When we come to consider the internal evidence, what do we find? We find that these poems, in common with those published by Percy, are composed in a style of romantic beauty and elevation distinguishing them from all other remains of Scottish traditionary poetry. They are quite unlike the palpably old historical ballads, such as the _Battle of Otterbourne_ and the _Raid of the Reidswire_. They are unlike the Border ballads, such as _Dick o' the Cow_, and _Jock o' the Syde_, commemorating domestic events of the latter part of the sixteenth century. They are strikingly unlike the _Burning of Frendraught_, the _Bonny House o' Airly_, and the _Battle of Bothwell Bridge_, contemporaneous metrical chronicles of events of the seventeenth century. Not less different are they from a large mass of ballads, which have latterly been published by Mr Peter Buchan and others, involving romantic incidents, it is true, or eccentricities in private life, but in such rude and homely strains as speak strongly of a plebeian origin. In the ballads here brought under question, the characters are usually persons of condition, generally richly dressed, often well mounted, and of a dignified bearing towards all inferior people. The page, the nurse, the waiting-woman, the hound, the hawk, and other animals connected with the pageantry of high life, are prominently introduced. Yet the characters and incidents are alike relieved from all clear connection with any particular age: they may be said to form a world of their own, of no particular era, wherein the imagination of the reader may revel, as that of the author has done. It may be allowably said, there is a tone of _breeding_ throughout these ballads, such as is never found in the productions of rustic genius. One marked feature--the pathos of deep female affections--the sacrifice and the suffering which these so often involve--runs through nearly the whole. References to religion and religious ceremonies and fanes are of the slightest kind. We hear of bells being rung and mass sung, but only to indicate a time of day. Had they been old ballads continually changing in diction and in thought, as passed down from one reciter to another, they could not have failed to involve some considerable trace of the intensely earnest religious life of the seventeenth century; but not the slightest tincture of this enthusiastic feeling appears in them, a defect the more marked, as they contain abundant allusion to the superstitions which survived into the succeeding time of religious indifference, and indeed some of their best _effects_ rest in a dexterous treatment of these weird ideas. There is but one exception to what has been observed on the obscurity of the epoch pointed to for the incidents--the dresses, properties, and decorations, are sometimes of a modern cast. The writer--if we may be allowed to speculate on a single writer--seems to have been unable to resist an inclination to indulge