may fairly be said to have come off
victor eleven or twelve years ago.

Discovery of the sources of Scotch
ballads is as troublesome a business as
discovery of sources of the Nile. Hitherto
nobody has gone further up than to a
mutilated volume in the Auchinleck
Library, written by John Asloan about the
year fifteen hundred and fifteen. It
includes pieces of good old Scottish verse—
Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice,
Holland's Book of the Howlet, the Book of the
Seven Sages, and a fragment of the Priests
of Peebles, besides prose writing.

Then there was amiable Sir Richard
Maitland— after whom, in these later days,
a club for the preservation of old literature
has been named. He was about
nineteen years old when John Asloan was
copying verse into his manuscript book.
Maitland became a lawyer, an Extraordinary
Lord of Session; at the age of
sixty-five, when he had become blind, an
Ordinary Lord of Session, and, a year
later, Lord Privy Seal. Though he kept
the last-named office only five years,
resigning it then to his second son, he sat on
the bench till he was eighty-eight years
old, and lived to be ninety. His wife died
on the day of his burial. During the last
thirty years of his long, cheerful life, Sir
Richard solaced himself in his blindness
with the making of verses. Verse written
upon him by Thomas Hudson, at his
death, bade others take "manly Maitland"
for a pattern, and live as he had done.

With love to God, religion, law, and right.
For as he was of virtue lucent light,
Of ancient blood, of noble sprite and name,
Beloved of God and every gracious wight,
So died he old, deserving worthy fame;
A rare example set for us to see
What we have been, now are, and ought to be.

Two manuscript volumes containing
verse by various Scottish poets with his
own, are in the Pepysian Library of
Magdalene College, Cambridge. One of these
volumes is in the handwriting of Sir
Richard's daughter Mary. Among pieces
special to the Maitland manuscript are
Peebles to the Play, Douglas's King Heart,
and Dunbar's Tale of Two Married Women
and the Widow.

The George Bannatyne, after whom
Scott named the Bannatyne Club, was the
seventh child in a family of three-and-
twenty, and he was born in the year fifteen
'forty-five. He was bred to trade; but it
happened that, when he was three-and-twenty
years old, work was stopped, men were
secluded by a visitation of the plague, and he
occupied his leisure time in copying into a
book —his manuscript covers eight hundred
closely-written pages— the best collection of
the Scottish poetry known in his time.
Bannatyne went into business on his own
account at the age of twenty-seven. At the
age of thirty-three, he was entered as a
merchant and guild-brother. He married,
traded, lent money, lost his only son and his
wife, married his daughter to a George
Foulis, and gave or bequeathed his
manuscript book of poems to the Foulises. In
seventeen hundred and twelve, George
Bannatyne's great-grandson, William Foulis of
Woodhall, gave the book to the Honourable
Mr. William Carmichael, an advocate;
and in seventeen 'seventy- two, John, third
earl of Hyndford, deposited it in the library
of the Faculty of Advocates at Edinburgh.
Like Sir Richard Maitland, Bannatyne
produced verse of his own. But the great
service done by these two men was in
copying out verse that was worth copying,
and of which a considerable part would,
but for them, have been entirely lost.

It was chiefly from the Bannatyne Manuscript,
lent to him by Mr. Carmichael, that
Allan Ramsay, in seventeen 'twenty-four,
drew the materials for his Evergreen:
Scots poems wrote by the Ingenious
before 1600. Among them are the Battle of
Harlaw, and the true old ballad of Johnnie
Armstrang, never before printed. At the
end of the second of the two small volumes
of the Evergreen, is a version of Hardyknute,
a Fragment, which had first
appeared five years earlier as a separate
publication in twelve pages folio. In Allan
Ramsay's version a more antique air was
given to the language, and there were
three additional verses. In seventeen 'forty
this ballad fragment of Hardyknute was
modernised and published at London, as
the First Canto of an Epic Poem, with
general remarks and notes. One of the
general remarks was that the piece could
only be the work of an author highly
smitten with the fury of a poetical genius.
"Far be it from me," wrote the editor,
who was probably Mr. John Moncrieff,
"far be it from me to compare Hardyknute
with the matchless Iliad, but I will
venture to say, that our author was
undoubtedly blest with a large portion of the
fiery spirit of Homer. . . . There is a
grandeur, a majesty of sentiment, diffused
through the whole; a true sublime, which
nothing can surpass." There can be little
doubt that the second Homer was a lady,
born in sixteen 'seventy-seven, as Elizabeth