_; nor do towns
contend for the honour of having produced the sweet singer of
_Kirkconnel Lea_, the blithe minstrel of _Glenlogie_, or the first of
all the bards who made the _Dowie Dens of Yarrow_ vocal with the song of
unavailing sorrow.

And in truth towns--even such towns as were in those days--could have
had but little to do with the birth and shaping of the Scottish
Balladists. Chief among the marks by which we may the true ballad-maker
know among the verse-makers of his age, is the open-air feeling that
pervades his thought and style. Like the Black Douglas, he likes better
to hear the laverock sing than the mouse cheep. It is not only that he
cares to tread 'the bent sae brown' rather than the paved street; that
the tragedies of fiery love and hate quenched by death, in which he
delights, are more often enacted under the blue cope of heaven than
under vault of stone. What we seem to feel is that these simple old
lays, in which lives a passion that still catches the breath and makes
the cheek turn pale--whose 'words of might' have yet the power to waft
us, mind and sense, into the 'Land of Faery,' must have been conceived
and brought to full strength under the light of the sun and the breath
of the wind. 'The Muse,' says Robert Burns, himself of the true kin of
the balladists:

'The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
Till by himsel' he learned to wander,
Adown some trottin' burn's meander,
An' no think lang.'

Certainly no true ballad was ever hammered out at the desk. It may have
been wrought and fashioned for singing in bower or hall; but the fire
that shaped it was caught, in gloaming grey or under the 'lee licht o'
the mune,' in birken shaw or by wan water.

It is true that one of the earliest of the Scots ballad-makers whose
names have been handed down to us--Robert Henryson, who taught the
Dunfermline bairns in the hornbook in the fifteenth century--has told us
that he sought inspiration at the ingleside over a glass:

'I mend the fyre, and beikit me about,
Then tuik ane drink my spreitis to confort,
And armit me weill fra the cold thairout;
To cut the winter nicht, and mak it schort,
I tuik ane quhair, and left all uther sport.'

But this was while conning, in cold weather, the classic tale of
_Troilus and Cressid_. _Robin and Makyne_, which among Henryson's
acknowledged pieces (except _The Bluidy Sark_) comes nearest to our
conception of the ballad--a