The English songs, fine as they are from a technical standpoint, have no very great emotional range. A few, like the famous ‘Willow’ song, strike a deep note of sorrow, but by far the greater portion are lively songs of the open-air or of festal gatherings. They reveal a vigorous sense of touch, a whole-hearted joy in the primitive feelings of the human body, in the invigorating English out-of-doors. They are clear-cut and literal--recalling the type of life and feeling which we associate with ‘the roast beef of old England.’ Their naïveté is that of an exuberant joy in the commonplace joys of life. We may mention such songs as ‘The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies, O!’ and ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ for their inspiriting physical vigor. Such songs as ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ (old tune), the Wassail song from Sussex, or the Sheep-shearing Song from Somerset, are worthy of much study as fine examples of the old English use of modal scales. The Scotch songs, of all true folk-songs the world over, have for many decades been the most familiar. No nation, except perhaps Russia, has been more vigorously creative in its folk-music than Scotland. Many excellent judges regard the Scotch folk-music as the finest in the world. It is probably quite as ancient as any. It entered into the lives of the Scotch people from the earliest times, when the Highland bards sang their praises to little tribal chieftains or narrated in rude verse the battles between one clan and another. There is a very old harper’s tune in existence, probably much modified in the course of the centuries but still eloquent of antiquity, which suggests the majesty of the days gone by. (It may be found under its modern title, ‘Harp of the Highlands.’) A large proportion of these tunes have lost their original words and taken on new ones. Robert Burns stimulated the process by writing words of his own (among them some of the greatest of his poems) for well-known melodies. The loss of the old texts, which were often crude or indecent, is, on the whole, of little moment from the artistic standpoint, especially since Burns, one of the finest folk-spirits of all ages, wrote words which fit the mouths of the people like their own. Perhaps, too, his words, as in the case of ‘Scots Wha Hae,’ helped to keep the old tunes alive and popular. Burns is one of the rare instances of a conscious artist who has been able to meddle with folk-art without making himself ridiculous.