The Book-Hunter Part 19

It was not until the year 1827 that a step was taken by the Roxburghe Club which might be called its first exhibition of sober manhood. Some of the members, ashamed of the paltry nature of the volumes circulated in the name of the club, bethought themselves of uniting to produce a book of national value. They took Sir Frederick Madden into their counsels, and authorised him to print eighty copies of the old metrical romance of Havelok the Dane. This gave great dissatisfaction to the historian, who muttered how "a MS. not discovered by a member of the club was selected, and an excerpt obtained, not furnished by the industry or under the inspection of any one member, nor edited by a member; but, in fact, after much _pro_ and _con._, it was made a complete hireling concern, truly at the expense of the club, from the copying to the publis.h.i.+ng."

The value of this book has been attested by the extensive critical examination it has received, and by the serviceable aid it has given to all recent writers on the infancy of English literature. It was followed by another interesting old romance, William and the Wer Wolf, valuable not only as a specimen of early literature, but for the light it throws on the strange wild superst.i.tion dealing with the conversion of men into wolves, which has been found so widely prevalent that it has received a sort of scientific t.i.tle in the word Lycanthropy. These two books made the reputation of the Roxburghe, and proved an example and encouragement to the clubs which began to arise more or less on its model. It was a healthy protest against the Dibdinism which had ruled the destinies of the club, for Dibdin had been its master, and was the Gamaliel at whose feet Hazlewood and others patiently sat. Of the term now used, the best explanation I can give is this, that in the selection of books--other questions, such as rarity or condition, being set aside or equally balanced--a general preference is to be given to those which are the most witless, preposterous, and in every literary sense valueless--which are, in short, rubbish. What is here meant will be easily felt by any one who chooses to consult the book which Dibdin issued under the t.i.tle of "The Library Companion, or the Young Man's Guide and the Old Man's Comfort in the choice of a Library." This, it will be observed, is not intended as a manual of rare or curious, or in any way peculiar books, but as the instruction of a Nestor on the best books for study and use in all departments of literature. Yet one will look in vain there for such names as Montaigne, Shaftesbury, Benjamin Franklin, D'Alembert, Turgot, Adam Smith, Malebranche, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fenelon, Burke, Kant, Richter, Spinoza, Flechier, and many others. Characteristically enough, if you turn up Rousseau in the index, you will find Jean Baptiste, but not Jean Jacques. You will search in vain for Dr Thomas Reid, the metaphysician, but will readily find Isaac Reed, the editor. If you look for Molinaeus or Du Moulin, it is not there, but alphabetic vicinity gives you the good fortune to become acquainted with "Moule, Mr, his Bibliotheca Heraldica." The name Hooker will be found, not to guide the reader to the Ecclesiastical Polity, but to Dr Jackson Hooker's Tour in Iceland. Lastly, if any one shall search for Hartley on Man, he will find in the place it might occupy, or has reference to, the editorial services of "Hazlewood, Mr Joseph."

Though the Roxburghe, when it came under the fostering care of the scholarly Botfield, and secured the services of men like Madden, Wright, and Taylor, outgrew the pedantries in which it had been reared, and performed much valuable literary work, yet its chief merit is in the hints its practice afforded to others. The leading principle, indeed, which the other clubs so largely adopted after the example of the Roxburghe, was not an entire novelty. The idea of keeping up the value of a book by limiting the impression, so as to restrain it within the number who might desire to possess it, was known before the birth of this the oldest book club. The practice was sedulously followed by Hearne the antiquary, and others, who provided old chronicles and books of the cla.s.s chiefly esteemed by the book-hunter. The very fame of the restricted number, operating on the selfish jealousy of man's nature, brought out compet.i.tors for the possession of the book, who never would have thought of it but for the pleasant idea of keeping it out of the hands of some one else.

There are several instances on record of an unknown book lying in the printer's warerooms, dead from birth and forgotten, having life and importance given to it by the report that all the copies, save a few, have been destroyed by a fire in the premises. This is an ill.u.s.tration in the sibylline direction of value being conferred by the decrease of the commodity; but by judiciously adjusting the number of copies printed, the remarkable phenomenon has been exhibited of the rarity of a book being increased by an increase in the number of copies. To understand how this may come to pa.s.s, it is necessary to recall the precept elsewhere set forth, and look on rarity as not an absolute quality, but as relative to the number who desire to possess the article. Ten copies which two hundred people want const.i.tute a rarer book than two copies which twenty people want. Even to a sole remaining copy of some forgotten book, lying dead, as it were, and buried in some obscure library, may collective vital rarity be imparted. Let its owner print, say, twenty copies for distribution--the book-hunting community have got the "hark-away," and are off after it. In this way, before the days of the clubs, many knowing people multiplied rarities; and at the present day there are reprints by the clubs themselves of much greater pecuniary value than the rare books from which they have been multiplied.

