795

N 1792 Burns wrote in his first letter to George Thomson : 'Apropos, if you are for English verses, there is on my part an end of the matter. Whether in the simplicity of the ballad or the pathos of the song, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue.' So that Burns, who fairly represented the practice of his older contemporaries, and who became the standard of all later writers of Scottish verse, followed Ramsay's nondescript and elastic linguistic principle, and with better taste and vastly greater command of his instrument wrote - at times indiscriminatelyalmost pure English, nearly the broadest surviving vernacular, or a broken English, more or less largely 'sprinkled' with Scotch words.

Some

times even the words were not vernacular Scotch, but archaisms taken from Ramsay (who, as Lord Hailes proved, in ancient Scotch was sadly to seek); sometimes, as Dr Murray has pointed out, they were not Scotch words at all, but 'fancy Scotch' made by Scottifying ordinary English words on an assumed analogy. As a rule Burns was most broadly Scotch when he was most jocular, most largely English when the matter was most serious. In the longer poems, as The Cotter's Saturday Night, some verses are pure English, some nearly pure vernacular, and some a curious arbitrary mixture. Only in some of the songs does the (largely Anglicised) Scotch of his Ayrshire neighbours form the warp and woof of the whole, with English words thrown in. In some of the songs that are reckoned quite Scotch the blend is still more curious-the diction is substantially English, or even the somewhat stilted 'poetic diction' of contemporary southern versewriters, with a few of the words translated into imitation Scotch. My Nannie's awa' is one of Burns's most popular 'Scotch' songs, but nothing is less like the language of Scottish shepherds of any date than :

Now in her green mantle blithe nature arrays,

And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes. Braes is the only genuine Scots word here; nature arraying in a green mantle and listening lambkins bleating' being not ordinary but poetic English, such as was used in many of the songbooks current in Burns's time. Most of the

666

phrases actually occur in the songs given in Cecilia (1784), for example. Dr Murray has said: Scots wha hae" is fancy Scotch; that is, it is merely the English "Scots who have" spelled as Scotch. Barbour would have written "Scottis at hes;" Dunbar or Douglas, “Scottis quhilkis hes;” and even Henry Charteris, in the end of the sixteenth century, "Scottis quha hes." . . . "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," although composed of Scotch words, is not vernacular Scotch any more than "How you carry you?" as a translation of "Comment vous portez vous?" is vernacular English.' 'Scots at hes,' it may be added, is still the current Scots form, as it was in Burns's time; 'wha hae' appears only as an imitation of Burns's imitation.

North Germans sometimes use Low German words in High German stories, but the stories themselves do not thus become Platt-Deutsch works. And though a southern Frenchman in Paris gives his articles or verses a southern flavouring of words or phrases from his native Nîmes or Avignon, he is not therefore ranked amongst Provençal authors. Nor would Burns have been the greatest of writers in Scottish dialect unless he had in many of his best poems closely followed the Scottish spoken vernacular of his time. But, as we have seen from his own explicit testimony, while refusing to write 'English verses' at all, Burns was content to write Scotch verses' in which there was merely a 'sprinkling of his native tongue.' And this whether he was bowdlerising the old Scots songs for Thomson, making new ones to the old tunes and with the old refrains, or inditing his own most spontaneous and original strains. Most of his contemporaries, earlier and later, and almost all his successors have adopted a similarly fluctuating standard of mixed dialect; for many, Burns's very modest minimum of Scotticism has amply sufficed. But when it is remembered that the actually spoken Scotch has long been itself a mixed tongue, a patois rather than a dialect, their practice is not so strange as at first it might appear. Most Scottish writers, accepting Beattie's dictum (page 308) that 'to write in the vulgar broad Scotch and yet write seriously had become impossible,' essayed at times to find or construct a dialect which was not vulgar and was not exactly broad Scotch.

