r, who in their eyes, however humbly born, had deserted his
class, and gone over to the camp of the enemy, and the flesh-pots of
Egypt.

After the time of Burns, as was to be expected, Scottish song
multiplies itself tenfold. The nation becomes awakened to the
treasures of its own old literature, and attempts, what after all,
alas! is but a revival; and like most revivals, not altogether a
successful one. Of the twelve hundred songs contained in Mr.
Whitelaw's excellent collection, whereof more than a hundred and
fifty are either wholly or partly Burns's, the small proportion
written before him are decidedly far superior in value to those
written after him; a discouraging fact, though not difficult to
explain, if we consider the great social changes which have been
proceeding, the sterner subjects of thought which have been arising,
during the last half-century. True song requires for its atmosphere
a state rather of careless Arcadian prosperity, than of struggle and
doubt, of earnest looking forward to an unknown future, and
pardonable regret for a dying past; and in that state the mind of the
masses, throughout North Britain, has been weltering confusedly for
the last few years. The new and more complex era into which we are
passing has not yet sufficiently opened itself to be sung about; men
hardly know what it is, much less what it will be; and while they are
hard at work creating it, they have no breath to spare in talking of
it. One thing they do see and feel, painfully enough at times,
namely, that the old Scottish pastoral life is passing away, before
the combined influence of manufactures and the large-farm system; to
be replaced, doubtless, hereafter, by something better, but in the
meanwhile dragging down with it in its decay but too much that can
ill be spared of that old society which inspired Ramsay and Burns.
Hence the later Scottish song-writers seldom really sing; their
proses want the unconscious lilt and flash of their old models; they
will hardly go (the true test of a song) without music. The true
test, we say again, of a song. Who needs music, however fitting and
beautiful the accustomed air may happen to be, to "Roy's Wife of
Aldivalloch," or "The Bride cam' out o' the byre," or either of the
casts of "The Flowers of the Forest," or to "Auld Lang Syne" itself?
They bubble right up out of the heart, and by virtue of their inner
and unconscious melody, which all that is true to the heart has