The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. | Page 3

spring up amongst a people most impressionable and joyous. I speak of the Lowland population, and especially of the Borderers, with whose habits, manners and customs, alone I am personally acquainted; and the lingering traces of whose old forms of life--so gay, kindly, and suggestive--I saw some thirty years ago, just before they sank under the mammonism, commonplace, critical apery, and cold material self-seeking, which have hitherto been the plague of the present generation. We have become more practical and knowing than our forefathers, but not so wise. We are now a "fast people;" but we miss the true goal of life--that is, _sober happiness_. Fast to smattering; fast to outward, isolated show; fast to bankruptcy; fast to suicide; fast to some final�� of enormous and dreadful infamy. Bah! rather the plain, honest, homely life of our grandfathers--
"Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,?Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;?Along the cool, sequester'd vale of life,?They kept the noiseless tenor of their way."
Or rather (for every age has its own type, and old forms of life cannot be stereotyped and reproduced), let us have a philosophic and Christian combination of modern adventure and "gold-digging" with old-fashioned balance of mind, and neighbourliness, and open-heartedness, and thankful enjoyment.
Our Scottish race have been--yes, and notwithstanding modern changes, still are--a joyous people--a people full of what I shall term _a lyric joyousness_. I say they still are--as may be found any day up the Ettricks, and Yarrows, and Galas--up any of our Border glens and dales. The Borderers continue to merit the tribute paid to them in the odd but expressive lines of Wordsworth:--
"The _pleasant men of Tiviotdale_,?Fast by the river Tweed."
From time immemorial they have been enthusiastic lovers of song and music, and have been thoroughly imbued with their influences. Bishop Leslie, a contemporary of the state of manners which he describes, has recorded of them, upwards of two centuries ago--"That they take extreme delight in their music, and in their ballads, which are composed amongst themselves, celebrating the deeds of their ancestors, or the valour and success of their predatory expeditions;" which latter, it must be remembered, were esteemed, in those days, not only not criminal, but just, honourable, and heroic. What a gush of mirth overflows in king James' poem of "Peebles to the Play," descriptive of the Beltane or May-day festival, four hundred years ago! at Peebles, a charming pastoral town in the upper district of the vale of the Tweed:--
"At Beltane, when ilk body bouns?To Peebles to the play,?To hear the singin' and the soun's,?The solace, sooth to say.?By firth and forest forth they wound,?They graithit them full gay:?God wot what they would do that stound,?For it was their feast-day,
They said,?Of Peebles to the play!

"Hop, Calye, and Cardronow?Gatherit out thick-fald,?With, _Hey and How and Rumbelow!_?The young folk were full bald.?The bagpipe blew, and they out threw?Out of the towns untald:?Lord! sic ane shout was them amang,?When they were owre the wald,
There west?Of Peebles to the play!"
Thirty years ago, the same joyousness prevailed in a thousand forms--in hospitality, in festivity, in merry customs, in an exquisite social sense, in the culture of the humorous and the imaginative, in impressibility to every touch of noble and useful enthusiasm. It would be easy to dilate upon the causes which seem to have produced this choice joyous spirit in so unexpected a region as the far, bleak North: but that would be a lengthened subject; and we must content ourselves at present with the fact. And, instead of branching out into general vague illustrations of what I mean by this lyric joyousness, I shall _localise_ it, and embody the meaning in a sketch, light and imperfect it must be, of a real place and a real life--such as mine own eyes witnessed when a boy--and in the fond resuscitation of which, amidst the usual struggles and anxieties allotted to middle age, memory and feeling now find one of their most soothing exercises.
Let me transport the reader in imagination to the Vale of the Tweed, that classic region--the Arcadia of Scotland, the haunt of the Muses, the theme of so many a song, the scene of so many a romantic legend. And there, where that most crystalline of rivers has attained the fulness of its beauty and splendour--just before it meets and mingles in gentle union with its scarce less beauteous sister, "sweet Teviot"--on one of those finely swelling eminences which everywhere crown its banks, rise the battlements of Fleurs Castle, which has long been the seat of the Roxburghe family. It is a peerless situation; the great princely mansion, ever gleaming on the eye of the traveller, at whatever point he may be, in the wide surrounding landscape. It comes boldly out from the very heart of an almost endless wood--old, wild, and