In _Johnie Armstrong o' Gilnockie_, _The Border Widow_, and _The Sang of the Outlaw Murray_, also--in which we should perhaps see the reflection, in the popular mind of the day, of the efforts of James IV. and James V. to preserve order on the Borders--it is on the side of the freebooter rather than of the king and the law that our sympathies are enlisted. Indeed your balladist, like Allan Breck Stewart, was never a bigoted partisan of the law. There is ample proof in the writings of Sir David Lyndsay and others that in the first half of the sixteenth century a number of the Scottish ballads that have come down to us were already current and in high favour among the people, although they have not reached us in the shape in which they were then sung or recited. Long before this period, however, and on both sides of the Border, the status of the minstrel or ballad-maker--for in old times the two went together, or rather were blent in one, like the words and music--had suffered sad declension. There was no longer question of royal harpers or troubadours, as Alfred the Great and as Richard the Lion Heart had been in their hour of need; or even of bards and musicians held in high favour and honour by king and court, like Taillefer or Blondel. 'King's Minstrels' there were on both sides of Tweed, as is found from Exchequer and other records. But we suspect that these were players and singers of courtly and artificial lays. True, a poet of such genuine gifts as Dunbar had gone to London as the 'King's singer,' and had recited verses at a Lord Mayor's banquet that had tickled the ears of the worshipful aldermen and livery. But these could hardly have been the natural and spontaneous notes of the Muse of Scottish ballad poetry. The written and printed verse of the period had got overlaid and smothered by the flowers of ornament. As a French student of our literature has said, 'The roses of these poets are splendid, but too full blown; they have expended all their strength, all their beauty, all their fragrance; no store of youth is left in them; they have given it all away.' As has happened repeatedly in our literary history, simplicity in art, as a source both of strength and of beauty, was almost forgotten; or its tradition was only remembered among the humble and nameless balladists. The only ones, says M. Jusserand, who escape the touch of decadence, are 'those unknown singers, chiefly in the region of the Scottish border, who derive their inspiration directly from the people'; who leave books alone and 'remodel ballads that will be remade after them, and come down to us stirring and touching,' like that ride of the Percy and the Douglas which, spite of his classic tastes, stirred the heart of the author of the _Art of Poesy_ 'like the sound of a trumpet.'