in description of the external furnishings of the heroes and heroines, or rather, perhaps, has been desirous of making out _effect_ from these particulars; but the finery of the court of Charles II. is the furthest point reached in the retrospect--although, I must admit, this is in general treated with a vagueness that helps much to conceal the want of learning. Another point of great importance in the matter of internal evidence, is the isolatedness of these ballads in respect of English traditionary literature. The Scottish muse has not always gone hand in hand with the English in point of time, but she has done so in all other respects. Any literature we had from the beginning of the seventeenth century downwards, was always sensibly tinged by what had immediately before been in vogue in the south. Nor is it easy to see how a people occupying part of the same island, and speaking essentially the same language, should have avoided this communion of literary taste; but the ballads in question are wholly unlike any English ballads. Look over Percy, Evans, or Mr Collier's suite of _Roxburghe Ballads_, giving those which were popular in London during the seventeenth century, and you find not a trace of the style and manner of these Scottish romantic ballads. Neither, it would appear, had one of them found its way into popularity in England before the time of Percy; for, had it been otherwise, he would have found them either in print or in the mouths of the people.[29] [29] Robert Jamieson found in the _Koempe Viser_, a Danish collection of ballads published in 1695, one resembling the Scottish ballad of _Fair Annie_ (otherwise called _Lady Jane_), and on this ground he became convinced that many of our traditionary ballads were of prodigious antiquity, though they had been intermediately subjected to many alterations. Mr Jamieson's belief seems remarkably ill supported, and as it has never obtained any adherents among Scottish ballad editors, I feel entitled to pass it over with but this slight notice. Upon all of these considerations, I have arrived at the conclusion, that the high-class romantic ballads of Scotland are not ancient compositions--are not older than the early part of the eighteenth century--and are mainly, if not wholly, the production of one mind. Whose was this mind, is a different question, on which no such confident decision may for the present be arrived at; but I have no hesitation in saying that, from the internal resemblances traced on from _Hardyknute_ through _Sir Patrick Spence_ and _Gil Morrice_ to the others, there seems to me a great _likelihood_ that the whole were the composition of the authoress of that poem--namely, Elizabeth Lady Wardlaw of Pitreavie.