Writing of them as if they had belonged to a remote age or a distant foreign land, he says: 'It was intended that an account of the authors of the following collection should be given, but not being furnished with such distinct information as could be wished for that end, at present, the design is delayed,' etc. To have been the first to seek to do justice to these forgotten masters in verse is a sufficient title on Ramsay's part to the permanent gratitude of his countrymen; but, in addition, his work as a literary pioneer in the combined capacity of writer, editor, publisher and librarian was, largely because of the literary dearth of the preceding century in Scotland, of far greater importance than that of many with whose literary achievements his own can bear no comparison.

A contemporary and a kind of poetic rival of Ramsay was Alexander Pennecuick (d. 1730), the thriftless, drunken and downat-heel nephew of Dr Alexander Pennecuik (1652—1722) of Romanno, author of a Description of Tweeddale and other English verse, published posthumously in 1817. The vernacular verses of the nephew, who is often confounded with his uncle, appeared, like the early experiments of Ramsay, as penny broadsides, and, like Ramsay, he also essayed verse in stilted English, publishing, in 1713, Britannia Triumphans, in 1720, Streams from Helicon and, in 1726, Flowers from Parnassus. If, in low humour, he is not quite so affluent as Ramsay, he, in The Merry Wives of Musselburgh at their meeting together to welcom Meg Dickson after her loup from the Ladder (1724), (Meg, a Musselburgh fishwife, had escaped execution through the breaking of the rope), depicts the incidents of the semi-grotesque semi-awesome occasion with a grim and graphic satiric mirth rather beyond him. Other vernacular achievements of Pennecuick are Rome's Legacy to the Church of Scotland, a satire on the kirk's cutty-stool in heroic couplets, an Elegy on Robert Forbes, a kirk-treasurer's man like Ramsay's John Cowper, and The Presbyterian Pope, in the form of a dialogue between the kirk-treasurer's man and his female informant, Meg. In his descriptions, Pennecuick shows greater aptitude for individual portraiture and for the realisation of definite scenes than does Ramsay, whose John Cowper might be any kirk-treasurer's man. Pennecuick shows us the 'pawky face' of Robert Forbes 'keeking thro' close-heads' to catch a brace of lovers in confabulation, or piously shaking his head when he hears the tune of Chevy Chace, and, with his 'Judas face,' repeating preachings and saying grace.

Robert Crawford, son of the laird of Drumsoy, Renfrewshire,

contributed a good many songs to The Miscellany. His Bush Aboon Traquair has one or two excellent lines and semi-stanzas, the best being, probably, that beginning 'That day she smiled and made me glad'; but it evidently owes its repute mainly to its title, and is not by any means so happy an effort as the more vernacular, and really excellent, Down the Burn Davie; while Allan Water and Tweedside are more or less spoiled by the introduction of the current artificialities of the English eighteenth century muse.

Another contributor to The Miscellany was William Hamilton of Bangour, whose one notable composition is the imposingly melodious Braes of Yarrow, beginning 'Busk ye, busk ye, my bony bride,' which, written in 1724, and circulated for some time in MS, appeared uninitialled at the close of the second volume of The Miscellany. It is probably a kind of fantasia on a fragmentary traditional ballad and may even have been suggested by the anonymous Rare Willie drowned in Yarrow, which appeared in the fourth volume of The Miscellany, and, consisting of only four stanzas, is by far the finest commemoration of the supposed Yarrow tragedy. If Hamilton wrote both of them, it is all the more regrettable that he mainly confined his poetic efforts to the celebration, in bombastic conventional form, of the charms of fashionable ladies. In the '45, he followed prince Charlie, and he wrote a Jacobite Ode to the battle of Gladsmuir, which was set to music by the Edinburgh musician, M'Gibbon.

