His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet."

A whole unuttered tragedy of love, treachery, and murder lies back of
these stanzas. This method of narration may be partly accounted for by
the fact that the story treated was commonly some local country-side
legend of family feud or unhappy passion, whose incidents were familiar
to the ballad-singer's audience and were readily supplied by memory. One
theory holds that the story was partly told and partly sung, and that the
links and expositions were given in prose. However this may be, the
artless art of these popular poets evidently included a knowledge of the
uses of mystery and suggestion. They knew that, for the imagination, the
part is sometimes greater than the whole. Gray wrote to Mason in 1757,
"I have got the old Scotch ballad [Gil Maurice] on which 'Douglas'
[Home's tragedy, first played at Edinburgh in 1756] was founded. It is
divine. . . Aristotle's best rules are observed in it in a manner which
shews the author never had heard of Aristotle. It begins in the fifth
act of the play. You may read it two-thirds through without guessing
what it is about; and yet, when you come to the end, it is impossible not
to understand the whole story."

It is not possible to recover the conditions under which these folk-songs
"made themselves,"[12] as it were, or grew under the shaping hands of
generations of nameless bards. Their naïve, primitive quality cannot be
acquired: the secret is lost. But Walter Scott, who was steeped to the
lips in balladry, and whose temper had much of the healthy objectivity of
an earlier age, has succeeded as well as any modern. Some of his ballads
are more perfect artistically than his long metrical romances; those of
them especially which are built up from a burden or fragment of old
minstrel song, like "Jock o' Hazeldean"[13] and the song in "Rokeby":