Note 3 — Chapter IX · : The Romanceros or Ballads

But I question if folk-poetry ever captured a lilt more exquisite than that of the first four lines of “The Gardener” or a sharper note of anguish than that of the last quatrain.3 To me at least Old Scots must always remain the language of the ballad par excellence, by virtue of the subtlety, the finely wrought and divinely coloured wealth of expressive idiom which bursts from its treasure-chest in a profusion of begemmed and enamelled richness, more various, more magical than any Spanish gold. Much of this Lockhart filched to give his Castilian bullion a replating. But in places he falls back most wretchedly upon the poetical trickeries of his day, falls to the level of Rogers and Southey, to the miserable devices and tinsel beggary of those bravely bound annuals beloved by the dames and damsels of the day before yesterday. In places, however, he outballads the ballad in pure gaucherie.