Thank you for my copy of your publication. Never did my eyes behold, in any musical work, such elegance and correctness. Your preface, too, is admirably written; only, your partiality to me has made you say too much: however, it will bind me down to double every eifort in the future progress of the work. The following are a few remarks on the songs in the list you sent me. I never copy what I write to you, so I may be often tautological, or perhaps contradictory.
"The Flowers of 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 hae seen the smiling o' fortune beguiling,
are worthy of a place, were it but to immortalise the author of them, who is an old lady[143] of my acquaintance, and at this moment living in Edinburgh. She is a Mrs. Cockburn; I forget of what place; but from Roxburghshire. What a charming apostrophe is
O fickle Fortune, why this cruel sporting,
Why, why torment 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.
Nee Rutherford, of Selkirkshire. She was then 81 years old.
XII.
August
1793.