ommentators to assume that its heroine was
that Lady Jane Gordon whom Bothwell wronged and divorced, and who
afterwards managed to console herself by marrying an Earl of Sutherland
and a Lord Ogilvy of Boyne. The tragedy of the death of 'Alexander our
King,' and the unnumbered woes that came in its train, was, as we know,
celebrated in rhymes of which some scant salvage has come down to us;
and the feats of William Wallace and the victories of the Bruce were
rewarded by the maidens singing and the harpers harping in their
praise. This we learn from a surer source than the ballads of the
Wallace and Bruce Cycle that have been preserved, and that are neither
the best of their kind nor of unquestioned authenticity. Blind Harry was
himself of the ancient guild of the Minstrels, and gathered his
materials at a date when the 'gude Sir William Wallace' was nearer his
day than Prince Charlie is to our own. His poem is nothing other than
floating ballads and traditional tales strung into epic form after the
manner in which Pausanias is supposed to have pieced together the
_Iliad_; indeed John Major, who in his childhood was contemporary with
the Minstrel, tells us that he wrote down these 'native rhymes' and 'all
that passed current among the people in his day,' and afterwards 'used
to recite his tales in the households of the nobles, and thereby get the
food and clothing that he deserved.'

Then nothing could yield more convincing proof of the prevalence and
popularity of the ballad in Scotland in the period of Chaucer--and
nothing also could be more tantalising to the ballad-hunter--than
Barbour's remark in his _Brus_, that it is needless for him to rehearse
the tale of Sir John Soulis's victory over the English on the shores of
Esk:

'For quha sa likis, thai may heir
Yong women, quhen they will play
Sing it emang thame ilka day.'

The 'young women,' and likewise the old--bless them for it!--have
always taken a foremost part in the singing and preservation of our old
ballads, and even in the composing of them. Bannockburn set their quick
brains working and their tongues wagging tunefully, in praise of their
own heroes and in scorn of the English 'loons.' Aytoun quotes from the
contemporary _St. Alban's Chronicle_ a stanza of a song, which (says the
old writer) 'the maydens in that countree made on Kyng Edward; and in
this manere they sang:

'"Maydens of Englande, sore may ye morne,
For ye have lost yo