Some Book-Club Men.

No one probably did more to raise the condition of the book clubs than Sir Walter Scott. In 1823 the Roxburghe made proffers of members.h.i.+p to him, partly, it would seem, under the influence of a waggish desire to disturb his great secret, which had not yet been revealed. Dibdin, weighting himself with more than his usual burden of ponderous jocularity, set himself in motion to intimate to Scott the desire of the club that the Author of Waverley, with whom it was supposed that he had the means of communicating, would accept of the seat at the club vacated by the death of Sir Mark Sykes. Scott got through the affair ingeniously with a little coy fencing that deceived no one, and was finally accepted as the Author of Waverley's representative. The Roxburghe had, however, at that time, done nothing in serious book-club business, having let loose only the small flight of flimsy sheets of letterpress already referred to. It was Scott's own favourite club, the Bannatyne, that first projected the plan of printing substantial and valuable volumes.

At the commencement of the same year, 1823, when he took his seat at the Roxburghe (he did not take his bottle there, which was the more important object, for some time after), he wrote to the late Robert Pitcairn, the editor of the Criminal Trials, in these terms: "I have long thought that a something of a bibliomaniacal society might be formed here, for the prosecution of the important task of publis.h.i.+ng _dilettante_ editions of our national literary curiosities. Several persons of rank, I believe, would willingly become members, and there are enough of good operatives. What would you think of such an a.s.sociation? David Laing was ever keen for it; but the death of Sir Alexander Boswell and of Alexander Oswald has damped his zeal. I think, if a good plan were formed, and a certain number of members chosen, the thing would still do well."[71]

[Footnote 71: Notices of the Bannatyne Club, privately printed.]

Scott gave the Bannatyners a song for their festivities. It goes to the tune of "One Bottle More," and is a wonderful ill.u.s.tration of his versatile powers, in the admirable bibulous sort of joviality which he distils, as it were, from the very dust of musty volumes, thus:--

"John Pinkerton next, and I'm truly concerned I can't call that worthy so candid as learned; He railed at the plaid, and blasphemed the claymore, And set Scots by the ears in his one volume more.

One volume more, my friends, one volume more-- Celt and Goth shall be pleased with one volume more.

As bitter as gall, and as sharp as a razor, And feeding on herbs as a Nebuchadnezzar, His diet too acid, his temper too sour, Little Ritson came out with his two volumes more.

But one volume, my friends, one volume more-- We'll dine on roast beef, and print one volume more."

I am tempted to add a word or two of prosaic gossip and comment to the characteristics thus so happily hit off in verse. John Pinkerton was, upon the whole, a man of simple character. The simplicity consisted in the thorough belief that never, in any country or at any period of the world's history, had there been created a human being destined to be endowed with even an approach to the genius, wisdom, and learning of which he was himself possessed. He never said a word in praise of any fellow-being, for none had ever risen so much above the wretched level of the stupid world he looked down upon as to deserve such a distinction. He condescended, however, to distribute censure, and that with considerable liberality. For instance, take his condensed notice of an unfortunate worker in his own field, Walter Goodal, whose works are "fraught with furious railing, contemptible scurrility, low prejudice, small reading, and vulgar error." Thus having dealt with an unfortunate and rather obscure author, he shows his impartiality by dealing with Macpherson, then in the zenith of his fame, in this wise: "His etymological nonsense he a.s.sists with gross falsehoods, and pretends to skill in the Celtic without quoting one single MS. In short, he deals wholly in a.s.sertion and opinion, and it is clear that he had not even an idea what learning and science are." Nor less emphatic is his railing at the plaid and blaspheming at the claymore. Donald and his brethren are thus described: "Being mere savages, but one degree above brutes, they remain still in much the same state of society as in the days of Julius Caesar; and he who travels among the Scottish Highlanders, the old Welsh, or wild Irish, may see at once the ancient and modern state of women among the Celts, when he beholds these savages stretched in their huts, and their poor women toiling like beasts of burden for their unmanly husbands;" and finally, "being absolute savages, and, like Indians and negroes, will ever continue so, all we can do is to plant colonies among them, and by this, and encouraging their emigration, try to get rid of the breed."

