Glen Collection of printed music > Printed text > Illustrated book of Scottish songs from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century

INTRODUCTION. 3
Saxon Englisli language. On the English side of the Tweed
these dialects, differing greatly from each other, are usually
called broad Scotch, even by the people of Northumberland
and Cumberland, who speak a very similar " Doric," and have
a music as well as manners and language as much Scotch as
English. If a line be drawn from Greenock on the Clyde north-
east by Perth to Inverness, it will be found that by far the
greater portion of the songs and melodies which are known as
Scotch to Scotchmen and to the world, and of which Scotch-
men speak and write with the highest pride and enthusiasm,
have been produced to the south of it. North of that line is a
country where, until of late years, and even now, the people
speak a totally diiferent language, and sing a music of a totally
different character. North-west of that line is the land of the
Gael — of the semi-barbarous and imperfect instrument the
bagpipe, of pibroch tunes, of rude, wild melodies, very little
known, and still less admired, and of a species of song which
has rarely been considered worth the trouble of translation.
But on the south-east of the line, and all the Avay to the
English Border, where the Saxon tongue prevails, and where
the minds of the people have for ages had access to English
literature, the land is vocal with sweet sounds. Every river,
stream, and lake — every mountain- slope and summit — every
pastoral valley — nay, almost every farmhouse, has been cele-
brated in a song. The Highlander, who has no right or title
to this music or song, is as proud of both as the Lowlander;
and not unfrequently claims for his own wild melodies, and for
his rude attempts at lyrical poetry in the native language of
the Gael, a large portion of the admiration lavished upon com-
positions of a totally different origin and character. The Low-
landers, while they admit the claim of the Highlanders, take to