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Surely he was better employed in plying the trades of tinker and smith than in having recourse to vice, in running after milk-maids, for example. "Nine arts have I, all noble; I play at chess so free, At ravelling runes I'm ready, At books and smithery; I'm skilled o'er ice at skimming On skates, I shoot and row, And few at harping match me, Or minstrelsy, I trow."
Dryburgh lies amid the scenes in which Scott not only took such peculiar delight, but which furnished him themes both for his poems and romances, and which were rich in those old songs and narratives of border feats and raids which he has preserved in his Border Minstrelsy.
Leaning with no light weight upon his guest's arm, the lover of ancient minstrelsy poured into the youth's ear a strain of eulogy, rather eloquent than coherent, upon the scene they had just witnessed. "What," cried his majesty in an enthusiastic tone, "what can be so truly regal as our state? Can any man control us? Are we not above all laws? Are we not the most despotic of kings?
His songs, so soft and tender, and yet so redolent of manliness and hope, inspired the ambition to compose a minstrelsy as wild and vigorous as themselves. They were read and learned and sung with an avidity and pride heretofore unknown. The monster meetings were long a design of Thomas Davis, John Dillon and the present writer.
No words can express the excitement which this rough minstrelsy marred as it is by our poor translation from the Romance-tongue in which it was chanted produced amongst the Norman guests; less perhaps, indeed, the song itself, than the recognition of the minstrel; and as he closed, from more than a hundred voices came the loud murmur, only subdued from a shout by the royal presence, "Taillefer, our Norman Taillefer!"
There were then not many sports or amusements wherewith a sorrowing maiden could be diverted; for the temper of England's Rulers was against vain pastimes and junketings. The Maypoles had been pulled down; the players whipped and banished; the bear and bull baitings, and even the mere harmless minstrelsy and ballad-singing of the streets, all rigorously pulled down.
The literary history of "The Death of Featherstonhaugh" naturally excited uneasiness about the touching ballad of "Barthram's Dirge," also contributed to the Minstrelsy as the fruit of the industrious investigations of Surtees. Most readers will remember this: "They shot him dead at the Nine-Stone Rig, Beside the headless cross, And they left him lying in his blood, Upon the moor and moss."
The "descent into hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes off the mediæval horror with the mediæval reverence, and the knight who achieves the quest spends his years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse with fair women.
Everywhere there was laughing, singing, a merry minstrelsy of mouth-organs. The jollity in my own part of the line was doubtless a picture in little of what was happening elsewhere. We were anticipating the exciting times just at hand. Mac, who was blown to pieces by a shell a few hours later, was dancing in and out of the ranks singing, "Oh! Won't it be joyful! Oh! Won't it be joyful!"
While she was wondering at this unwonted minstrelsy, there came a silence, and could she believe her ears? it certainly was Una's clear low contralto softly singing a bar or two from the window. Then once more silence and then again the strange manly voice, faintly chaunting from the leafy abyss. With a strange wild feeling of suspicion and terror, Alice glided to the window.
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