“The Flowers o’ the Forest,” is charming as a poem, and should be, and must be, set to the notes; but, though out of your rule, the three stanzas beginning,
“I’ve seen the smiling of fortune beguiling,”
are worthy of a place, were it but to immortalize the author of them, who is an old lady of my acquaintance, and at this moment living in Edinburgh. She is a Mrs. Cockburn, I forget of what place, but from Roxburghshire.[228] What a charming apostrophe is
“O fickle fortune, why this cruel sporting,
Why thus perplex us, poor sons of a day?”
The old ballad, “I wish I were where Helen lies,” is silly to contemptibility. My alteration of it, in Johnson’s, is not much better. Mr. Pinkerton, in his, what he calls, ancient ballads (many of them notorious, though beautiful enough, forgeries), has the best set. It is full of his own interpolations—but no matter.
In my next I will suggest to your consideration a few songs which may have escaped your hurried notice. In the meantime allow me to congratulate you now, as a brother of the quill. You have committed your character and fame, which will now be tried, for ages to come, by the illustrious jury of the Sons and Daughters of Taste—all whom poesy can please or music charm.
Being a bard of nature, I have some pretensions to second sight; and I am warranted by the spirit to foretell and affirm, that your great-grand-child will hold up your volumes, and say, with honest pride, “This so much admired selection was the work of my ancestor!”
R. B.
FOOTNOTES:
[228] Miss Rutherford, of Fernilee in Selkirkshire, by marriage Mrs. Patrick Cockburn, of Ormiston. She died in 1794, at an advanced age.