Sir John Clerk, of Penicuik, is the reputed author of Merry may the Maid be that Marries the Miller, which first appeared in 1752 in The Charmer, a volume of partly Scots and partly English verse, edited by I. Gair, the first edition of which appeared in 1749. George Halkett, schoolmaster of Rathen, Aberdeenshire, is credited by Peter Buchan with the authorship of Logie O'Buchan, which appeared, c. 1730, in a broadside, and a Jacobite ballad Wherry Whigs Awa, included in Hogg's Jacobite Relics, but termed by Hogg a confused ballad, the greater part of the twenty copies in his possession being quite different from one another, and visibly 'composed at different periods and by different hands.' Halkett, it is also supposed, may have been the author of the Dialogue between the Devil and George II, which caused the duke of Cumberland, in 1746, to offer a reward of £100 for the author, living or dead. Halkett's Occasional Poems on Various Subjects, published in 1727, strongly militate against Buchan's statements, even if Wherry Whigs Awa, in the extended fashion

printed by Hogg, existed in the time of Halkett. Logie O'Buchan may well, however, have been a veiled Jacobite ballad, lamenting the fortunes of the old pretender.

Alexander Ross, a graduate of Aberdeen university, who became schoolmaster at Lochlee in Forfarshire, acquired much fame in the northern counties by his pastoral Helenore or the Fortunate Shepherdess, which, with a few of his songs, was published at Aberdeen, in 1768, a revised edition appearing in 1778. Linguistically, it is of special interest as a specimen of the Aberdeenshire dialect; but it is a rather wearisome production, and cannot compare with Ramsay's pastoral, on which it is largely modelled, though the plot is of quite a different and much more romantic character. Its prosy commonplace strikingly contrasts with the wit and vivacity of Ross's songs, such as The Rock and the Wee Pickle Tow, Wooed and Married and a' and The Bridal ('t, which, apart from lyric effectiveness, are really admirable sketches of Scottish peasant life in the olden time. Quite the equal, and, indeed, the superior, of Ross, as a song-writer, was John Skinner, episcopalian minister of Longside, Aberdeenshire, the irresistible sprightly cheerfulness of whose Tullochgorum so captivated Burns that he pronounced it to be 'the best Scots song Scotland ever saw.' In much the same vein are Tune your Fiddle and Old Age; but a much finer achievement than any of these is the Ewie wi the Crookit Horn. Though suggested by the older elegies of Sempill and Hamilton, it is in a different stanza, one of three lines riming together, with a refrain ending in 'a'' throughout the poem, and it altogether surpasses them in pathetic humour. To it, Burns owed more than the suggestion for Poor Mailie's Elegy, following not merely its general drift but partly parodying its expressions, more particularly those in the last stanza, beginning 'O all ye bards benorth Kinghorn.'

Alexander Geddes, an accomplished catholic priest-who contributed a Scots translation of the first eclogue of Vergil and the first idyll of Theocritus to the transactions of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries and wrote in English Linton, a Tweedside Pastoral, and a rimed translation of the first book of The Iliad-is one of the few known authors of contemporary Jacobite songs. His Lewie Gordon, under the title The Charming Highlandman, first appeared in the second edition of The Scots Nightingale, 1779: and he is also credited with the inimitably droll Wee Wifukie, relating the experiences of a rustic Aberdeenshire dame on her way homewards from the fair, after she had got 'a wee bit

Graham. Mrs Cockburn and Jane Elliot 373

drappukie.' Murdoch M'Lennan, minister of Crathie, Aberdeenshire, narrated the affair of Sheriffmuir in the clever but absolutely impartial Race of Sheriffmuir, with the refrain, 'and we ran and they ran awa man.' John Barclay celebrated the same engagement in the versified Dialogue betwixt William Lickladle and Thomas Cleancogue, modelled upon the anonymous ballad of Killiecrankie; and a similar ballad, Tranent Muir, on the battle of Prestonpans, is attributed to Adam Skirving. Skirving has, also, been usually credited with the authorship of the song Johnnie Cope; but a manuscript note by Burns in an interleaved copy of Johnson's Museum seems to indicate that the song, as published there, is by Burns 'the air,' he says, 'was the tune of an old song, of which I have heard some verses, but now only remember the title which was: "Will ye go to the coals in the morning?" Two sets are published in Hogg's Relics, from Gilchrist's Collection.

