Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/9



was born in 1785, and died at the age of fifty-seven, in October 1842. He was born into a poor household at Blackwood, in Dumfriesshire, and had little schooling. When a child of eleven he was apprenticed to a stonemason. But he was born with a quick fancy and a love of song. In 1810 R. H. Cromek published "Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, with Historical and Traditional Notices relative to the Manners and Customs of the Peasantry." Allan Cunningham, then twenty-five years old, had taken special delight in the fireside tales and songs of the little world of peasantry to which he himself belonged, and he supplied to Cromek's Nithsdale and Galloway volume Ballads of his own making as if they were traditions of the past. They were good enough to draw towards Allan Cunningham the sympathies of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who had also come into the world with a small gift, that if small was true.

Walter Scott, who had warmly recognized the genius of the Ettrick Shepherd, was as prompt in generous appreciation of young Allan Cunningham, made his acquaintance, and the more he knew of him liked "honest Allan" the better. Encouraged by this recognition of his native power the stonecutter went, in the same year, 1810, to seek his fortune in London as a poet.