For a maid again I’ll never be.
THE HEIR OF LINNE
The Text is taken from the Percy Folio, but I have modernised the spelling. For the Reliques Percy made a ballad out of the Folio version combined with ‘a modern ballad on a similar subject,’ a broadside entitled The Drunkard’s Legacy, thus producing a very good result which is about thrice the length of the Folio version.
The Scottish variant was noted by Motherwell and Buchan, but previous editors—Herd, Ritson, Chambers, Aytoun—had used Percy’s composition.
The Story.—There are several Oriental stories which resemble the ballad as compounded by Percy from The Drunkard’s Legacy. In most of these—Tartar, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, etc.—the climax of the story lies in the fact that the hero in attempting to hang himself by a rope fastened to the ceiling pulls down a hidden treasure. There is, of course, no such episode in The Heir of Linne, but all the stories have similar circumstances, and the majority present the moral aspect of unthriftiness, and of friends deserting a man who loses his wealth.
‘Linne,’ of course, is the place which is so often mentioned in ballads. See note, First Series, p. 1.
THE HEIR OF LINNE
1.