The _Gude and Godlie Ballates_ of the Wedderburns had been deliberately produced and circulated by the Reformers, with the avowed intention, as Sheriff Mackay says, of 'driving the old amatory and romantic ballads out of the field, and substituting spiritual songs, set to the same tunes--much as revivalists of the present day have adopted older secular melodies.' But nothing enduring is to be done, in the field of poetry, by mere dint of determination and good intent. If the older songs succumbed for a time to the new spiritual melodies, we may feel sure that it was not without a struggle. On the Borders and in the Highlands, the Original Adam asserted himself, in deed and in song, long after the more sober mind of Fife, Lanark, and the West Country had given itself up to the solution of the new theological and ecclesiastical problems which time and change had brought to the nation. The Reformers complained that the fighting clans of the Western Marches could only with difficulty be induced to turn their thoughts from the hereditary business of the quarrel of the Kingdoms to take up instead the quarrel of the Kirk. Even so late as the Covenanting period, Richard Cameron found it hard work 'to set the fire of hell to the tails' of the Annandale men. They came to the field meetings 'out of mere curiosity, to see a minister preach in a tent, and people sit on the ground'--in a spirit not unlike that in which the people used to gather at _Peblis to the Play_ or _Christ's Kirk on the Green_, to mingle a pinch of piety and priestly Moralities with a bellyful of carnal delights. It was not until the preacher had denounced them as 'offspring of thieves and robbers,' that some of them began to 'get a merciful cast.' This, too, changed in the course of time, and having once caught fire, the religious enthusiasm of the marchmen kindled into a brilliant glow, or smouldered with a fervent heat. They flung themselves into the front of Kirk controversy, as they did also into more peaceable pursuits, such as sheep-farming and tweed manufacture, with the same hearty energy which aforetime was expended upon raids into Cumberland and Northumberland.