XI.
WALY WALY, LOVE BE BONNY.
A Scottish Song.
This is a very ancient song, but we could only give it from a modern copy. Some editions instead of the four last lines in the second stanza have these, which have too much merit to be wholly suppressed:
"Whan cockle shells turn siller bells,
And muscles grow on every tree,
When frost and snaw sall warm us aw',
Than sall my love prove true to me."
See the Orpheus Caledonius, &c.
Arthur's-seat mentioned in ver. 17, is a hill near Edinborough; near the bottom of which is St. Anthony's well.
[There has been considerable difference of opinion among ballad collectors relative to this beautiful song. Some suppose it to be a portion of the ballad entitled Lord Jamie Douglas, which relates to James Douglas, second Marquis of Douglas, who married Lady Barbara Erskine, eldest daughter of John, ninth Earl of Mar, on the seventh of September, 1670, and afterwards repudiated her on account of a false accusation of adultery made against her by Lowrie, laird of Blackwood. Prof. Aytoun, however, believes that certain verses of Waly Waly have wrongly been mixed up with Lord Jamie Douglas. There is very little doubt that the song was in existence long before 1670, and it also appears to be the lamentation of a forsaken girl rather than of a wife. Mr. Stenhouse and others considered it to belong to the age of Queen Mary and to refer to some affair at Court. Aytoun writes, "there is also evidence that it was composed before 1566, for there is extant a MS. of that year in which some of the lines are transcribed," but Mr. Maidment gives the following opinion—"that the ballad is of ancient date is undoubted, but we are not quite prepared to admit that it goes back as far as 1566, the date of the manuscript transcribed by Thomas Wode from an ancient church music book compiled by Dean John Angus, Andrew Blackhall, and others, in which it said the first [second] stanza is thus parodied:—