A had been somewhat edited before it was communicated to Percy; the places were, however, indicated by commas. Several copies besides O, already referred to, have slight passages that never came from the unsophisticated people; as J 2, in which a page “runs with sorrow,” for rhyme and without reason, L 23, and L 123,4, which is manifestly taken from Logan’s Braes of Yarrow.[[96]] N has been interpolated with artificial nonsense,[[97]] and is an almost worthless copy; the last stanza may defy competition for silliness.
M 1, 3, and N 4, 6, 7, belong to ‘The Duke of Athole’s Nurse.’ So also does one half of a fragment sent by Burns in a letter to William Tytler, Cromek’s Select Scotish Songs, 1810, II, 194–8, which, however, has two stanzas of this ballad (P) and two of ‘Rare Willie’s drowned in Yarrow,’ No 215.
The fragment in Ritson’s Scotish Songs, 1794, I, lxvii, is O.
Herd’s MSS, I, 36, II, 182, have the following couplets, evidently from a piece treating the story of this ballad:
O when I look east my heart is sair,
But when I look west it’s mair and mair,
For there I see the braes of Yarrow,
And there I lost for ay my marrow.
The groups A-I and J-P are distinguished by the circumstance, of no importance to the story, that the hero and heroine in the former are man and wife, in the other unmarried lovers. In all the versions (leaving out of account the fragments O, P) the family of the woman are at variance with the man. Her brothers think him an unfit match for their sister, A 8, B 2.[[98]] In C 2 the brothers have taken offence because their sister was not regarded as his equal by her husband, which is perhaps too much of a refinement for ballads, and may be a perversion. She was worth stealing in C as in B. The dispute in two or three copies appears to take the form who is the flower, or rose, of Yarrow, that is the best man, C 8, 9, 17, B 1, 12, D 1, 14; but this matter is muddled, cf. C 2, 3, D 2. We hear nothing about the unequal match in D-I, but in J-L a young lady displeases her father by refusing nine gentlemen in favor of a servant-lad.
Men who are drinking together fall out and set a combat for the next day, B-F, H, I. It is three lords that drink and quarrel in B-D (ten (?) in I). The lady fears that her three brothers will slay her husband, B 5, C 5. The lord in D 2 seems not to be one of the three in D 1, and we are probably to understand that three brothers get into a brawl with a man who has surreptitiously married their sister. Only one brother is spoken of in A (6), from whom treachery is looked for, E 2.