Walter Scott, also, was born in the latter half of 1771. Burns was then fifteen years of age, 'beardless, young, and blate,' but already, as he wrote to the 'guidwife of Wauchope-house,' with
'The elements o' sang In formless jumble right an' wrang Wild floating in his brain.'
Already the wish was 'strongly heaving the breast' of that young Ayrshire ploughman,
'That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake Some usefu' plan or beuk could make, Or sing a sang at least.'
Galloway had by this time taken up again its rough old lyre. Away in the North--in the Mearns and in Buchan, old homes of the ballad--the Reverend John Skinner had written his genial songs of _Tullochgorum_, _The Ewie wi' the Crookit Horn_ and the rest, that seem to thrill with the piercing and stirring notes of fiddle and pipes, being moved thereto, as he has told us, by his daughters, 'who, being all good singers, plagued me for words to their favourite tunes.' Fergusson was celebrating, in an old stanza, shortly to be made world-famous, the high jinks on Leith Links. Everywhere, from the Moray Firth to the Cheviots, and from the East Neuk of Fife to Maidenkirk, there were preludings for the new and splendid burst of Scottish song, that by and by broke from the banks of Ayr and Doon. The service rendered by the genius of Burns in quickening and purifying Scottish song and ballad poetry has often been acknowledged. It was, indeed, beyond all measure and praise. But recognition, has not, perhaps, been made so fully and frequently of what our 'King of Song' owed to the popular poetry of country people and elder times--and notably to the ballads--that have been handed down by memory rather than books. His was not an isolated phenomenon, blazing up meteor-like without visible cause or prompting. His poetry is rather the culminating effect of an impulse that had been making itself felt for generations. It was like one of those grand bale-fires of the days of peril and watching, whose sudden gleam made the blood stir in the veins, and turned men's faces skywards, but which caught its message from distant points of light that to us seem almost swallowed in the surrounding darkness.
Burns had an inimitable ear for ballad feeling and for ballad rhythm and music. But, except for some vigorous satiric, political, and bacchanalian chants of his own, and the recasting of a few of the old-fashioned and lively rhymes like _The Carl o' Kellyburn Braes_ that were not out of the need of being cleaned and furbished to please a more fastidious age, he could scarcely be called a ballad writer. His special sphere in the restoration and preservation of the old was in lyrical poetry. What Robert Burns achieved for the songs, however, Walter Scott did for the ballads and prose legends of Scotland. The appearance of the _Border Minstrelsy_ makes 1802 the red-letter year in the later annals of the Scottish Ballad. More than twenty years before, the little lame boy, with the good blood of two Border clans, the Scotts and the Rutherfords, in his veins, had lain on the braes of Sandyknowe, and had drunk in through all his senses the history and romance of the Borderland. He had heard from the 'aged hind,' or at the 'winter hearth,' the old tales of woe and mirth; wild conjurings of superstition or real events that, although nearer then by a hundred years than they are to-day, had already been magnified, distorted, glorified in passing through the medium of the popular memory. His dreaming fancy did the rest. Looking from his point of vantage across the fair valley of the Tweed to the blue chain of Cheviot, every notch in which was 'a gate and passage of the thief,' every fold below it, the site of some battle or story of old,