A a is wrongly said by Stenhouse, The Scots Musical Museum, IV, 213, to have appeared in Ramsay's Miscellany in 1724. It is not even in the edition of 1733, but, according to Mr Chappell, was first inserted in that of 1740. Ramsay's copy is repeated in Herd, 1769, p. 29, 1776, I, 19, Johnson's Museum, p. 230, No 221, and Ritson's Scotish Song, II, 196. C was perhaps derived from Ramsay, but possibly may have come down by purely oral tradition. Some later copies of B have Reading Town for Scarlet Town (Chappell).
The Scottish ballad is extended in Buchan's MSS, I, 90, Motherwell's MS., p. 671, to forty-one stanzas. In this amplified copy, which has no claim to be admitted here, the dying lover leaves his watch and gold ring, his Bible and penknife, a mill and thirty ploughs, nine meal-mills and the freights of nine ships, all to tocher Barbara Allan. This is the ballad referred to by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe in Stenhouse's edition of the Museum, IV, 300*, as sung by the peasantry of Allandale. Doubtless it was learned by them from some stall-print.
Pepys makes this entry in his Diary, January 2, 1666: "In perfect pleasure I was to hear her [Mrs Knipp, an actress] sing, and especially her little Scotch song of Barbary Allen." Goldsmith, in his third essay, 1765, p. 14, writes: The music of the finest singer is dissonance to what I felt when an old dairy-maid sung me into tears with 'Johnny Armstrong's Last Good-night,' or 'The Cruelty of Barbara Allen.'[143]
A b is translated by Loève-Veimars, p. 379, von Marées, p. 34; B d by Bodmer, I, 85.
A
a. The Tea-Table Miscellany, IV, 46, ed. 1740; here from the London edition of 1763, p. 343. b. Percy's Reliques, III, 131, ed. 1765, "with a few conjectural emendations from a written copy."
1 It was in and about the Martinmas time,
When the green leaves were a falling,
That Sir John Græme, in the West Country,
Fell in love with Barbara Allan.
2 He sent his men down through the town,
To the place where she was dwelling:
'O haste and come to my master dear,
Gin ye be Barbara Allan.'
3 O hooly, hooly rose she up,
To the place where he was lying,
And when she drew the curtain by,
'Young man, I think you're dying.'