Our Scottish race have been--yes, and notwithstanding modern changes, still are--a joyous people--a people full of what I shall term _a lyric joyousness_. I say they still are--as may be found any day up the Ettricks, and Yarrows, and Galas--up any of our Border glens and dales. The Borderers continue to merit the tribute paid to them in the odd but expressive lines of Wordsworth:--
"The _pleasant men of Tiviotdale_, Fast by the river Tweed."
From time immemorial they have been enthusiastic lovers of song and music, and have been thoroughly imbued with their influences. Bishop Leslie, a contemporary of the state of manners which he describes, has recorded of them, upwards of two centuries ago--"That they take extreme delight in their music, and in their ballads, which are composed amongst themselves, celebrating the deeds of their ancestors, or the valour and success of their predatory expeditions;" which latter, it must be remembered, were esteemed, in those days, not only not criminal, but just, honourable, and heroic. What a gush of mirth overflows in king James' poem of "Peebles to the Play," descriptive of the Beltane or May-day festival, four hundred years ago! at Peebles, a charming pastoral town in the upper district of the vale of the Tweed:--
"At Beltane, when ilk body bouns To Peebles to the play, To hear the singin' and the soun's, The solace, sooth to say. By firth and forest forth they wound, They graithit them full gay: God wot what they would do that stound, For it was their feast-day, They said, Of Peebles to the play!
"Hop, Calye, and Cardronow Gatherit out thick-fald, With, _Hey and How and Rumbelow!_ The young folk were full bald. The bagpipe blew, and they out threw Out of the towns untald: Lord! sic ane shout was them amang, When they were owre the wald, There west Of Peebles to the play!"
Thirty years ago, the same joyousness prevailed in a thousand forms--in hospitality, in festivity, in merry customs, in an exquisite social sense, in the culture of the humorous and the imaginative, in impressibility to every touch of noble and useful enthusiasm. It would be easy to dilate upon the causes which seem to have produced this choice joyous spirit in so unexpected a region as the far, bleak North: but that would be a lengthened subject; and we must content ourselves at present with the fact. And, instead of branching out into general vague illustrations of what I mean by this lyric joyousness, I shall _localise_ it, and embody the meaning in a sketch, light and imperfect it must be, of a real place and a real life--such as mine own eyes witnessed when a boy--and in the fond resuscitation of which, amidst the usual struggles and anxieties allotted to middle age, memory and feeling now find one of their most soothing exercises.