B. The Thistle of Scotland, 1823, p. 92.
The copy of this ballad which was printed by Aytoun, 1858, I, 75, was derived by Lady John Scott from a friend of Mr Dalrymple’s, and when it left Mr Dalrymple’s hands was in the precise form of A a. Some changes were made in the text published by Aytoun, and four stanzas, 14–16, 18, were dropped, the first three to the advantage of the ballad, and quite in accordance with the editor’s plan. Mr Dalrymple informs me that in his younger days he had essayed to improve the last two lines of stanza 7 by the change,
We’d best cry in our merry men
And turn our horses’ head,
and had rearranged stanzas 18, 19, “which were absolutely chaotic,” adhering, however, closely to the sense. A b, given in Notes and Queries, from a manuscript, as “the original version of this ballad,” exhibits the changes made by Mr Dalrymple, and was therefore, one would suppose, founded upon his copy. Half a century ago the ballad was familiar to the people, and the variations of b, which are not few, may be traditional, and not arbitrary; for this reason it has been thought best not to pass them over. The Great North of Scotland Railway, A Guide, by W. Ferguson, Edinburgh, 1881, contains, p. 8 f, a copy which is evidently compounded from A b and Aytoun. It adds this variation of the last stanza:
Gin ony body spier at ye
For the men ye took awa,
They’re sleepin soun and in their sheen
I the howe aneath Harlaw.
The editor of The Thistle of Scotland treats the ballad as a burlesque, and “not worth the attention of the public,” on which ground he refrains from printing more than three stanzas, one of these being 15; and certainly both this and that which follows it have a dash of the unheroic and even of the absurd. Possibly there were others in the same strain in the version known to Laing, but all such may fairly be regarded as wanton depravations, of a sort which other and highly esteemed ballads have not escaped.