collector and antiquarian of admirable quality. Meanwhile Walter
Scott, still in his schoolboy days, had chanced upon a copy of the
_Reliques_, and had fallen in love with ballads at first sight. All
the morning long he lay reading the book beneath a huge platanus-tree
in his aunt's garden. "The summer day sped onward so fast," he says,
"that notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the
hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was found still
entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was in
this instance the same thing, and henceforth I overwhelmed my
school-fellows and all who would hearken to me, with tragical
recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I
could scrape a few shillings together, which were not common
occurrences with me, I bought unto myself a copy of these beloved
volumes, nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or
with half the enthusiasm."

The later fruits of that schoolboy passion were garnered in Scott's
original ballads, metrical romances, and no less romantic novels, all
so picturesque with feudal lights and shadows, so pure with chivalric
sentiment; but an earlier result was _The Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border,_ a collection of folk-songs gleaned in vacation excursions
from pipers and shepherds and old peasant women of the border
districts, and containing, with other ballads, full forty-three
previously unknown to print, among them some of our very best. Other
poet collectors--Motherwell and Aytoun--followed where Scott had led,
Scott having been himself preceded by Allan Ramsay, who so early as
1724 had included several old ballads, freely retouched, in his
_Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany._ Nor were there lacking others,
poets in ear and heart if not in pen, who went up and down the
country-side, seeking to gather into books the old heroic lays that