The Historical Ballad relates events, which we either know actually to have taken place, or which, at least, making due allowance for the exaggerations of poetical tradition, we may readily conceive to have had some foundation in history.  For reasons already mentioned, such ballads were early current upon the border.  Barbour informs us, that he thinks it unnecessary to rehearse the account of a victory, gained in Eskdale over the English, because

  —­Whasa liks, thai may her
  Young women, when thai will play,
  Syng it among thaim ilk day.—­

The Bruce, Book XVI.

Godscroft also, in his History of the House of Douglas, written in the reign of James VI., alludes more than once to the ballads current upon the border, in which the exploits of those heroes were celebrated.  Such is the passage, relating to the death of William Douglas, Lord of Liddesdale, slain by the Earl of Douglas, his kinsman, his godson, and his chief[61].  Similar strains of lamentation were poured by the border poets over the tomb of the Hero of Otterbourne; and over the unfortunate youths, who were dragged to an ignominious death, from the very table at which they partook of the hospitality of their sovereign.  The only stanza, preserved of this last ballad, is uncommonly animated—­

  Edinburgh castle, towne and toure,
  God grant thou sink for sinne! 
  And that even for the black dinoure,
  Erl Douglas gat therein.

Who will not regret, with the editor, that compositions of such interest and antiquity should be now irrecoverable?  But it is the nature of popular poetry, as of popular applause, perpetually to shift with the objects of the time; and it is the frail chance of recovering some old manuscript, which can alone gratify our curiosity regarding the earlier efforts of the border muse.  Some of her later strains, composed during the sixteenth century, have survived even to the present day; but the recollection of them has, of late years, become like that of “a tale which was told.”  In the sixteenth century, these northern tales appear to have been popular even in London; for the learned Mr. Ritson has obligingly pointed out to me the following passages, respecting the noted ballad of Dick o’ the Cow (p. 157); “Dick o’ the Cow, that mad demi-lance northern borderer, who plaid his prizes with the lord Jockey so bravely.”—­Nashe’s Have with you to Saffren-Walden, or Gabriell Harvey’s Hunt is up.—­1596, 4to. Epistle Dedicatorie, sig. A. 2. 6.  And in a list of books, printed for, and sold by, P. Brocksby (1688), occurs “Dick-a-the-Cow, containing north country songs[62].”  Could this collection have been found, it would probably have thrown much light on the present publication:  but the editor has been obliged to draw his materials chiefly from oral tradition.

[Footnote 61:  “The Lord of Liddisdale being at his pastime, hunting in Ettrick forest, is beset by William, Earl of Douglas, and such as he had ordained for the purpose, and there asailed, wounded, and slain, beside Galsewood, in the year 1353, upon a jealousy that the earl had conceived of him with his lady, as the report goeth; for so sayeth the old song,