Father Geddes's remarks, quoted below (page 799), are interesting as coming from a philological

scholar of great acquirements and thoroughly familiar with the vernacular. In the introduction to one of his own poems, Sir Alexander Boswell, one of Burns's most fervent admirers, and author of some of the most popular and 'broadest' Scotch songs since Burns's time, admirably and authoritatively summed up the case as it stood in 1810 with regard to 'the mixed dialects of English and Scotch, which, though they afford so many facilities in measure and rhyme, are, I am told, not quite legitimate. I shall therefore [in this particular poem] endeavour to confine myself to that which, till the Gentle Shepherd once more awoke the Scottish reed, seemed to be for ever the destined dialect of British Poesy. But while our later Bards have wooed the Scottish muse-and even Robert Burns is subject to the criticism— one-half of what has been written, by a slight alteration of vowels and a few consonants added or subtracted, becomes plain English. Doctor Jamieson will tell you it is not Scotch; but it is a pleasing mélange, which carries to the soul the sweetest sentiments, and we care not how we come by them.'

Sir Alexander's pronouncement holds good of the score of Burns's contemporaries, earlier and later, from whom extracts are given below. Some of the minor writers have left a few admirable songs; but whether for songs or total achievement, none of them stands near Burns, and none of them is worthy to be named beside him save Fergusson of those earlier in date, and Tannahill and Lady Nairne amongst those who were born soon after him. Meanwhile the principal writers of Scottish birth and blood were doing their best in book English. What they accomplished may be seen in the preceding pages, and may be recalled here by the names of Beattie, Bruce, and Logan, Macpherson and Mickle, the two Blairs, Dugald Stewart, Henry Mackenzie, Mackintosh, Bruce and Mungo Park, Grahame and Leyden, Joanna Baillie and Thomas Campbell.

D. P.

Jean Elliot and Mrs Cockburn. - Two songs, both by women, and both bearing the name of The Flowers of the Forest, still divide the favour of lovers of Scottish song. The first, bewailing the losses sustained at Flodden, was written by Jean Elliot of Minto (1727-1805), daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, and sister of the author of the lyric, My sheep I neglected, I broke my sheep-hook' (page 423). The second song (1765), which is usually taken to have been on the same subject, was in reality occasioned by the bankruptcy of a number of gentlemen in Selkirkshire; it was written by Alicia Cockburn (1713-95), the daughter of Robert Rutherford of Fernilie, who in 1731 married Patrick Cockburn, advocate, and died in Edinburgh. Most modern Scotsmen agree with Allan Cunningham in preferring Miss Elliot's song; but both have their merits; the second is most usually sung. Sir Walter Scott praises the

David Herd (1732-1810) did for Scottish song what Bishop Percy had done for the old English ballads. The son of a farmer in Kincardineshire, he became an accountant's clerk in Edinburgh, and devoted the scanty leisure and savings of a bachelor life to the acquisition of a valuable library and a sound knowledge of the popular lyric poetry of Scotland. Sir Walter Scott, who praises his shrewd manly common-sense and antiquarian science,' made use of his rich manuscript collections for the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and recent editors of Burns have been glad to draw illustrations from the same source. His Ancient Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, &c., appeared at first anonymously in a single volume in 1769, and afterwards, with his name, in two volumes, in 1776 (the best edition) and 1791. It was, as Scott described it, 'the first classical collection' of the kind, for the earliest Scottish song-books do not count for much as literature; and the Ancient Scottish Poems of Lord Hailes (1770) were not songs, but a more critical reprint of some of the contents of the Bannatyne MS. than Allan Ramsay had presented in his Evergreen (1724-27), called a collection of 'Scots poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600.' Watson's Choice Collection of Scottish Poems (1706-11) contained only a few songs, such as 'Old Long Syne,' 'Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament,' and the verses attributed to Montrose, and these are not Scotch in language at all. More notable in this regard is Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, the first volume of which appeared in 1724. Ramsay printed some of the older songs, and published many from the pens of contemporary verse-writers like Robert Crawford and the Hamiltons of Bangour and Gilbertfield (pages 309, 310). But not a few of these new songs were eighteenth-century English in language and sentiment; too many of the old ones were the spurious imitations produced by Durfey and his school; and nowhere is Ramsay's treatment of his texts to be trusted. Quite as uncritical was the Orpheus Caledonius, a collection of songs (largely appropriated from the Tea-Table Miscellany, which, however, revenged itself by such reprisals as that of Lady Grizel Baillie's famous song) set to music and published by a certain William Thomson in 1725-33. Of the same order were the collection of Scottish melodies by James Oswald, Yair's Charmer (1749-51), and the selection entitled The Lark -the last a Scottish and English medley, blending 'Todlin Hame' and 'The Ewe Bughts,' 'Waly, waly' and 'The Blithesome Bridal,' with 'Chevy Chace,' first issued in London in 1746, and reprinted at Edinburgh in an edition which contained Mrs Cockburn's 'Flowers of the Forest,' and is known to have been possessed by Burns. On such merely popular publications the critical collection of Herd was a great advance. His texts have always enjoyed the reputation of superior accuracy, and his choice of specimens is ample

