There is no more delightful reading in the world than these Scottish ballads.  The mailed knight, the Border peel, the moonlight raid, the lady at her bower window—­all these have disappeared from the actual world, and lead existence now as songs.  Verses and snatches of these ballads are continually haunting and twittering about my memory, as in summer the swallows haunt and twitter about the eaves of my dwelling.  I know them so well, and they meet a mortal man’s experience so fully, that I am sure—­with, perhaps, a little help from Shakspeare—­I could conduct the whole of my business by quotation,—­do all its love-making, pay all its tavern-scores, quarrel and make friends again, in their words, far better than I could in my own.  If you know these ballads, you will find that they mirror perfectly your every mood.  If you are weary and down-hearted, behold, a verse starts to your memory trembling with the very sigh you have heaved.  If you are merry, a stanza is dancing to the tune of your own mirth.  If you love, be you ever so much a Romeo, here is the finest language for your using.  If you hate, here are words which are daggers.  If you like battle, here for two hundred years have trumpets been blowing and banners flapping.  If you are dying, plentiful are the broken words here which have hovered on failing lips.  Turn where you will, some fragment of a ballad is sure to meet you.  Go into the loneliest places of experience and passion, and you discover that you are walking in human footprints.  If you should happen to lift the first volume of Professor Aytoun’s “Ballads of Scotland,” the book of its own accord will open at “Clerk Saunders,” and by that token you will guess that the ballad has been read and re-read a thousand times.  And what a ballad it is!  The story in parts is somewhat perilous to deal with, but with what instinctive delicacy the whole matter is managed!  Then what tragic pictures, what pathos, what manly and womanly love!  Just fancy how the sleeping lovers, the raised torches, and the faces of the seven brothers looking on, would gleam on the canvas of Mr. Millais!—­

  “’For in may come my seven bauld brothers,
    Wi’ torches burning bright.’

  “It was about the midnight hour,
    And they were fa’en asleep,
  When in and came her seven brothers,
    And stood at her bed feet.

  “Then out and spake the first o’ them,
    ’We ‘ll awa’ and let them be.’ 
  Then out and spake the second o’ them,
    ‘His father has nae mair than he.’

  “Then out and spake the third o’ them,
    ‘I wot they are lovers dear.’ 
  Then out and spake the fourth o’ them,
    ‘They ha’e lo’ed for mony a year.’

  “Then out and spake the fifth o’ them,
    ‘It were sin true love to twain.’ 
  ‘’Twere shame,’ out spake the sixth o’ them,
    ‘To slay a sleeping man!’

  “Then up and gat the seventh o’ them,
    And never word spake he,
  But he has striped his bright-brown brand
    Through Saunders’s fair bodie.