It is quite useless to call this a historical ballad. There was a reference, perhaps, in the author’s mind, to the battle of Largs in Ayrshire, fought by the Scots in 1263, in the reign of Alexander III., against the invading King Haco of Norway; and there is a Fairly Castle on a hill near Largs which may have yielded a suggestion and a name. But, in truth, any old Scottish reign, and any Norse invasion, will do for time and basis, and the ballad is essentially of the romantic kind, a story snatched from an ideal antique, and appealing to the pure poetic imagination. A battle is flung in; but what rivets our interest is the hero Hardyknute, a Scottish warrior with a Danish name, and that stately castle of his, somewhere on the top of a hill, in which he dwelt so splendidly with his lady, his four sons, and their sister Fairly fair, till he was called once more to war, and in which there was some ghastly desolation before his return. Such as it is, we shall all agree, I think, with Gray, Warton, Scott, and the rest of the best critics, in admiring the fragment. It has that something in it which we call _genius_. It seems strange now that any critic could ever have taken the ballad for a really old one, to be dated from the sixteenth century or earlier. Apart from the trick of old spelling, and affectation of the antique in a word or two, the phraseology, the manner, the cadence, the style of the Scotch employed, are all of about the date of the first publication of the ballad, the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The phrase “Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute,” and the phrase “And all the warrior fled,” are decisive; and, while there might be room for the supposition that some old legend suggested the subject to the author, the general cast of the whole forbids the idea that it is merely a version of some transmitted original.