and judicious. Ballads as well as songs were included in his work, and it is noteworthy that when one has made subtraction from it of 'Gil Morice' and 'Sir Patrick Spens' and their like, as well as of Anglicised verses like 'The Bush aboon Traquair' and the 'Broom o' the Cowdenknowes,' very little of what is now recognised as classical Scottish song remains. The majority and assuredly the best of the genuine old Scottish songs printed by Herd are of the bacchanalian, comicamorous, and not always too decorous kind, exemplified by The Tailor,' 'The Bob o' Dumblane,' and 'Todlin Hame.' Songs of passion and pathos, such as are now taken as typical of Scottish minstrelsy, are conspicuously few. They make

their appearance first from the master-hand of Burns in James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803) and George Thomson's Collection of Scottish Songs and Airs (1793-1841), which, by grace of the genius of their chief contributor rather than through any editorial scholarship, rank along with Herd's modest anthology as the great books of Scottish song. Pinkerton's rather unreliable Select Scotish Ballads (1783; Pinkerton and some others made a point of spelling Scotish) and Joseph Ritson's scholarly volume of Scottish Songs (1794) also deserve mention. St Cecilia, or the Lady's and Gentleman's Harmonious Companion, also called Wilson's Musical Miscellany, published at Edinburgh for C. Wilson' in 1779, was of the Lark type. It complained that all previous collections 'had one general fault-viz. that they abounded too much with obscene songs, that tend to suppress virtue; which proves that the editors thereof have had but a mean taste. . . . Particular care hath been taken in the selection of this collection, and nothing is inserted that can give the least offence to that delicacy of taste for which the present age is so remarkable;' and yet used considerable freedom in this very department. This collection, English and Scotch, contains many of the Scotch songs Burns commended and imitated, and was doubtless known to him. The Chearful Companion (Perth, 1780; 3rd ed. 1790) was one of several provincial song-books in common use. A good reprint of Herd's collection was published in 1869.

Robert Graham (c. 1735-97) of Gartmore inherited the family estate (part of it handed on from the last Earl of Menteith) on the death of his brother William in 1774. He assumed the name of Cunninghame before Graham (Cunninghame-Graham) on succeeding to the estates of the Glencairn earldom at the death of his cousin, the fifteenth and last Earl of Glencairn (1796), through his mother, Lady Margaret Cunninghame, daughter of William, twelfth Earl. Graham studied at Glasgow, was for some years Receiver-General of Jamaica, and from 1794 to 1796 was M.P. for Stirlingshire. An advanced Liberal, the friend of Charles James Fox, and an

admirer of the French Revolution, he had in 1785 been elected Rector of Glasgow University in opposition to Burke. He gathered about him a large and valuable library and a rich collection of admirable paintings; and when Sir Walter Scott was at Gartmore while writing Rob Roy, Graham lent him many documents and MSS. about the family and the district. Graham (ancestor of Mr Cunninghame-Graham, a well-known writer of a later day, whose wife is also an authoress) wrote songs and lyrics, of which by far the best and the only one known is that printed by Scott in the first edition of the Border Minstrelsy as verses 'taken down from recitation and averred to be of the age of Charles I. They have indeed much of the romantic expression of passion common to poets of that period, whose rays still reflected the setting beams of chivalry.' But in later editions he had to add that he was assured they were by the late Mr Graham of Gartmore.' He told Lockhart he had believed them to be the work of a greater Graham-the famous Marquis of Montrose himself (see Vol. I. p. 817).

If Doughty Deeds.

If doughty deeds my ladye please,
Right soon I'll mount my steed,
And strong his arm, and fast his seat,
That bears frae me the meed.
I'll wear thy colours in my cap,

Thy picture at my heart;
And he that bends not to thine eye
Shall rue it to his smart!

Then tell me how to woo thee, Love,
O, tell me how to woo thee!
For thy dear sake nae care I'll take,
Tho' ne'er another trow me.

