It is otherwise with True Thomas, as it was with Merlin before him, and with all the men, wise and foolish, who have once yielded to the glamourie of the Elfin Queen and others of her type and sex. The Rhymer of Ercildoune was probably only a man more learned and far-seeing than others of his time. His reputation for Second Sight may rest upon a basis similar to that which led the mediaeval mind to dub Virgil a magician, and to recognise the wizard in Sir Michael Scott, the grave ambassador and counsellor of kings, and, at a later date, enabled the profane vulgar to discover a baronet of Gordonstoun to be a warlock, for no better reason than because, with the encouragement of that most indefatigable of ballad collectors, Samuel Pepys, he gave his attention to the perfecting of sea-pumps for the royal navy. Whether the Rhymer's expedition to Fairyland was feigned by the balladist to explain his soothsaying; or whether, rather, his prophecies were invented as evidence of the perilous gift he brought back with him from Elfland, research will never be able to tell us. But the journey True Thomas made on the fateful day when, lying on Huntlie bank, 'A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e; And there he saw a ladye bright Come riding down by the Eildon Tree,' was one that many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a lurid peep into Hades: 'It was mirk, mirk nicht and nae starlicht, And they waded through red bluid to the knee; For a' the bluid that 's shed on earth Rins through the springs o' that countrie.' The Palace of Truth as well as of Error is built on fairy ground; and there is a foretaste of Gilbertian humour in the dismay with which the Rhymer hears that he is to be endowed with 'the tongue that can never lie.' '"My tongue is mine ain," True Thomas said; "A goodlie gift you would give me; I neither dought to buy or sell At fair or tryst where I may be; I dought neither speak to prince or peer Nor ask of grace from fair ladye."' But from his seven years' wanderings in fairyland, that speed like a day upon earth, he wakens up as from a dream, and again he is laid on Huntlie bank, in sight of the cleft Eildon.