If there ever be matter of offence in the traditional ballad, it resides in the theme and not in the handling and language. Whatever be its faults, it never has the taint of the vulgar; it avoids the suggestive with the same instinct with which it avoids the vapid adjective; it is the antithesis of the modern music-hall ditty. The balladist and his men and women speak straight to the point, and call a spade a spade. 'Ye lee, ye lee, ye leear loud, Sae loud 's I hear ye lee,' and 'O wae betide you, ill woman, And an ill death may ye dee,' are among the familiar courtesies of colloquy. In the telling of his tale, the minstrel puts off no time in preluding or introductory passages. In a single verse or couplet he has dashed into the middle of his theme, and his characters are already in dramatic parley, exchanging words like sword-thrusts. Take the opening of the immortal _Dowie Dens of Yarrow_, where the place, time, circumstances, and actors in the fatal quarrel are put swiftly before us in four lines: 'Late at e'en, drinking the wine, And e'er they paid the lawin', They set a combat them between, To fight it e'er the dawin'.' Or still better example, the not less famous: 'The king sits in Dunfermline tower, Drinking the blood-red wine. Oh, where shall I find a skeely skipper To sail this ship o' mine.' Or of _Sir James the Rose_: 'O, hae ye nae heard o' Sir James the Rose, The young laird o' Balleichan, How he has slain a gallant squire Whose friends are out to take him!' Or in yet briefer space the whole materials of tragedy are given to us, as in that widely-known and multiform legend of the _Twa Sisters_ which Tennyson took as the basis of his _We were two daughters of one race_: 'He courted the eldest wi' glove and wi' ring, Binnorie, O Binnorie! But he loved the youngest aboon a' thing, By the bonnie mill dams o' Binnorie.' Sometimes a brilliant or glowing picture is called up before our eyes by a stroke or two; as-- 'The boy stared wild like a grey goshawk,' or 'The mantle that fair Annie wore It skinkled in the sun'; or 'And in at her bower window The moon shone like a gleed'; or 'O'er his white banes when they are bare The wind shall sigh for evermair.' Or, to rise to the height of pity, despair, and terror to which the ballad strains of Scotland have reached, what master of modern realism has surpassed in trenchant and uncompromising power the passages in _Clerk Saunders_?-- 'Then he drew forth his bright long brand, And slait it on the strae, And through Clerk Saunders' body He 's gart cauld iron gae'; and, 'She looked between her and the wa', And dull and drumly were his een.'