local interest. His father, also Dr. Alexander Pennycuik of Newhall, and the representative of the old family of Pennycuik of Pennycuik (i. e., the Gowk's Hill), was surgeon to General John Bannier in the Swedish wars under the great Gustavus Adolphus, and surgeon also to the auxiliary Scots army in England during the troubled period that preceded the Restoration. The father married Janet Murray, the heiress of Romanno, leaving a son, the poet, and died after the Revolution of 1688. This son, the author of the Description of Tweeddale (1715), was born in 1652, and died in 1722. He was buried in the churchyard of Newlands by the side of his father. Dr. Pennycuik was assisted in his Description of Tweeddale by John Forbes, who succeeded him in the estate of Newhall. Pennycuik was a friend of Allan Ramsay; and it has been said that it was to Pennycuik that Ramsay owed the plot of The Gentle Shepherd. Dr. Pennycuik's poems, and their general characteristics, are well known. They are not without a certain amount of humour; and they are often very coarse in portraiture and suggestion the taint of the times; yet they give a true, curious, often pointed, description of the rural life and manners of the period of the Restoration and the Revolution. contain also many interesting references to names and families in Tweeddale, which now, alas! have ceased to be represented in the district; for, with one or two exceptions, the really old families of Tweeddale do not now hold the lands of the county; their memory has, in a great measure, They perished; and with their names have passed away many ennobling historical associations. But in Dr. Pennycuik's poems, though he was in the habit of traversing Tweeddale, as a practising surgeon, we look in vain for any trace of feeling suggested by the scenery of the district in which he lived. There is not a single characteristic natural feature of Tweeddale in all his poems. In his lines entitled To my Friend inviting him to the Country, where we might expect some local description, all we get is this:— "Sir, fly the smoke and clamour of the town, Breathe country air, and see the farms cut down ; Dr. Pennycuik obviously represented that style of Scottish poetry, which contented itself with noting the manners of the time, mixing observation with shrewd judgment and sense; but feeling nothing of nature, and quite incapable of touching the heart by pathos, or filling the soul with imagery. A small inn that stood near Newlands Kirk, not far from Romanno, the residence of Dr. Pennycuik. + Poems, p. 414. 441 XIII. BORDER POETRY-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. THE Earl of Stirling, Drummond of Hawthornden, Aytoun of Kinaldie, died before the middle of the seventeenth century. From that date down to the first quarter of the eighteenth, there appeared no Scottish poet of any public note. In the Lowland valleys and glens there had been heard during that period, and even long before it, scattered strains of Ballad and Song, many of them full of fine, simple, and truthful feeling. These were caught up and sung in the home circles and at the firesides of the Lowland farmhouses and shepherds' cots. But there was, as yet, no attempt The spirit that was in the older at any single great poem. ballads and songs had not yet been concentrated and distilled into one pure continuous melody. James Watson, in his Collection of Scots Poems Ancient and Modern, published in three parts from 1706 to 1711, had drawn attention to some of those floating songs and ballads. And the Evergreen and Tea Table Miscellany of Allan Ramsay-both published in 1724-further enhanced the interest in this line of literature. It was diligently cultivated by subsequent collectors. Percy's Reliques, which referred to both sides of the Border, in 1765 opened up the widest field of Ballad literature as yet disclosed. Percy was followed by David Herd, with his Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, in 1769. Then there came Evans' Old Ballads, 1777; Pinkerton's Scottish Tragic Ballads, 1781, and his Select Scottish Ballads, 1783. Ritson began to publish books of songs in 1783, and continued down to 1795. James Johnson, in The Scots' Musical Museum, 1787, greatly aided the work; Burns contributing new songs. J. G. Dalzell, in 1801, gave Scottish Poems of the Sixteenth Century. Walter Scott, in 1802, gave the first two volumes of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The third volume appeared in 1803. This was a work second in importance and immediate influence only to that of Percy himself. In 1806, Robert Jamieson gave to the world his Popular Ballads and Songs, and pointed to the large Scandinavian element in our Ballad literature. Since then we find on the roll of distinguished collectors and editors, Finlay, David Laing, C. K. Sharpe, Maidment, Utterson, Buchan, Allan Cunningham, Kinloch, Motherwell, R. Chambers, Peter Cunningham, Aytoun, Chappell, Child, etc. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the best representative of the stilted artificialism of his time, sneered, as was to be expected, at the labours of Percy. But the resuscitated ballads and songs were true to natural feeling and to the primary and per manent human emotions; and, though they were but the material of a literature, they formed the well-spring of a new and free literary development, which, while it yields nothing in the power of imaginative creation to the old, and nothing really in point of true artistic perfection, far surpasses it in the freshness and the living power which truthful delineation of the facts of man's spiritual nature, and of the aspects of the world around him, alone can inspire. But it was an original work which, in the early part of last century, first disclosed to the world the wealth of beauty in Scottish scenery, and the naturalness, simplicity, and pathos that lay close at hand in Scottish rural life. This was The Gentle Shepherd, published in 1725. The feeling for the natural scenery of Scotland had been growing in susceptible hearts in this first quarter of the century. James Thomson, the son of the Minister of Ednam, whose boyhood had been passed at Southdean, high up among the wild and striking hills which slope down to the picturesque and beautifully wooded valley of the Jed, carried with him to England haunting impressions of winter storms which had swept the Carter Fell, and passed over rugged Ruberslaw. And, a year after The Gentle Shepherd, there appeared Winter, a poem, followed in 1727 by Summer. Thomson dared to be true to the face of nature, and to make the delineation of it the all-sufficient object of poetry. And it enhances the merit of the poet that in this, a new form of poetic art, he was thoroughly successful, and influenced the |