer only to husband and wife. It has been left to Professor Veitch, if not positively to make, certainly to give wide publicity and the character of literary consistency to, the discovery that there was an earlier ballad than either "Rare Willy" or "The Dowie Dens," and that in particular, Scott's revised (but not always improved) version of "The Dowie Dens" was "a mixed, therefore incongruous reference to the incidents of this earlier ballad and to a later incident in the relations of the families of Scott of Thirlestane and Scott of Tuschielaw." The plot of this original ballad, as taken down by Professor Veitch from the mouth of an old Peebleshire cottar, is clear enough. The heroine is a maiden lover; her betrothed was slain directly by her brother in the course of an unequal combat ; his body was thrown into the Yarrow, and there found by her. The stanzas of this version are certainly primitive enough.

The comic troubles of a rhymester with but little freedom for poetic movement are only too visible in,— " They've ta'en the young man by the heels And trailed him like a harrow,

And then they flung the comely youth In a whirlpool o' 'Yarrow."

But if the ballad be taken as a whole, and judged by internal evidence alone, we should say that there can be no doubt as to its genuineness. It was inevitable that, in his final chapter dealing with "Recent Poets," Professor Veitch should have a good deal to add to what he said under the same heading in 1878. Perhaps the most interesting addition which he makes to previous information in this connection, relates to the un- published and hitherto unknown poems of Lady John Scott of Spottiswood, in whom the Border has undoubtedly had a worthy successor to such well-known songstresses as Lady Grisell Baillie, Mrs. Cockburn, and Miss Elliot, Two of Lady John Scott's poems—" The Bounds o' Cheviot" and "The Lammermoor Lilt "—are given. Their scansion is imperfect, and the sentiments expressed in them cannot be said to be very profound. But they are full of that love of locality and that pathos which seem inseparable from Border song, perhaps because its essential nature is that of the ballad. The ring of the Border at least is here :— "Shall I never wander lamely when the gloamin' fa's,

And the wild birds flutter to their rest, Ower the lang heathery muir, to the bonnie Brunden Laws, Standin' dark against the glitter o' the west ?

Nae mair, nae mair, I shall never see the bounds o' Cheviot mair I"

Regarded as a now complete and organic whole, Professor Veitoh's History and Poetry of the 'Scottish Border may be said to be an adequate and final text-book of its subject in all its aspects,—topographical, geological, historical, ethnological, and poetical. As a Scottish Wordsworthian, who never, how- ever, forgets or is unjust to Scott and Hogg, he gives himself heart and soul to his subject. Yet he has certain solid, substantial, almost prosaic qualities which prevent him from being quite carried away with it. The following is descrip- tive of a view from Broad Law, the summit of the range of mountains of the greatest average height in the south of Scotland, and 2,754 feet above the sea-level :— "We are absolutely alone—alone with earth and sky, save for the occasional cry of a startled sheep, and the summer hum of insects on the hill-top,—

' That undefined and mingled hum, Voice of the desert, never dumb.'

Here and there a very tiny yellow-faced tormentilla, a very slender blue-eyed harebell, or-a modest hill-violet, peeps timorously out on the barrenness, like an orphan that has strayed on the wild. But we look around us from this great height, and what strikes the eye? On all sides, but particularly to the east of us, innumerable rounded hill-tops run in series of parallel flowing ridges, chiefly from the south-west to the north-east, and between the ridges ve no.te that there is enclosed in each a scooped-out glen, in which we know that a burn or water flows. These hill-tops follow each other in wavy outline. One rises, flows, passes softly into another. This again rises, flows, and passes into another beyond itself ; and thus the eye reposes on the long soft lines of a sea of hills, whose tops move and yet do not move, for they carry our vision along their undulating flow, themselves motionless, lying like an earth-ocean in the deep quiet calm of their statuesque beauty. Near us are the heads of the burns, and the heads of the glens which, on the one hand, run northward to the Tweed, and on the other southward to the Yarrow. Here,

at one burn-head, we have deep peaty bogs, out of which ooze black trickling rills; then, at another, we have a well-eye, fringed with bright mosses, and fair forget-me-not of purer hue and more slender form than any that the valley can show. The burn gathers strength, and makes its way through a deep red scaur and amid grey-bleached boulder-stones ; then, overshadowed by the boughs, of a solitary rock-rooted birch, leaps through a sunny fall to a strong, deep, eddying pool. At length it reaches tho hollow of the glen, where it winds round and round, amid links of soft green pasture, amid sheen of bracken and glow of heather—passes a solitary herd's house—the only symbol of human life there—now breaks against a dark-grey opposing rock, then spreads itself out before the sunlight in soft music amid its stones. Finally, leaving- the line of hills that shut in the glen on each side, the stream mingles with one of the waters of the south or with the Tweed itself on the north of the central range of mountains."

This level of style—the style of the writer who is a sure-footed climber and a close, though not pedantically scientifi3 observer, but whose mood is that of The Excursion—is maintained all through these two volumes, except, of course, where Professor Veitch happens to be dealing with (and in) botanical, geolo- gical, and historical details. It is admirably—we had almost said amusingly—exhibited in the chapter on Arthur and the Arthurian legends. We are not quite so confident, as is Professor Veitch, that the Arthur who contended with Cerdic and the Saxons of Wessex is the same as he who fought on the plains of the Scottish Lowlands, even although it may be quite true that "there is no portion of Great Britain so full, in the same space, of Arthurian names as that part of Scotland which stretches from the brown slopes of the Gram- pians to the blue line of the Cheviots." Yet it is pleasant and delightfully Scottish to dream that the haughs and hills of the Lowlands "were once the scene of struggles as patriotic, as heroic, as memorable as those of the Scottish War of Independence, long before the present Kingdom of Scotland had a being or a name." Yet there is one thing of which Pro- fessor Veitch will not convince us, in spite of all his endeavours —and we know no book dealing with a particular region at once so reliable in its information, and so attractive without being rhetorical in style, such a happy blend of knowledge and imagination—and that is, that the Border has produced iv mass of poetry at once worthy of it and celebrating its varied charms. It has produced some great—though not supremely great—poets, from Thomas the Rhymour to James Hogg, and inspired many more, like Scott and Wordsworth, to special efforts. It is the home—nay, the " howff "—of the ballad. But it is not to its hills and glens, haunted though they are by fairy-story and historical tradition, but to the much tamer banks and braes of Ayrshire that the heart of Scotland turns.

Can it be that the awe which such a region inspires kills that love which is the soul of popular poetry?