This fervency is all along of the question whether the Picts, or Piks, as Pinkerton chooses to call them, were Celts or Goths. If we turn to the books of his opponent on this question, Joseph Ritson, we find him paid back in his own coin, and that so genuine, that, on reading about gross ignorance, falsehood, and folly, one would think he was still enjoying Pinkerton's own flowers of eloquence, were it not that the tenor of the argument has somehow turned to the opposite side. I drop into the note below a specimen from the last words of this controversy, as characteristic of the way in which it was conducted, and a sample of the kind of dry fuel which, when ignited by these incendiaries, blazed into so much rage.[72]

[Footnote 72: "See Pinkerton's Enquiry, i. 173, &c., 369. He explains the _Vecturiones_ of Marcellinus, '_Vectveriar_, or _Pikish_ men, as,'

he untruly says, 'the Icelandic writers call them in their Norwegian seats _Vik-veriar_,' and, either ignorantly or dishonestly to countenance this most false and absurd hypothesis, corrupts the Pihtas of the Saxons into Pihtar, a termination impossible to their language.

It is true, indeed, that he has stumbled upon a pa.s.sage in Rudbeck's Atlantica, i. 672, in which that very fanciful and extravagant writer speaks of the _Packar_, _Baggar_, _Paikstar_, _Baggeboar_, _Pitar_, and _Medel Pakcar_, whom he pretends '_Britanni_ vero _Peiktar_ appellant, et _Peictonum_ tam eorum qui in Galliis quam in Britannia resident genitores faciunt.' He finds these Pacti also in the Argonauticks, v.

1067; and his whole work seems the composition of a man whom 'much learning hath made mad.'"--Ritson's Annals of the Caledonians, &c., i.

81.]

Ritson was a man endowed with almost superhuman irritability of temper, and he had a genius fertile in devising means of giving scope to its restless energies. I have heard that it was one of his obstinate fancies, when addressing a letter to a friend of the male s.e.x, instead of using the ordinary prefix of Mr or the affix Esq., to use the term "Master," as Master John Pinkerton, Master George Chalmers. The agreeable result of this was, that his communications on intricate and irritating antiquarian disputes were delivered to, and perused by, the young gentlemen of the family, so opening up new little intricate avenues, fertile in controversy and misunderstanding. But he had another and more inexhaustible resource for his superabundant irritability. In his numerous books he insisted on adopting a peculiar spelling. It was not phonetic, nor was it etymological; it was simply Ritsonian. To understand the efficacy of this arrangement, it must be remembered that the instinct of a printer is to spell according to rule, and that every deviation from the ordinary method can only be carried out by a special contest over each word. General instructions on such a matter are apt to produce unexpected results. One very sad instance I can now recall; it was that of a French author who, in a new edition of his works, desired to alter the old-fas.h.i.+oned spelling of the imperfect tense from o to a.

To save himself trouble, on the first instance occurring in each proof, he put in the margin a general direction to change all such o's into a's. The instruction was so literally and comprehensively obeyed, that, happening to glance his eye over the volume on its completion, he found the letter o entirely excluded from it. Even the sacred name of Napoleon was irreverently printed Napalean, and the Revolution was the Revalutian. Ritson had far too sharp a scent for any little matter of controversy and irritating discussion to get into a difficulty like this. He would fight each step of the way, and such peculiarities as the following, profusely scattered over his books, may be looked upon as the names of so many battles or skirmishes with his printers--_compileer_, _writeer_, _wel_, _kil_, _onely_, _probablely_. Even when he condescended to use the spelling common to the rest of the nation, he could pick out little causes of quarrel with the way of putting it in type--as, for instance, in using the word a.s.s, which came naturally to him, he would not follow the practice of his day in the use of the long and short ([s]s), but inverted the arrangement thus, s[s]. This strange creature exemplified the opinion that every one must have some creed--something from without having an influence over thought and action stronger than the imperfect apparatus of human reason. Scornfully disdaining revelation from above, he groped below, and found for himself a little fetish made of turnips and cabbages. He was as fanatical a devotee of vegetarianism as others have been of a middle state or adult baptism; and, after having torn through a life of spiteful controversy with his fellow-men, and ribaldry of all sacred things, he thus expressed the one weight hanging on his conscience, that "on one occasion, when tempteed by wet, cold, and hunger in the south of Scotland, he ventured to eat a few potatoes dressed under the roast, nothing less repugnant to feelings being to be had."[73]

[Footnote 73: See an Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty. By Joseph Ritson.]

