ere in the custom of
gulping his whisky all alone; many describe the boisterous carousals in
which they made fools of themselves; not a few extol the power and
properties of whisky, and incite to Bacchanalian pleasures; and we have
several good songs suitable for singing at the close of an evening
pleasantly spent, but almost none which express the feelings that
naturally well-up when one sees his friends around him, becomes
exhilarated through pleasant social intercourse, and finds the path of
life smoothed and sweetened by the aid of his brothers.

The reason of this peculiar circumstance is not far to seek. It lies in
the distinctive character of the two great classes into which the Scotch
have been divided since the Reformation, called, at the early period of
Scottish song, the Covenanters and the Cavaliers. The one party bowed
before religion, most scrupulously abstained from all worldly pleasures,
and regarded and denounced as sin, or something akin to it, every
approach to levity or frivolity. The other party was a wild rebound from
this. Sanctimoniousness was hateful in their eye; and not being able to
find a medium, they abjured religion, and rushed into the pleasures of
this life with headlong zest. The poets, in accordance with their
joy-loving natures, allied themselves to the latter class. There was
thus in Scotland a deep, dark gulf between the religious and the
poetical or beautiful, which has not yet been completely bridged over.
The consequence is, that the elder Scottish songs, of all songs, contain
the fewest references to the Divine Being. The name of God is never
mentioned unless in the caricatures of the Covenanters; and a foreigner,
taking up a book of Scottish songs written since the Reformation, and
judging of the religion of the Scotch from them alone, would be prone to
suppose that, if Scotland had any religion at all, it consisted in using
the name of the devil occasionally with respect or with dread. The
Cavaliers, in their most energetic moods, swore by him and by no other;
while the Covenanters had no songs at all, scarcely any poetry of any
kind, and doubtless would have regarded as impious the tracing of any
but the most spiritual pleasures to God. The words, for instance, which
Allan Cunningham puts into the mouth of a Covenanter, "I hae sworn by my
God, my Jeanie" (p. 17 of this volume), would still be regarded by many
people as profane.

The case was the very opposite with the Greeks