If gay attire delight thine eye,
I'll dight me in array,
I'll tend thy chamber door all night,
And squire thee all the day.
If sweetest sounds can win thine ear,
These sounds I'll strive to catch :
Thy voice I'll steal to woo thysell,

That voice that nane can match.
But if fond love thy heart can gain,
I never broke a vow,

Nae maiden lays her skaith to me,
I never loved but you.

For you alone I ride the ring,
For you I wear the blue,

For you alone I strive to sing

O, tell me how to woo!

Then tell me how to woo thee, Love,
O, tell me how to woo thee!
For thy dear sake nae care I'll take,
Tho' ne'er another trow me.

Alexander Geddes (1737-1802), one of the most remarkable and curiously gifted Scotsmen of his time, was born in Ruthven parish, Banffshire, of Roman Catholic parentage, and was educated for the priesthood at the seminary of Scalan in Glenlivat and at Paris (1758-64), where he

acquired a knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, French, Spanish, German, and Low Dutch, as well as of Latin, but devoted himself specially to school divinity and biblical criticism. In 1769 he took a cure of souls at Auchinhalrig in Banffshire, where his too marked sympathy with the Protestants around him (he sometimes went to the parish church services) led to his dismissal (1780). He then went to London, and, by Lord Petre's help, carried on a new translation of the Bible for the use of English Catholics (3 vols. 1792-1800; including only the earlier books to Ruth, with some of the Psalms)—a work whose 'notes and critical remarks' offended Catholics and Protestants alike by 'higher criticism' of startling boldness. Indeed, the critic rivalled the revolutionary freedom of the most thorough-going German rationalists; and Eichhorn and Paulus were both among his correspondents, as well as Dr Kennicott and Bishop Lowth. Geddes claimed explicitly to apply to the sacred text the very same methods as had been so profitably used in connection with the Greek and Latin classics; doubted or disputed the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; and held that the writer, whoever he was, adorned his narrative of perfectly natural events with marvels and fictitious Divine interferences, and dressed up fables as true history. The story of the creation is a fable, like other cosmogonies; the story of the fall a mythos. The effect of such methods on the doctrine of inspiration was such as to make the Unitarian Priestley (against whom Geddes defended the Trinity) doubt if a man who believed so little and conceded so much as Geddes could be a Christian. Violent controversy followed, and ecclesiastical interdicts. Geddes died without recanting, qualified his acceptance of the Trinity and the Atonement, but received absolution from a French priest. Public mass for his soul was prohibited by the Roman Catholic bishop.

In Professor George Adam Smith's Criticism of the Old Testament (1901) Geddes is treated as a conspicuous representative, if not the originator, of the view that the Pentateuch is composed, not of two or three documents (Elohistic, Jehovistic, &c.) merely, but of a multitude of independent documents or services-the Fragmentary hypothesis, as it is called. And Geddes anticipated Bleek in regard to the book of Joshua forming an indispensable supplement to the Pentateuch.

Besides his memorable contribution to English biblical criticism, Geddes wrote numerous letters, appeals, and pamphlets in his own defence; an apology for the Roman Catholics of Great Britain, disquisitions on the penal laws, and other argumentative treatises; an ironical defence of slavery; and a number of sermons. But he is also known as an indefatigable poet in Latin, English, and vernacular Scotch. His 'translation' in spirited Hudibrastic verse of some of Horace's Satires (1778) was rather a lively 'imitation;' it secured a literary success and the praise of Professors

a

Robertson, Reid, and Beattie, and in 1780 the author was made an LL.D. of Aberdeen. On his being elected a corresponding member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, he addressed to the society a poetical epistle in 'geud ald Scottis' phrase, printed in the first volume of their Transactions, along with dissertation on 'The Scoto-Saxon Dialect' which represents truer views than were then current, and translations of an eclogue of Virgil and an idyl of Theocritus in Scots. His Epistola Macaronica ad Fratrem (1790), on a great public dinner of the English Protestant Dissenters, is a clever and amusing performance; and Bardomachia, on a battle between two rival bards in a bookseller's shop (1800; when 'Peter Pindar' attacked Gifford in a shop in Piccadilly) was also macaronic, with an English version appended.

Linton, a Tweeddale Pastoral (1781), celebrated the birth of an heir to the house of Traquair, where Geddes had been tutor; the Carmen Seculare pro Gallica Gente (1790; followed by two others) praised the French Revolution. There were also A Norfolk Tale (1791), suggested by a journey to visit Lord Petre; L'Avocat du Diable, on a lawsuit against Peter Pindar; a doggerel parody of a Cambridge University sermon ; a painfully literal verse translation of the first book of the Iliad; and a mock-heroic poem in nine cantos on an electioneering affair in which the Bishop of Bangor took a conspicuous part, called The Battle of Bangor, or the Church's Triumph. Another of his clever translations in iambics was Ver Vert, or the Parrot of Nevers, from the French of Gresset, a poem afterwards translated by Father Prout. He used to be credited, on no sufficient grounds, with the authorship of the pathetic song Lewie Gordon, and of the broadly and vulgarly humorous Wee Wifukie, more probably the work of Alexander Watson, Lord Byron's Aberdeen tailor. Geddes was companionable and brilliant in conversation, full of anecdote, wit, and epigram; but he was apt to be trying to his friends by his indiscretions in speech and writing, and seemed too willing to startle people by the audacity of his paradoxes.

From the 'Dissertation on the Scoto-Saxon
Dialect.'

It is my opinion that those who, for almost a century past, have written in Scots, Allan Ramsay not excepted, have not duly discriminated the genuine Scottish idiom from its vulgarisms. They seem to have acted a similar part with certain pretended imitators of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, who fondly imagine that they are copying from those great models, when they only mimic their antique mode of spelling, their obsolete terms, and their irregular construction. Thus, to write Scottish poetry (for prose has been seldom attempted), nothing more was deemed necessary than to interlard the composition with a number of low words and trite proverbial phrases, in common use among the illiterate; and the more anomalous and farther removed from polite usage

those words and phrases were, so much the more apposite and eligible they were accounted. It was enough that they were not found in an English lexicon to give them a preference in the Scottish glossary; nor was it ever once considered that all words truly Anglo-Saxon were as truly Scoto-Saxon words, and that every exotic term which the English have borrowed from other languages, the Scots had an equal right to appropriate.

By the last sentence he claims an antihistoric liberty that allowed him to introduce in his own poems, as most of his contemporaries had done, along with indubitable Scotch words, as many English words and spellings as were found convenient -a practice which produces a highly artificial dialect; and like his contemporaries, too, Geddes permitted himself to manufacture Scotch words for English ones, obviously on erroneous analogies. Thus because the English o is in Scots often (not always) a, because the English home is in Scotch hame, therefore roam is rame, the city of Rome, Rame, and moment, mament! The two translations from Virgil and Theocritus were printed in a curious phonetic system of his own, which makes them all but unintelligible even to those familiar with old Scotch: thus, hame is hém; frae is fre; ease is èz; braid, brâd; thou, thû; praise, preis; wha, hua; while, huyl; you, ghù ; deein, dìan; laughs, lâkhs; power, pùr; and the Aberdeenshire value of the Scotch u or ui is given by è (=ee in English), muses becoming mèses.

In the Epistle to the Antiquaries he laments the low estate of the Muse of vernacular Scots; surveys her achievements in the past; and pays a tribute to Burns, remarkable even in the year (1792) when it was printed in the Transactions, which could obviously not have formed any part of the epistle as sent to the society immediately on Geddes's election in 1785, before the Kilmarnock edition had appeared and before Burns had been heard of in Edinburgh.

From the Epistle to the Society of Antiquaries. For tho' 'tis true that Mither-tongue

Has had the melancholy fate

To be neglekit by the great,
She still has fun' an open door
Amang the uncoruptit poor,
Wha be na weent to treat wi' scorn
A gentlewoman bred and born;
Bot bid her, thoch in tatters drest,
A hearty welcome to their best.

...

There aft on ben-maist bink she sits, And sharps the edge of cuintry wits, Wi' routh of gabby saws an' says, An' jokes an' jibes of uther days: That gi'e si'k gust to rustic sport And gar the langsome night leuk short.

At uther times in some warm neuk She to the cutchok ha'ds a beuk, And reids in si'k a magic tone The deeds that our forbeirs ha' done : Sa here, gif ye attention gi'e, Si'k ald warld wunders ye may see;

wont

bench

blazing fire