and expositions were given in prose. However this may be, the
artless art of these popular poets evidently included a knowledge of the
uses of mystery and suggestion. They knew that, for the imagination, the
part is sometimes greater than the whole. Gray wrote to Mason in 1757,
"I have got the old Scotch ballad [Gil Maurice] on which 'Douglas'
[Home's tragedy, first played at Edinburgh in 1756] was founded. It is
divine. . . Aristotle's best rules are observed in it in a manner which
shews the author never had heard of Aristotle. It begins in the fifth
act of the play. You may read it two-thirds through without guessing
what it is about; and yet, when you come to the end, it is impossible not
to understand the whole story."

It is not possible to recover the conditions under which these folk-songs
"made themselves,"[12] as it were, or grew under the shaping hands of
generations of nameless bards. Their naive, primitive quality cannot be
acquired: the secret is lost. But Walter Scott, who was steeped to the
lips in balladry, and whose temper had much of the healthy objectivity of
an earlier age, has succeeded as well as any modern. Some of his ballads
are more perfect artistically than his long metrical romances; those of
them especially which are built up from a burden or fragment of old
minstrel song, like "Jock o' Hazeldean"[13] and the song in "Rokeby":

"He turned his charger as he spake
Upon the river shore,
He gave the bride-reins a shake,
Said 'Adieu for evermore,
My love!
And adieu for evermore!'"

Here Scott catches the very air of popular poetry, and the dovetailing is
done with most happy skill. "Proud Maisie is in the Wood" is a fine
example of the ballad manner of story-telling by implication.[14]

As regards their subject-matter, the ballads admit of a rough
classification into the historical, or _quasi_-historical, and the purely
legendary or romantic. Of the former class were the "riding-ballad" of
the Scottish border, where the forays of moss-troopers, the lifting of
blackmail, the raids and private warfare of the Lords of the Marches,
supplied many traditions of heroism and adventure like those recorded in
"The Battle of Otterburn," "The Hunting of the Cheviot," "Johnnie
Armstrong," "Kinmont Willie," "The Rising in the North" and
"Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas." Of the fictitious class, some were
shortened, popularized, and generally degraded v