II. was discomfitted at Banocksborne, therefore the maydens made a song thereof in that countree on Kynge Edward, and in this manere they singe: 'Maydens of Englonde, sore may ye morne, For ye have last your lemmans at Banocksborne, With havelogh. What wenyth the King of Englonde To have got Scotland? With rombelogh."" In the writings of Hume of Godscroft direct reference is made to old Scottish ballad poetry in the reference to the old ballad of the "Battle of Otterbourne." Chambers complains that throughout the ballads there is not a distinct enough reference to any particular age. He says, "The characters and incidents are alike relieved from all clear connection with any particular age." I do not exactly fathom this objection. If he means that they do not all relate to one particular age, they relate to more than one, and there is all the more reason for supposing that they had extended over a lengthened period of time. The incidents in many cases relate to ages long since gone by. We have the old traditions of Fairyland, and we have other classes of superstitions portrayed. We have many references to rites of the Roman Catholic Church, tending to show that the ballads were composed when these rites were performed-references to particular dresses and customs, all lead to the conviction that these ballads are ancient. Let it not be supposed (as Chambers would insinuate) that, because through many of them there flows a vein of romantic beauty, they cannot therefore be ancient. Scotland, despite the poverty of her soil, and her continual warfare, always shone pre-eminent in the world of poetry. There is a curious old poem (published in Watson's Collection of 1770), taken from George Ballantyne's MSS., compiled in 1568, entitled "Lament for the Death of the Makkaris." I may give an extract from it, as enumerating some of the early authors of the species of poetry under consideration, and we possess no writings whatever of many of them, although, from being thus mentioned, it is clear that they must have composed many ballads: "LAMENT FOR THE DEATH OF THE MAKKARIS." "I see the Makkers amangis the laif Playis neir thair padyanis, syne gois to graif, Sparit is nocht thair facultie; Timor mortis conturbat me. He hes petouslie devoir The noble Chawser of Makars flowir, The monk of Percy, and Gowyr, all three; Timor mortis conturbat me. The gude Schir Hew of Eglintoun, Etrik, Heriot, and Wintoun, He hes tane out of the countrie; Timor mortis conturbat me. That scorpioun fell hes done infek Maister Johne Clerk, and James Affleck Timor mortis conturbat me. Holland and Barbour he has berevit; Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lie; Clerk of Tranent lik he hes tane, That made the aventors of Sir Gawane, Sir Gilbert Gray endit hes he; Timor mortis conturbat me. He hes Blind Hary and Sandy Traill Slane with his schot of Mortall Haill, Quhilk Patrick Johnstoun mycht nocht fle; Timor mortis conturbat me. He has reft Mersar, his indite, That did in luve so lyfly wryte, So schort, so quick, of sentens hie; He hes tane Rowll of Abirdene, In Dumfermling he hes tane Broun, And he hes tane last of aw The gentill Stobo and Quintene Schaw, And Mr. Walter Kennedy In poyntt of deth lyis berely; Sen he hes all my brethren tane, I give all praise and honour to England's old and mighty masters; but while they are studied and read by all, I regret that the Scottish makers are shelved and set aside. Sir Walter Scott says that "the first classical English romance was written in part of what is now called Scotland." He refers to the romance of "Sir Tristrem," by Thomas the Rhymer, or True Thomas, who wrote in the thirteenth century. The languages of the old poets of England and Scotland are wonderfully similar. About a hundred years after him we had Barbour, whose writings flow as smoothly as his successor in the south-Chaucer, who was the first great English poet. Of Barbour it has been said by Warton that "he adorned the English language by a strain of versification, expression, and poetical imagery." After Barbour, in Scotland, we find Winton, the Cannon of St. Andrew's, who displays poetical talent of no mean order in his chronicle. Then we have James I., the most illustrious of the house of Stewart, "who may be pronounced, in addition to his eminence in serious and imaginative poetry, as the first who, in his 'Peblis to the Play,' opened up that store of rich, humorous, and graphic description of common life, by which the Scottish muse has been ever since so prominently distinguished." He wrote in the beginning of the fifteenth century. The next century has been termed the Augustan age of Scottish poetry. Time forbids me from doing more than mentioning the names of Blind Harry, Robert Henrysone, William Dunbar, Gawin Douglas, who wrote the first English versification of Virgil, for, as he quaintly remarks, the romance "on the Siege of Troy," published by Caxton, "is no more like Virgil than the devil is like Saint Austin." Then Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, and his royal master, James V. England, on the other hand, when she lost Chaucer and Lydgate, could point to no successor for 200 years. I do not hold that all the old Scotch poems are perfect poems. I do not say that a critic will not easily discover in many of them glaring faults-in many cases they are not the productions of skilled rhymers; but I maintain that many of the productions of these old Scotch poets display a purity of language, and a delicacy of expression, which one is at a loss to conceive of as existing in such dark and rude ages; and if I am correct in holding that the main characteristic beauties of ballad poetry consist in simplicity and pathos, I maintain that Scotch ballad poetry occupies a high place in this department of literature. I still cherish a belief in the antiquity of the ballad literature of my country; and I am grateful to Percy and Scott, and Jamieson and Motherwell and Aytoun, and those men through whose indefatigable zeal and unwearied labours it has been preserved; and I believe, had the step not been taken by them so soon as it was, and a few years had elapsed, it would have been impossible to have done so. Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis;" the pen and the printing press diffuse knowledge and amusement through another channel; old things were rapidly passing away; in the general vortex would have been buried our Scottish ballads. France and Spain, the German States, and Sweden and Norway, all would have had their ballad literature, and Scotland, with her proud associations, been without it. Thanks again, then, to the collectors, in however mutilated a form they may have presented us with this rich legacy, for we have in some cases the very words in which our forefathers sang the triumphant records of their victories, as in the high and lofty strains of the "Battle of Otterburne," and we see, too, how they beguiled the long winter night by some of their humorous songs and ballads, or stirred and roused the feelings by tales of love or superstition. TRANSACTIONS OF THE GLASGOW ARCHEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. NO. XXXI. ANCIENT CROMLECH AT ARDENADAM, NEAR DUNOON: BY A. D. ROBERTSON, Esq. [Read at a Meeting of the Society held at Glasgow on 25th March, 1867.] THIS ruinous structure of unhewn and unsculptured stones, which still remains to awaken ideas of an undefined period of time, and revive the shadowy existence of a people whose memories, habits of thought, and action, have long since been resolved into vague unsatisfactory legend, or become shrouded for ever in impervious oblivion, stands on a rising ground on the south side of the Holy Loch, on the opposite shore from the old tower of the ancient Collegiate Church of Kilmun. It occupies the centre and summit of a slightly elevated and dilapidated cairn or mound which measures at the base from twentyfive to thirty feet in diameter, and consists of four flagstones, forming a rude chamber about nine feet long by four to two feet wide, |