The traditions of this part of the country, and of perhaps every other, may be divided into three great classes. Those of the first and simplest class are strictly local; they record real events, and owe their chief interest to their delineations of character. Those of the second are pure inventions. They are formed mostly after a set of models furnished perhaps by the later bards, and are common--though varying in different places according to the taste of the several imitators who first introduced them, or the chance alterations which they afterwards received--to almost every district of Scotland. The traditions of the third and most complex class are combinations of the two others, with in some instances a dash of original invention, and in others a mixture of that superstitious credulity which can misconceive as ingeniously as the creative faculty can invent. The value of stories of the first class is generally in proportion to their truth, and there is a simple test by which we may ascertain the degree of credit proper to be attached to them. There is a habit of minute attention almost peculiar to the common people (in no class, at least, is it more perfect than in the commonest), which leads them to take a kind of microscopic survey of every object suited to interest them; and hence their narratives of events which have really occurred are as strikingly faithful in all the minor details as Dutch paintings. Not a trait of character, not a shade of circumstance, is suffered to escape. Nay more, the _dramatis personæ_ of their little histories are almost invariably introduced to tell their own stories in their own language. And though this be the easiest and lowest style of narrative, yet to invent in this style is so far from being either low or easy, that with the exception of Shakspere, and one or two more, I know not any who have excelled in it. Nothing more common than those faithful memories which can record whole conversations, and every attendant circumstance, however minute; nothing less so than that just conception of character and vigour of imagination, which can alone construct a natural dialogue, or depict, with the nice pencil of truth, a scene wholly fictitious. And thus though any one, even the weakest, can mix up falsehoods with the truths related in this way, not one of a million can make them amalgamate. The iron and clay, to use Bacon’s illustration, retain their separate natures, as in the feet of the image, and can as easily be distinguished.