"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
som