[108]. Minstrelsy, 1833, III, 144. For a criticism of Sir Walter Scott’s remarks and a correction of some errors, with much new information, see Mr T. Craig-Brown’s History of Selkirkshire, Edinburgh, 1886, I, 14–16, 311–15, of which work grateful use is here made.
[109]. Buchan’s note to E is, for a wonder, to the purpose. With his usual simplicity, he informs us that “the unfortunate hero of this ballad was a factor to the laird of Kinmundy.” He then goes on to say: “As the young woman to whom he was to be united in connubial wedlock resided in Gamery, a small fishing-town on the east coast of the Murray Frith, the marriage was to be solemnized in the church of that parish; to which he was on his way when overtaken by some of the breakers which overflow a part of the road he had to pass, and dash with impetuous fury against the lofty and adamantine rocks with which it is skirted.” I, 315.
[110]. Professor Veitch has remarked on the incongruousness of this stanza in Blackwood’s Magazine, June, 1890, p. 739 ff. Something like it, but adjusted to the circumstances of a maid, occurs in the ballad which he there prints as the “Original Ballad of the Dowie Dens.” See No 214, p. 174, L 19.
[111]. Mr Macmath informs me that in “A Collection of Old Ballads, etc., printed at Edinburgh between the years 1660 and 1720,” No 7228 of the catalogue issued by John Stevenson, Edinburgh, 1827, there is this item: “Be valiant still, etc., a new song much in request; also Logan Water, or, A Lover in Captivity.”
[112]. “Hire a horse,” in an “old fragment”?—Cunningham gives the first two stanzas of the ballad, with variations in the first, in his edition of Burns, 1834, V, 107.
[113]. This volume came in 1836 into the hands of Motherwell’s friend, Mr P. A. Ramsay. The entries have been communicated to me by Mr Macmath.
[114]. The cane in 181 of this copy is a touch of “realism” which we have had in a late copy of Tam Lin; see J 16, III, 505.
[115]. The attempt to lessen the disproportion of the match seems to me a decidedly modern trait. In H 27, 28, this goes so far that the maid has twenty ploughs and three against the laird’s thirty and three. In M 3–5, the maid’s father was once a landed laird, but gambles away his estate, and then both father and mother take to drinking!
[116]. Of D, W. Laidlaw writes as follows, September 11, 1802: “I had the surprise of a visit from my crack-brained acquaintance Mr Bartram of Biggar, the other day. He brought me a copy of the ‘Laird of Laminton,’ which has greatly disappointed my expectations. It is composed of those you have and some nonsense. But it overturns the tradition of this country, for it makes the wedding and battle to have been at Lauchinwar.” Letters addressed to Sir Walter Scott, I, No 73, Abbotsford.
For the particulars of the compilation of the copies in the Minstrelsy, see the notes to B, C.