[21] Sir Patrick Spens, or Spence, A, B, C, G, H, J, M; Young Patrick, E; Skipper Patrick, F; Young Patrick Spens, I, K; Sir Patrick, L; Earl Patrick Spens, N; Sir Andrew Wood, A b, D; Earl Patrick Graham, P.
[22] It is so with the Conde Dirlos, when he receives a letter from the emperor:
De las cartas placer hubo,
de las palabras pesar;
que lo que las cartas dicen
á él parece muy mal.
(Wolf y Hofmann, Primavera, II, 129.)
[23] There is a falling off in C, E, with the wives sewing their silken seams and rocking the cradle, and in B, waiting with their babies in their hands, till in M the ladies, still so called, are reduced to fishers' wives, "wi their gown-tails owre their crown!"
[24] The reading in I 9, "To Noroway, wi our king's daughter," has been treated as if important. This version, says Buchan, was taken down from the recitation of "'a wight of Homer's craft,' who, as a wandering minstrel, blind from his infancy, has been travelling in the North as a mendicant for these last fifty years. He learned it in his youth from a very old person." The mendicant was, no doubt, James Rankin, "the blind beggar whom I kept travelling through Scotland, collecting ballads for me, at a heavy expense" (frontispiece to Buchan's MSS, vol. i.). A large part of Buchan's ballads have the mint-mark of this minstrel beggar and beggarly minstrel, who collected for pay. No confidence can be placed in any of his readings: his personal inspiration was too decided to make him a safe reporter.
[25] For consistency's sake, it has here been dropped from the place where it first occurs, after stanza 4.
[26] Or a pure accident. Wyntoun says that Margaret sailed the 12th of August. Motherwell found, "from a laborious calculation," that the 12th of August, 1282 (a misprint, I suppose, for 1281), was a Monday, the sailing day in G 5. The account in H is probably taken from G.
[27] Fordun, ed. Skene, I, 307.
[28] Scalacronica, ed. Stevenson, p. 110. Fordun mentions Michael of Wemyss and Michael Scot as the envoys, I, 311.