I. ‘Johnie of Braidisbank,’ Motherwell’s Minstrelsy, p. 23.
J. Chambers, Scottish Ballads, p. 181.
K. Finlay’s Scottish Ballads, I, xxxi: one stanza.
L. Harris MS., fol. 25 b: one stanza.
M. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, II, 335, New York, 1882, supplemented by Mrs Aitken: one stanza.
The first notice in print of this precious specimen of the unspoiled traditional ballad is in Ritson’s Scotish Song, 1794, I, xxxvi, note 25: the Rev. Mr Boyd, the translator of Dante, had a faint recollection of three ballads, one of which was called ‘Johny Cox.’ Before this, 1780, a lady of Carlisle had sent a copy to Doctor Percy, A. Scott, 1802, was the first to publish the ballad, selecting “the stanzas of greatest merit” from several copies which were in his hands. John Fry gave two valuable fragments, C, B (which he did not separate), in his Pieces of Ancient Poetry, 1814, from a manuscript “appearing to be the text-book of some illiterate drummer.”[[1]] I have been able to add only three versions to those which were already before the world, A, D, G; and of these D is in part the same as E, previously printed by Kinloch.
Pinkerton, Select Scotish Ballads, II, xxxix, 1783, has preserved a stanza, which he assigns to a supposititious ballad of ‘Bertram the Archer:’[[2]]
‘My trusty bow of the tough yew,
That I in London bought,
And silken strings, if ye prove true,