“Clerk Saunders he started, and Margaret she turn’d
    Into his arms as asleep she lay,
  And sad and silent was the night
    That was atween thir twae.”

Could a word be added or taken from these verses without spoiling the effect?  You never think of the language, so vividly is the picture impressed on the imagination.  I see at this moment the sleeping pair, the bright burning torches, the lowering faces of the brethren, and the one fiercer and darker than the others.

Pass we now to the Second Part—­

  “Sae painfully she clam’ the wa’,
    She clam’ the wa’ up after him;
  Hosen nor shoon upon her feet
    She had na time to put them on.

  “’Is their ony room at your head, Saunders? 
    Is there ony room at your feet? 
  Or ony room at your side, Saunders,
    Where fain, fain I wad sleep?’”

In that last line the very heart-strings crack.  She is to be pitied far more than Clerk Saunders, lying stark with the cruel wound beneath his side, the love-kisses hardly cold yet upon his lips.

It may be said that the books of which I have been speaking attain to the highest literary excellence by favour of simplicity and unconsciousness.  Neither the German nor the Scotsman considered himself an artist.  The Scot sings a successful foray, in which perhaps he was engaged, and he sings as he fought.  In combat he did not dream of putting himself in a heroic position, or of flourishing his blade in a manner to be admired.  A thrust of a lance would soon have finished him if he had.  The pious German is over-laden with grief, or touched by some blessing into sudden thankfulness, and he breaks into song as he laughs from gladness or groans from pain.  This directness and naturalness give Scottish ballad and German hymn their highest charm.  The poetic gold, if rough and unpolished, and with no elaborate devices carved upon it, is free at least from the alloy of conceit and simulation.  Modern writers might, with benefit to themselves, barter something of their finish and dexterity for that pure innocence of nature, and child-like simplicity and fearlessness, full of its own emotion, and unthinking of others or of their opinions, which characterise these old writings.

The eighteenth century must ever remain the most brilliant and interesting period of English literary history.  It is interesting not only on account of its splendour, but because it is so well known.  We are familiar with the faces of its great men by portraits, and with the events of their lives by innumerable biographies.  Every reader is acquainted with Pope’s restless jealousy, Goldsmith’s pitted countenance and plum-coloured coat, Johnson’s surly manners and countless eccentricities, and with the tribe of poets who lived for months ignorant of clean linen, who were hunted by bailiffs, who smelt of stale punch, and who wrote descriptions of the feasts of the gods