To return to the services of him of mightier renown, whose genial drolleries led to these notices. Scott printed, as a contribution to his favourite club, the record of the trial of two Highlanders for murder, which brought forth some highly characteristic incidents. The victim was a certain Sergeant Davis, who had charge of one of the military parties or guards dispersed over the Highlands to keep them in order after the '45. Davis had gone from his own post at Braemar up Glen Clunie to meet the guard from Glenshee. He chose to send his men back and take a day's shooting among the wild mountains at the head of the glen, and was seen no more. How he was disposed of could easily be divined in a general way, but there were no particulars to be had. It happened, however, that there was one Highlander who, for reasons best known to himself--they were never got at--had come to the resolution of bringing his brother Highlanders, who had made away with the sergeant, to justice. It was necessary for his own safety, however, that he should be under the pressure of a motive or impulse sufficient to justify so heartless and unnatural a proceeding, otherwise he would himself have been likely to follow the sergeant's fate. Any reference to his conscience, the love of justice, respect for the laws of the land, or the like, would of course have been received with well-merited ridicule and scorn. He must have some motive which a sensible Highlander could admit as probable in itself, and sufficient for its purpose.

Accordingly the accuser said he had been visited by the sergeant's ghost, who had told him everything, and laid on him the heavy burden of bringing his slaughterers in the flesh to their account. If that were not done, the troubled spirit would not cease to walk the earth, and so long as he walked would the afflicted denouncer continue to be the victim of his ghostly visits. The case was tried at Edinburgh, and though the evidence was otherwise clear and complete, the Lowland jury were perplexed and put out by the supernatural episode. A Highland story, with a ghost acting witness at second-hand, roused all their Saxon prejudices, and they cut the knot of difficulties by declining to convict. A point was supposed to have been made, when the counsel for the defence asked the ghost-seer what language the ghost, who was English when in the flesh, spoke to the Highlander, who knew not that language; and the witness answered, through his interpreter, that the spectre spoke as good Gaelic as ever was heard in Lochaber. Sir Walter Scott, however, remarks that there was no incongruity in this, if we once get over the first step of the ghost's existence. It is curious that Scott does not seem to have woven the particulars of this affair into any one of his novels.

Among those who contributed to place the stamp of a higher character on the labours of the book clubs, one of the most remarkable was Sir Alexander Boswell. A time there was, unfortunately, when his name could not easily be dissociated from exasperating political events; but now that the generation concerned in them has nearly pa.s.sed away, it becomes practicable, even from the side of his political opponents, to glance at his literary abilities and accomplishments without recalling exciting recollections. He was a member of the Roxburghe, and though he did not live to see the improvement in the issues of that inst.i.tution, or the others which kept pace with it, he, alone and single-handed, set the example of printing the kind of books which it was afterwards the merit of the book clubs to promulgate. He gave them, in fact, their tone. He had at his paternal home of Auchinleck a remarkable collection of rare books and ma.n.u.scripts; one of these afforded the text from which the romance of Sir Tristrem was printed. He reprinted from the one remaining copy in his own possession the disputation between John Knox and Quentin Kennedy, a priest who came forward against the great Reformer as the champion of the old religion. From the Auchinleck press came also reprints of Lodge's Fig for Momus, Churchyard's Mirrour of Man, the Book of the Chess, Sir James Dier's Remembrancer of the Life of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Dialogus inter Deum et Evam, and others.

