Taylor and Hessey - 1822
After the Trollope interlude, I returned to Allan Cunningham's Traditional Tales - there are ten of them in this second volume. Once again, I was drawn to some more than to others and, eventually, felt there was a 'sameness' about them, concentrating as they do on the Solway and its coastlines of Cumberland and Dumfries/Galloway. Above all, the injection of verse, so-called original ballads, were rarely to my taste. To be fair, I think many of them had appeared in the London Magazine over a period of time. The first story, Miles Colvine, the Cumberland Mariner was one of the best. It starts well: On the Cumberland side of the firth of Solway lies a long line of flat and unelegant coast [I know it well], where the sea-fowl find refuge from the gun of the fowler, and which, save the barren land and the deep sea, presents but one object to our notice, - the ruins of a rude cottage, once the residence of MILES COLVINE, the Mariner... Colvine was a seaman, a soldier, a scholar, and a gentleman who had been shipwrecked there in slightly mysterious circumstances. Three persons had been visible on the ship's deck, but only he survived. The planks from the deck which floated ashore seemed stained with blood and with wine. Colvin gave nothing away and remained thereafter a silent and melancholy man. Although he took to the sea again, he seldom looked in the face of any one; man he seemed to regard with an eye of scorn, and even deadly hatred; but on women he looked with softness and regard. When meeting a mother and child, he gazed on them with an eye of settled sorrow and affection.
The narrator recalls stopping by Colvine's cottage with an idle friend or two and seeing within not only a smarter dress mariner but also a female richly dressed, and of a beauty so exquisite, who busied herself about the room and then sang a Ballad O Mariner, O Mariner, which clearly related to the story of her father's and mother's misfortunes. Suddenly a band of smugglers from Ireland Scotland appear and seem determined to break in. The narrator helps Colvine and his daughter (both armed with pistols) to flee to their boat; he is invited in to the cottage and is introduced to May Colvine with an increase of loveliness, such as a rose appears when refreshed in dew. The grateful father then tells the narrator his sad story of his loss of fair domains, a stately house and a beauteous wife due to an involvement with a ruthless band of smugglers. His wife is seized and despoiled; thanks to the drunkenness of the smugglers on one trip, Colvine manages to kill several before the ship sank in Allanbay. Only later did Colvine find out his daughter had been saved by a passing vessel. Albeit, the story ends sadly, with Colvine being found, years later, cold and dead gazing out across the Solway dressed in the garb resembling that of a pilgrim.
Other stories, such as Honest Man John Ochiltree and Elphin Irving. The Fairies' Cupbearer are full of romance, pathos and elements of the supernatural. As the author says of the latter Tale, In the legends of the people of Corrievale there is a singular mixture of elfin and human adventure, and the traditional story of the Cupbearer to the Queen of the Fairies appeals alike to our domestic feelings and imagination. There is the occasional touch of humour: There has not been a fairy in the land since Donald Cargil, the Cameronian, conjured them into the Solway for playing on their pipes during one of his nocturnal preachings on the hip of the Burnswark hill.
The story of Richard Faulder, Mariner again deals with a shipwreck, where his father and three brothers are drowned. Local refers to the Faulders as a doomed race. Once more, as with nearly all these Tales, a Ballad - along with many other singular rhymes full of maritime superstition and adventure - is placed in the text. The Last Lord of Helvellyn is actually a story related by the same Richard Faulder of Allanbay. It includes this observation about the Scots: [they] are a demure, a careful, and a singular people; and, amid much homeliness of manner, have something of a poetical way of displaying their affections, which they treasure too for great occasions, or, as they say, "daimen times". By the time I reached the sixth Tale - Judith Macrone, the Prophetess - I was beginning to feel mildly bored with the 'sameness' and simplicity of the stories. The brief touch of humour again (The sun was, to use the expression of a Scottish poet - "wading 'mang the mist", or as a fastidious Englishman would say, "struggling amid drizzly rain"), did not disguise the fact that story was overlong. It made much of Judith's skill in minstrel lore - with her, each oak-tree has its tale, each loop of Annanwater its tradition, and every green knowe or holly-bush its ballad of true love, or song of knightly bravery.
The Ghost with the Golden Casket - dealing with a supernatural being and Caerlaverock Castle - The Haunted Ships (Richard Faulder is mentioned in both) again concentrate on the superstitions singularly wild and unusual linked to both sides of the Solway. The second Tale, involving two sunken and haunted Danish ships, was, admittedly, quite spooky! The Laird of Warlsworm focused on a miserly old man, consumed with grasping and incessant greed, his face gross and covetous, being looked after by nis niece, remarkable for her gentleness and beauty...glowing in health and ripe in beauty, her tresses bright, her hands, white and shapely, and small, clasped over a white and a perturbed bosom (what is a perturbed bosom?!). This Bessie Lamond loves a young man, Gawain, but her miserly uncle pledges her to another old skinflint, Haudthegrup. The old laird dies; Haudthegrup is chief mourner and, to elude the expense of a toll-bar, he proposes to ford a river, red and swollen with rain. But, I'll stop there as I don't want to spoil my other favourite of the ten stories for any potential reader.
I repeat - the Tales are very similar to one another and can 'drag' a little if one reads them immediately one after the other. The near-doggerel verse - ballads - grated on me after awhile. I always prefer prose to verse anyway.
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