. Like thistledown it has the property of floating from
place to place, and even from kingdom to kingdom and from epoch to
epoch, changing names and circumstances to suit the locality, and
attaching itself to outstanding figures and fresh events without
changing its essential spirit and character. The more formal Muses
despised these rude and unlettered rhymes--when they noticed them at all
it was in a disdainful or patronising spirit--and this holds true of the
eighteenth century almost as much as of the sixteenth. It is not that
ballad poetry was dumb, but that history was deaf and blind to its
beauties.

Nor is any adverse judgment as to the antiquity of the Scottish ballad
to be drawn from the comparative modernity of the style and language.
The presence of archaisms in a ballad that claims to have been handed
down by oral repetition from a remote period is, on the contrary, a
thing to raise suspicion as to its genuineness. The ballad, as has been
said, is a living and growing organism; or at least it is this until it
has been committed to print. However deep into the mould of the past its
roots run down, its language and idioms should not be much older than
the popular speech of the time when it has been gathered into the
collector's budget. It is like a plant that, while remaining the same
at the heart and root, is constantly casting the old, and putting out
fresh, leaves.

Thus the very words and phrases that were intended to give an antique
air to _Hardyknut_ stamped it as an imitation; these clumsy and
artificial patches were not the true mosses of age. The ballad of true
lineage, partly from its simplicity of thought and structure, partly
from being kept in immediate contact with the lips and the hearts of the
people, is as readily 'understanded of the general' to-day as when it
was first sung.

It has been noted, for instance, that our ballads preserve fewer
reminiscences of the time when alliteration shared importance with rhyme
or took its place in the metrical system. The bulk of them are supposed
to come hither from the early sixteenth century, from the reigns of
James IV. and James V.; and in that period of Scottish literature
alliteration not only blossomed but often overran and smothered the
court poetry of the day. Alliterative lines and verses appear frequently
in the ballads, but always with good taste, often with exquisite effect.
What phrases are more familiar, more infused with the magic of th