tassie a cup; Fr. ‘tasse’
[XLV]
About 1777–80: printed 1801. ‘One of my juvenile works,’ says Burns. ‘I do not think it very remarkable, either for its merits or demerits.’ But Hazlitt thought the world of it, and now it passes for one of Burns's masterpieces.
trysted appointed stoure dust and din
[XLVI]
Museum, 1796. Attributed, in one shape or another, to a certain Captain Ogilvie. Sharpe, too, printed a broadside in which the third stanza (used more than once by Sir Walter) is found as here. But Scott Douglas (Burns, iii. 173) has ‘no doubt that this broadside was printed after 1796,’ and as it stands the thing is assuredly the work of Burns. The refrain and the metrical structure have been used by Scott (Rokeby, IV. 28), Carlyle, Charles Kingsley (Dolcino to Margaret), and Mr. Swinburne (A Reiver's Neck Verse) among others.
[XLVII–LII]
Of the first four numbers, the high-water mark of Wordsworth's achievement, all four were written in 1802; the second and third were published in 1803; the first and fourth in 1807. The Ode to Duty was written in 1805, and published in 1807, to which year belongs that Song for the Feast of Brougham Castle, from which I have extracted the excellent verses here called Two Victories.
[LIII–LXII]
The first three numbers are from Marmion (1808): I. Introduction; V. 12; and VI. 18–20, 25–27, and 33–34. The next is from The Lady of the Lake (1810), I. 1–9: The Outlaw is from Rokeby (1813), III. 16; the Pibroch was published in 1816; The Omnipotent and The Red Harlaw are from The Antiquary (1816), and the Farewell from The Pirate (1821). As for Bonny Dundee, that incomparable ditty, it was written as late as 1825. ‘The air of Bonny Dundee running in my head to-day,’ he writes under date of 22d December (Diary, 1890, i. 61), ‘I wrote a few verses to it before dinner, taking the key-note from the story of Clavers leaving the Scottish Convention of Estates in 1688–9. I wonder if they are good.’ See The Doom of Devorgoil (1830), Note A, Act II. sc. 2.