hen all was still,
When the fringe was red on the westlin hill,
The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane,
The reek o' the cot hung o'er the plain,
Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane;
When the ingle lowed wi' an eiry leme,
Late, late in the gloamin' Kilmeny came hame."

The Ettrick Shepherd's peculiar province was not so much the romance of
national history as the field of Scottish fairy lore and popular
superstition. It was he, rather than Walter Scott, who carried out the
suggestions long since made to his countryman, John Home, in Collins'
"Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." His poems are full of
bogles, kelpies, brownies, warlocks, and all manner of "grammarie." "The
Witch of Fife" in "The Queen's Wake," a spirited bit of grotesque, is
repeatedly quoted 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 so