BARTHRAM'S DIRGE.

NEITHER the authorship, nor any historical or traditional incident connected with this fragment of a ballad, has been discovered by Sir Walter Scott, who first published it in his "Border Minstrelsy." It was taken down, from the recitation of an old woman of defective memory, by a lover of poetical relics. The name "Barthram" is Northumbrian, but the "Nine-Stane Rig" and the "NineStane Burn" are Scotch, and point for locality to the neighbourhood of Hermitage Castle, the scene of the ballad of Lord Soulis.

THEY shot him dead at the Nine-Stone Rig, | And the Gray Friars sung the dead man's Beside the Headless Cross,

And they left him lying in his blood,

Upon the moor and moss.

They made a bier of the broken bough,

The sauch and the aspin gray,
And they bore him to the Lady Chapel,
And waked him there all day.

A lady came to that lonely bower,

And threw her robes aside; She tore her ling long yellow hair,

And knelt at Barthram's side.

She bathed him in the Lady-Well,

His wounds so deep and sair;

And she plaited a garland for his breast,
And a garland for his hair.

They rowed him in a lily-sheet,

And bare him to his earth;

mass,

As they pass'd the Chapel Garth.

They buried him at the mirk midnight,

When the dew fell cold and still,
When the aspin gray forgot to play,

And the mist clung to the hill.

They dug his grave but a bare foot deep,
By the edge of the Nine-Stone Burn,
And they cover'd him o'er with the heather-
flower,

The moss and the lady fern.

A Gray Friar staid upon the grave,
And sang till the morning tide;
And a friar shall sing for Barthram's soul,
While the Headless Cross shall bide.

SIR CAULINE.

MR. HALL is right in calling this "a beautiful, touching, and interesting ballad." It is extracted from Percy's "Reliques," Percy himself having so altered, enlarged, and improved it from a defective and mutilated original, that the composition may be called his own. A curious version of a similar story is preserved by oral tradition in the north of Scotland. Buchan has given it in his "Ancient Ballads and Songs," under the title of "King Malcolm and Sir Colvin." But though the similarity be strong in the first part of the ballad, the catastrophe, as here told, is altogether original.