as authority upon the ways of Scotch witches in the notes to Croker’s “Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland.”  Similar themes engaged the poet in his prose tales.  Some of these were mere modern ghost stories, or stories of murder, robbery, death warnings, etc.  Others, like “The Heart of Eildon,” dealt with ancient legends of the supernatural.  Still others, like “The Brownie of Bodsbeck:  a Tale of the Covenanters,” were historical novels of the Stuart times.  Here Hogg was on Scott’s own ground and did not shine by comparison.  He complained, indeed, that in the last-mentioned tale, he had been accused of copying “Old Mortality”, but asserted that he had written his book the first and had been compelled by the appearance of Sir Walter’s, to go over his own manuscript and substitute another name for Balfour of Burley, his original hero.  Nanny’s songs, in “The Brownie of Bodsbeck,” are among Hogg’s best ballads.  Others are scattered through his various collections—­“The Mountain Bard,” “The Forest Minstrel,” “Poetical Tales and Ballads,” etc.

Another Scotch balladist was William Motherwell, one of the most competent of ballad scholars and editors, whose “Minstrelsy:  Ancient and Modern,” was issued at Glasgow in 1827, and led to a correspondence between the collector and Sir Walter Scott.[15] In 1836 Motherwell was associated with Hogg in editing Burns’ works.  His original ballads are few in number, and their faults and merits are of quite an opposite nature from his collaborator’s.  The shepherd was a man of the people, and lived, so far as any modern can, among the very conditions which produced the minstrel songs.  He inherited the popular beliefs.  His great-grandmother on one side was a notorious witch; his grandfather on the other side had “spoken with the fairies.”  His poetry, such as it is, is fluent and spontaneous.  Motherwell’s, on the contrary, is the work of a ballad fancier, a student learned in lyric, reproducing old modes with conscientious art.  His balladry is more condensed and skilful than Hogg’s, but seems to come hard to him.  It is literary poetry trying to be Volkspoesie, and not quite succeeding.  Many of the pieces in the southern English, such as “Halbert the Grim,” “The Troubadour’s Lament,” “The Crusader’s Farewell,” “The Warthman’s Wail,” “The Demon Lady,” “The Witches’ Joys,” and “Lady Margaret,” have an echo of Elizabethan music, or the songs of Lovelace, or, now and then, the verse of Coleridge or Byron.  “True Love’s Dirge,” e.g., borrows a burden from Shakspere—­“Heigho! the Wind and Rain.”  Others, like “Lord Archibald:  A Ballad,” and “Elfinland Wud:  An Imitation of the Ancient Scottish Romantic Ballad,” are in archaic Scotch dialect with careful ballad phrasing.  Hogg employs the broad Scotch, but it is mostly the vernacular of his own time.  A short passage from “The Witch of Fife” and one from “Elfin Wud” will illustrate two very different types of ballad manner: