A whole unuttered tragedy of love, treachery, and murder lies back of these stanzas. This method of narration may be partly accounted for by the fact that the story treated was commonly some local country-side legend of family feud or unhappy passion, whose incidents were familiar to the ballad-singer's audience and were readily supplied by memory. One theory holds that the story was partly told and partly sung, and that the links 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]