The possession of a private printing-press is, no doubt, a very appalling type of bibliomania. Much as has been told us of the awful scale on which drunkards consume their favoured poison, one is not accustomed to hear of their setting up private stills for their own individual consumption. There is a Sardanapalitan excess in this bibliographical luxuriousness which refuses to partake with other vulgar mortals in the common harvest of the public press, but must itself minister to its own tastes and demands. The owner of such an establishment is subject to no extraneous caprices about breadth of margins, size of type, quarto or folio, leaded or unleaded lines; he dictates his own terms; he is master of the situation, as the French say; and is the true autocrat of literature. There have been several renowned private presses: Walpole's, at Strawberry Hill; Mr Johnes's, at Hafod; Allan's, at the Grange; and the Lee Priory Press. None of these, however, went so distinctly into the groove afterwards followed by the book clubs as Sir Alexander Boswell's Auchinleck Press. In the Bibliographical Decameron is a brief history, by Sir Alexander himself, of the rise and progress of his press. He tells us how he had resolved to print Knox's Disputation: "For this purpose I was constrained to purchase two small fonts of black-letter, and to have punches cut for eighteen or twenty double letters and contractions. I was thus enlisted and articled into the service, and being infected with the _type_ fever, the fits have periodically returned. In the year 1815, having viewed a portable press invented by Mr John Ruthven, an ingenious printer in Edinburgh, I purchased one, and commenced compositor. At this period, my brother having it in contemplation to present Bamfield to the Roxburghe Club, and not aware of the poverty and insignificance of my establishment, expressed a wish that his tract should issue from the Auchinleck Press. I determined to gratify him, and the portable press being too small for general purposes, I exchanged it for one of Mr Ruthven's full-sized ones; and having increased my stock to _eight_ small fonts, roman and italic, with the necessary appurtenances, I placed the whole in a cottage, built originally for another purpose, very pleasantly situated on the bank of a rivulet, and, although concealed from view by the surrounding wood, not a quarter of a mile from my house."[74]

[Footnote 74: Bibliographical Decameron, vol. ii. p. 454.]

To show the kind of man who co-operated with Scott in such frivolities, let me say a word or two more about Sir Alexander. He was the son, observe, of Johnson's Jamie Boswell, but he was about as like his father as an eagle might be to a peac.o.c.k. To use a common colloquial phrase, he was a man of genius, if ever there was one. Had he been a poorer and socially humbler man than he was--had he had his bread and his position to make--he would probably have achieved immortality. Some of his songs are as familiar to the world as those of Burns, though their author is forgotten,--as, for instance, the song of parental farewell, beginning--

"Good-night, and joy be wi' ye a'; Your harmless mirth has cheered my heart,"

and ending with this fine and genial touch--

"The auld will speak, the young maun hear; Be canty, but be good and leal; Your ain ills aye hae heart to bear, Another's aye hae heart to feel: So, ere I set I'll see you s.h.i.+ne, I'll see you triumph ere I fa'; My parting breath shall boast you mine.

Good-night, and joy be wi' you a'."

His "Auld Gudeman, ye're a drucken carle," "Jenny's Bawbee," and "Jenny dang the Weaver," are of another kind, and perhaps fuller of the peculiar spirit of the man. This consisted in hitting off the deeper and typical characteristics of Scottish life with an easy touch that brings it all home at once. His lines do not seem as if they were composed by an effort of talent, but as if they were the spontaneous expressions of nature.

Take the following specimen of ludicrous pomposity, which must suffer a little by being quoted from memory: it describes a Highland procession:--

"Come the Grants o' Tullochgorum, Wi' their pipers on afore 'em; Proud the mithers are that bore 'em, Fee fuddle, fau fum.

Come the Grants o' Rothiemurchus, Ilka ane his sword an' durk has, Ilka ane as proud's a Turk is, Fee fuddle, fau fum."

To comprehend the spirit of this, one must endow himself with the feelings of a Lowland Scot before Waverley and Rob Roy imparted a glow of romantic interest to the Highlanders. The pompous and the ludicrous were surely never more happily interwoven. One would require to go further back still to appreciate the spirit of "Skeldon Haughs, or the Sow is Flitted." It is a picture of old Ayrs.h.i.+re feudal rivalry and hatred. The Laird of Bargainy resolved to humiliate his neighbour and enemy, the Laird of Kerse, by a forcible occupation of part of his territory. For the purpose of making this aggression flagrantly insulting, it was done by tethering or staking a female pig on the domain of Kerse. The animal was, of course, attended by a sufficient body of armed men for her protection. It was necessary for his honour that the Laird of Kerse should drive the animal and her attendants away, and hence came a b.l.o.o.d.y battle about "the flitting of the sow." In the contest, Kerse's eldest son and hope, Jock, is killed, and the point or moral of the narrative is, the contempt with which the old laird looks on that event, as compared with the grave affair of flitting the sow. A retainer who comes to tell him the result of the battle stammers in his narrative on account of his grief for Jock, and is thus pulled up by the laird--

"'Is the sow flitted?' cries the carle; 'Gie me an answer, short and plain-- Is the sow flitted, yammerin' wean?'"

To which the answer is--

"'The sow, deil tak her, 's ower the water, And at her back the Crawfords clatter; The Carrick couts are cowed and bitted.'"

Hereupon the laird's exultation breaks forth,--

"'My thumb for Jock--the sow's flitted!'"