Dougal Graham, a wandering chapman who followed the army of prince Charlie and afterwards became bellman and town crier of Glasgow, wrote, in doggerel rime, A full and Particular Account of the Rebellion of 1745-6, to the tune of The Gallant Grahams; he is credited with a rather witty skit The Turnpike, expressing, in Highland Scots, the mingled contempt and wonder with which the roads of general Wade were regarded by the unsophisticated Celt, and his objection to the imposition of tolls; and he wrote and sold various more or less racy and absurd prose chapbooks, as, for example, The History of Buchhaven, jocosely imaginary, Jocky and Maggie's Courtship, a skit on the cutty-stool, The Comical Transactions of Lothian Tam, etc.

Mrs Cockburn, a relative of Sir Walter Scott, wrote, besides other songs which have not attained to popularity, a version of The Flowers of the Forest (I have seen the Smiling'), which appeared in The Lark in 1765, and was, as she herself states, sung 'at wells1' to the old tune. A more vernacular version, 'I've heard them Lilting at the Ewe Milking'-which includes the first line and the burden of the old song now lost-by Jane Elliot, third daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, of Minto, was used by Herd for a version made up from various copies of the old ballad collated; but an authentic copy was obtained by Scott for The Border Minstrelsy. Miss Elliot's brother, Sir Gilbert Elliot, was the author of My Apron Dearie in Johnson's Museum.

Of a considerable number of songs of the eighteenth century, the authorship is either doubtful or quite unknown. There's nae

1 I.e. in watering places.

luck aboot the Hoose has been attributed both to William Julius Mickle, author of the ballad of Cumnor Hall, and to Jean Adams of Greenock, authoress of a book of religious verse; but Burns states that it first came on the streets as a ballad in 1771 or 1772, and it may not be by either of them. Two verses were added to it by James Beattie, author of The Minstrel, who confined himself almost wholly to English verse1, but wrote a rather clever riming epistle, in the Habbie Simson stave, To Mr Alexander Ross, whose 'hamely auld-warld muse,' he said, had provoked him to ape 'in verse and style,' our 'guid plain country folks.' The song O weel may the Boatie Row was attributed by Burns to John Ewen, an Aberdeen merchant; but, in any case, it appears to have been suggested by some old fisher chorus.

Excellent anonymous songs-all probably, and some certainly, not of earlier date than the eighteenth century-are Ettrick Banks, Here awa there awa, Saw ye my Father, The Lowlands of Holland, Bess the Gawkie, I had a horse and I had nae mair, Hooly and Fairly, Willie's gane to Melville Castle and O'er the Moor amang the Heather (which Burns said he wrote down from the singing of a disreputable female tramp, Jean Glover, and which, if not largely by Burns, is not all by Jean, and is probably in part founded on an old song).

Towards the later half of the eighteenth century and during it, various anonymous songs, more or less indelicate in tone, found their way into broadsides. Some were preserved by Herd, either from recitation or from print, and several are included, in whole or in part, in his 1769 and 1776 editions; others, too liberal in their humour for general reading, are, with quite unobjectionable songs, included in the limited edition of Songs from David Herd's Manuscript, edited by Hans Hecht, 1904. Of these, a few have not appeared at all in other collections, and the others only in a garbled form. Neither the MS collection of Peter Buchan nor his Gleanings of Scotch, English and Irish Ballads (1825), nor Robert Hartley Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (1810), can be regarded as trustworthy authorities in regard either to texts or sources. Rare copies of broadsides occur containing songs of a certain literary merit and interesting for their glimpses of the characteristics of rustic life in the eighteenth century; but several are not likely ever to be included in collections. Thus, by a careful examination of existing broadsides, much that, for various reasons, deserves preservation might be found; and, in any case,

1 See, as to Beattie, vol. x, post.