"Come, cease thy allacing, thou silly blind Harper,
And again of thy harping let us hear;
And weel payd sall thy cowt-foal be,75
And thou sall have a far better mare."
Then aye he harped, and aye he carped,
Sae sweet were the harpings he let them hear!
He was paid for the foal he had never lost,79
And three times ower for the gude Gray Mare.
JOHNIE OF BREADISLEE.
AN ANCIENT NITHSDALE BALLAD.
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, iii. 114.
"The hero of this ballad appears to have been an outlaw and deer-stealer—probably one of the broken men residing upon the Border. There are several different copies, in one of which the principal personage is called Johnie of Cockielaw. The stanzas of greatest merit have been selected from each copy. It is sometimes said, that this outlaw possessed the old Castle of Morton, in Dumfries-shire, now ruinous: "Near to this castle there was a park, built by Sir Thomas Randolph, on the face of a very great and high hill; so artificially, that, by the advantage of the hill, all wild beasts, such as deers, harts, and roes, and hares, did easily leap in, but could not get out again; and if any other cattle, such as cows, sheep, or goats, did voluntarily leap in, or were forced to do it, it is doubted if their owners were permitted to get them out again." Account of Presbytery of Penpont, apud Macfarlane's MSS. Such a park would form a convenient domain to an outlaw's castle, and the mention of Durisdeer, a neighboring parish, adds weight to this tradition."
Johnie of Breadislee was first printed in the Border Minstrelsy. Fragments of two other versions, in which the hero's name is Johny Cock, were given in Fry's Pieces of Ancient Poetry, Bristol, 1814, p. 55,
and the editor did not fail to notice that he had probably lighted on the ballad of Johny Cox, which Ritson says the Rev. Mr. Boyd faintly recollected, (Scottish Song, I. p. xxxvi.) Motherwell, not aware of what Fry had done, printed a few stanzas belonging to the first of these versions, under the title of Johnie of Braidisbank (Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, p. 23), and Kinloch recovered a nearly complete story. Another copy of this last has been published from Buchan's manuscripts in Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads (Percy Society, vol. xvii. p. 77). Chambers, in his Scottish Ballads, p. 181, has compounded Scott's, Kinloch's, and Motherwell's copies, interspersing a few additional stanzas of no value. Scott's and [Kinloch's] versions are given in this place, and Fry's fragments (which contain several beautiful stanzas) [in the Appendix].