Another man of genius and learning, whose name is a household one among the book clubs, is Robert Surtees, the historian of Durham. You may hunt for it in vain among the biographical dictionaries. Let us hope that this deficiency will be well supplied in the Biographia Britannica, projected by Mr Murray. Surtees was not certainly among those who flare their qualities before the world--he was to a peculiar degree addicted, as we shall shortly see, to hiding his light under a bushel; and so any little notice of him in actual flesh and blood, such as this left by his friend, the Rev. James Tate, master of Richmond School, interests one:--

"One evening I was sitting alone--it was about nine o'clock in the middle of summer--there came a gentle tap at the door. I opened the door myself, and a gentleman said with great modesty, 'Mr Tate, I am Mr Surtees of Mainsforth. James Raine begged I would call upon you.' 'The master of Richmond School is delighted to see you,' said I; 'pray walk in.' 'No, thank you, sir; I have ordered a bit of supper; perhaps you will walk up with me?' 'To be sure I will;' and away we went. As we went along, I quoted a line from the Odyssey. What was my astonishment to hear from Mr Surtees, not the next only, but line after line of the pa.s.sage I had touched upon. Said I to myself, 'Good Master Tate, take heed; it is not often you catch such a fellow as this at Richmond.' I never spent such an evening in my life." What a pity, then, that he did not give us more of the evening, which seems to have left joyful memories to both: for Surtees himself thus commemorated it in macaronics, in which he was an adept:--

"Doctus Tatius hic residet, Ad Coronam prandet ridet, Spargit sales c.u.m cachinno, Lepido ore et concinno, Ubique carus inter bonos Rubei montis praesens honos."

In the same majestic folio in which this anecdote may be found--the Memoir prefixed to the History of Durham--we are likewise told how, when at college, he was waiting on a Don on business; and, feeling coldish, stirred the fire. "Pray, Mr Surtees," said the great man, "do you think that any other undergraduate in the college would have taken that liberty?" "Yes, Mr Dean," was the reply--"any one as cool as I am!" This would have been not unworthy of Brummell. The next is not in Brummell's line. Arguing with a neighbour about his not going to church, the man said, "Why, sir, the parson and I have quarrelled about the t.i.thes."

"You fool," was the reply, "is that any reason why you should go to h.e.l.l?" Yet another. A poor man, with a numerous family, lost his only cow. Surtees was collecting a subscription to replace the loss, and called on the Bishop of Lichfield, who was Dean of Durham, and owner of the great t.i.thes in the parish, to ascertain what he would give. "Give!"

said the bishop; "why, a cow, to be sure. Go, Mr Surtees, to my steward, and tell him to give you as much money as will buy the best cow you can find." Surtees, astonished at this unexpected generosity, said--"My Lord, I hope you will ride to heaven upon the back of that cow." A while afterwards he was saluted in the college by the late Lord Barrington, with--"Surtees, what is the absurd speech that I hear you have been making to the dean?" "I see nothing absurd in it," was the reply; "when the dean rides to heaven on the back of that cow, many of you prebendaries will be glad to lay hold of her tail!"

I have noted these innocent trifles concerning one who is chiefly known as a deep and dry investigator, for the purpose of propitiating the reader in his favour, since the sacred cause of truth renders it necessary to refer to another affair in which his conduct, however trifling it might be, was not innocent. He was addicted to literary practical jokes of an audacious kind, and carried his presumption so far as to impose on Sir Walter Scott a spurious ballad which has a place in the Border Minstrelsy. Nor is it by any means a servile imitation, which might pa.s.s unnoticed in a crowd of genuine and better ballads; but it is one of the most spirited and one of the most thoroughly endowed with individual character in the whole collection. This guilty composition is known as "The Death of Featherstonhaugh," and begins thus:--

"Hoot awa', lads, hoot awa'; Ha' ye heard how the Ridleys, and Thirlwalls, and a', Ha' set upon Albany Featherstonhaugh, And taken his life at the Dead Man's Haugh?

There was Williemoteswick And Hardriding d.i.c.k, And Hughie of Hawdon, and Will of the Wa', I canna tell a', I canna tell a', And many a mair that the deil may knaw.

The auld man went down, but Nicol his son Ran awa' afore the fight was begun; And he run, and he run, And afore they were done There was many a Featherston gat sic a stun, As never was seen since the world begun.

I canna tell a', I canna tell a', Some got a skelp and some got a claw, But they gar't the Featherstons haud their jaw.

Some got a hurt, and some got nane, Some had harness, and some got staen."