Away in the North, what we may call the ballad-yielding age, if it came later and had a less brilliant flowering time, endured longer. They had a fighting 'Border' there that lasted until the '45. The Gordons, of their own hand, have furnished a ballad literature as rich, if not quite so choice, as that of the Douglases themselves. _Glenlogie_ and _Geordie_ were of the 'gay Gordons,' and had the 'sprightly turn' that is held to be an inheritance of the race. _Edom o' Gordon_--Adam of Auchindoun--did his ruthless work in 1571. It was in one of their interminable quarrels, begun on the farther side of Spey, that, in the year 1592, the _Bonnie Earl o' Moray_ fell so far away as Donibristle, in Fife. The mystery of the _Burning of Frendraught_ took place in 1630; the tragedy of _Mill o' Tiftie's Annie_--one of the few dramas in which the balladist is content to take his characters from humble life--is dated, from the tombstone in Fyvie churchyard, in the year following, and is placed in Gordon country, and under the shadow of the Setons that became Gordons. _The Bonnie House o' Airlie_ treats of one of the incidents of the Civil War, and, for a wonder, in the true ballad fashion; and it turns, as the balladists are apt to do, a crooked and misliking look on the 'gleyed Argyll'; while that fine Deeside ballad, _The Baron o' Bracklay_, deals with an encounter between Farquharsons and Gordons in the period of the Restoration. After this, however, we hardly meet with a ballad having the antique ring about it, even on the Highland Line. The fine gold had become dim, or mixed with later clay. The mood and condition of the nation had changed. The 'end of the auld sang' of the Scottish Parliament was the end also of the ballad. There was an outburst of national feeling, expressed in song and music, over the Jacobite risings of last century; Allan Ramsay rose like a star at its beginning, and Burns shone out gloriously towards its close. But the expression was lyrical, and not narrative. The ballad of the old type no longer grew naturally and freshly by edge of copse and shaw. The collector had his eye upon it, and was already collecting, comparing, and classifying--and, what was worse, correcting, restoring, and improving. CHAPTER III BALLAD STRUCTURE AND BALLAD STYLE 'Strike on, strike on, Glenkindie, O' thy harping do not blinne, For every stroke goes o'er thy harp, It stounds my heart within.' _Glenkindie._