' 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.

"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 bril