Of course the great majority of these poems in the ballad form, whether lyric or narrative, or a mixture of both, are in no sense romantic.  They are like Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads,” idyllic; songs of the affections, of nature, sentiment, of war, the sea, the hunting field, rustic life, and a hundred other moods and topics.  Neither are the historical or legendary ballads, deriving from Percy and reinforced by Scott, prevailingly romantic in the sense of being mediaeval.  They are such as Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome,” in which—­with ample acknowledgment in his introduction both to Scott and to the “Reliques”—­he applies the form of the English minstrel ballad to an imaginative re-creation of the lost popular poetry of early Rome.  Or they continue Scott’s Jacobite tradition, like “Aytoun’s Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers,” Browning’s “Cavalier Tunes,” Thornbury’s “Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads” (1857), and a few of Motherwell’s ditties.  These last named, except Browning, were all Scotchmen and staunch Tories; as were likewise Lockhart and Hogg; and, for obvious reasons, it is in Scotland that the simpler fashion of ballad writing, whether in dialect or standard English, and more especially as employed upon martial subjects, has flourished longest.  Artifice and ballad preciosity have been cultivated more sedulously in the south, with a learned use of the repetend, archaism of style, and imitation of the quaint mediaeval habit of mind.

Of the group most immediately connected with Scott and who assisted him, more or less, in his “Minstrelsy” collection, may be mentioned the eccentric John Leyden, immensely learned in Border antiquities and poetry, and James Hogg, the “Ettrick Shepherd.”  The latter was a peasant bard, an actual shepherd and afterward a sheep farmer, a self-taught man with little schooling, who aspired to become a second Burns, and composed much of his poetry while lying out on the hills, wrapped in his plaid and tending his flocks like any Corydon or Thyrsis.  He was a singular mixture of genius and vanity, at once the admiration and the butt of the Blackwood’s wits, who made him the mouthpiece of humour and eloquence which were not his, but Christopher North’s.  The puzzled shepherd hardly knew how to take it; he was a little gratified and a good deal nettled.  But the flamboyant figure of him in the Noctes will probably do as much as his own verses to keep his memory alive with posterity.  Nevertheless, Hogg is one of the best of modern Scotch ballad poets.  Having read the first two volumes of the “Border Minstrelsy,” he was dissatisfied with some of the modern ballad imitations therein and sent his criticisms to Scott.  They were sound criticisms, for Hogg had an intimate knowledge of popular poetry and a quick perception of what was genuine and what was spurious in such compositions.  Sir Walter called him in aid of his third volume and found his services of value.