_The Jolly Beggar_ is a variation of the same tale from the book of the moonlight rovings of the 'Guidman o' Ballengeich,' with the same vigour and lively humour, and with the bloom of the old ballad minstrelsy upon it besides: 'He took his horn from his side, And blew baith loud and shrill, And four-and-twenty belted knights Came skipping o'er the hill. And he took out his little knife, Loot a' his duddies fa'; And he stood the brawest gentleman That was amang them a'.' Other excellent specimens of old Scottish humour have come down to us in ballad form, some of them made more familiar to our ears in modernised versions or paraphrases in which, along with the roughnesses, much of the force and quaint drollery of the originals has been smoothed away. Of such is _The Wyf of Auchtermuchty_, a Fife ballad, full of local colour and character, the production of 'Sir John Moffat,' a sixteenth century priest, who loved a merry jest, and of whom we know barely more than the name. With so many other precious fragments of our national poetry, it is preserved in the collection of George Bannatyne, the namefather of the Bannatyne Club, who beguiled the tedium of his retirement in time of plague by copying down the popular verse of his day. It is the progenitor of _John Grumlie_, and gives us a lively series of pictures of the housewifery and the husbandry, as well as the average human nature of the time, class, and locality to which it belongs. The proverb, 'The more the haste the less the speed,' has never been more humorously illustrated than in the troubles of the lazy guidman who 'weel could tipple oot a can, and neither lovit hunger nor cauld,' and who fancied that he could more easily play the housewife's part: 'Then to the kirn that he did stour, And jumbled at it till he swat; When he had jumblit ane lang hour, The sorrow crap of butter he gat. Albeit nae butter he could get, Yet he was cumbered wi' the kirn; And syne he het the milk ower het, That sorrow spark o' it wad yearn.' Of the same racy domestic type are the still popular, _The Barrin' o' the Door, Hame cam' oor Guidman at e'en_, to which, with needless ingenuity, it has been sought to give a Jacobite significance, and _Allan o' Maut_, an allegorical account of the genesis of 'barley bree.' Of this last, also, Bannatyne has noted a version which was probably in vogue in the first half of the sixteenth century. Even the hand of Burns, who has produced, in _John Barleycorn_, the final form of the ballad, could not give us more vigorous and trenchant Scots than is contained in the verses of this venerable rhyme in Jamieson's collection: 'He first grew green, syne grew he white, Syne a' men thocht that he was ripe; And wi' crookit gullies and hafts o' tree, They 've hew'd him down, right dochtilie. . . . . .