The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. / With a New Life of the Poet, and Notices, Critical and Biographical by Allan Cunningham

by Robert Burns; Allan Cunningham

LEWIS GORDON.

This air is a proof how one of our Scots tunes comes to be composed out of another. I have one of the earliest copies of the song, and it has prefixed,

“Tune of Tarry Woo.”—

Of which tune a different set has insensibly varied into a different air.—To a Scots critic, the pathos of the line,

“‘Tho’ his back be at the wa’,”

—must be very striking. It needs not a Jacobite prejudice to be affected with this song.

The supposed author of “Lewis Gordon” was a Mr. Geddes, priest, at Shenval, in the Ainzie.

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