Burns had an inimitable ear for ballad feeling and for ballad rhythm and music. But, except for some vigorous satiric, political, and bacchanalian chants of his own, and the recasting of a few of the old-fashioned and lively rhymes like _The Carl o' Kellyburn Braes_ that were not out of the need of being cleaned and furbished to please a more fastidious age, he could scarcely be called a ballad writer. His special sphere in the restoration and preservation of the old was in lyrical poetry. What Robert Burns achieved for the songs, however, Walter Scott did for the ballads and prose legends of Scotland. The appearance of the _Border Minstrelsy_ makes 1802 the red-letter year in the later annals of the Scottish Ballad. More than twenty years before, the little lame boy, with the good blood of two Border clans, the Scotts and the Rutherfords, in his veins, had lain on the braes of Sandyknowe, and had drunk in through all his senses the history and romance of the Borderland. He had heard from the 'aged hind,' or at the 'winter hearth,' the old tales of woe and mirth; wild conjurings of superstition or real events that, although nearer then by a hundred years than they are to-day, had already been magnified, distorted, glorified in passing through the medium of the popular memory. His dreaming fancy did the rest. Looking from his point of vantage across the fair valley of the Tweed to the blue chain of Cheviot, every notch in which was 'a gate and passage of the thief,' every fold below it, the site of some battle or story of old, 'Over Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood, And all down Teviotdale,' he was able to repeople the scene as it was when ballad romance was not only written but lived: 'I marvelled as the aged hind With some strange tale bewitched my mind, Of forayers, who with headlong force Down from that strength had spurred their horse. . . . . . And ever, by the winter hearth, Old tales I heard of woe or mirth, Of lovers' slights, of ladies charms, Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms; Of patriot battles won of old By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold.' There could not have been a more 'meet nurse for a poetic child' than the green slopes, the black rocks, and the grey keep, reflected in its still 'lochan,' of Scott's ancestral home at Sandyknowe. Dryburgh, Melrose, and Kelso, are hidden in the valley below. The huge square tower of Hume--'Willie Wastle's' castle--stands on the same sky-line as Smailholm peel itself, keeping guard along with it over the passes and marches of the ancient Scottish Kingdom. Wrangholm is near by, where St. Cuthbert dreamed and played boyish sports before he set forth on his mission to christianise Northumbria. Bemerside, the Broom o' the Cowdenknowes, and the Rhymer's Tower are not far off; Huntly Bank is also where True Thomas lay alone listening to the throstle and the jay, under the Eildon tree, and