The Highland men, they're clever men
At handling sword and shield,
But yet they are too naked men
To stay in battle field.
[The Highland men are clever men]55
[At handling sword or gun,]
[But yet they are too naked men]
[To bear the cannon's rung.]
For a cannon's roar in a summer night
Is like thunder in the air;60
There's not a man in Highland dress
Can face the cannon's fire.
[39]. Sir William Forbes of Cragievar.
[55-62]. The Highlanders were thrown into great consternation by cannon shot, to which they were not accustomed. At the Raid of Stonehaven, just previous to the affair of the Bridge of Dee, the first volley made them wheel about and fly in disorder. They declared that they could not abide "the musket's mother."
THE HAWS OF CROMDALE.
Ritson's Scottish Songs, ii. 40. Johnson's Museum, p. 502.
This ballad, very popular in Scotland, was long sold on the stalls before it was received into the collections. A glance will show that it has at best been very imperfectly transmitted by oral tradition. In fact, the Ettrick Shepherd seems to be right in maintaining that two widely separated events are here jumbled together. The first five stanzas apparently refer to an action in May, 1690, when Sir Thomas Livingston surprised fifteen hundred Highlanders in their beds at Cromdale, and the remainder to the lost battle of Auldern, where Montrose, with far inferior forces, defeated Sir John Hurry with prodigious slaughter, on the 4th of May, 1645. Mr. Stenhouse