‘Charlie MacPherson’ should have been put with Nos 221–5.
[137]. Epitaphs and Inscriptions . . . in the North East of Scotland, by Andrew Jervise, 1875, I, 17. (W. Macmath.)
[138]. The House of Drum is a well-known mansion in Liberton, near Edinburgh, and there is a note to F a importing (wrongly) that the ballad refers to this place.
[139]. Lady Jean Gordon was divorced from the Earl of Bothwell in 1567, “being then twenty years of age,” says Sir Robert Gordon. His continuator puts her death at 1629, in her eighty-fourth year. Genealogy of the Earls of Sutherland, pp. 143, 145, 169, 469.
[140]. There is, to tell the whole truth, an allusion in A, H to Jean’s portion, or tocher, as not being sufficient to justify the breaking of a previous engagement. One would wish to think that ‘portion’ in A 5 is a corruption of ‘fortune,’ and that what is meant is that her luck is hard. But tocher in H 3 is not easily disposed of.
[141]. The gross and uncalled-for language of father and mother in A 7, 10, has slipped in by a mere trick of memory, I am convinced, from ‘Lady Maisry,’ No 65, B, C. See again the ballad which follows this.
[142]. I owe the knowledge of Marshall’s and Fittis’s publications to Mr Macmath.
[143]. Carruthers, Abbotsford Notanda, appended to R. Chambers’s Life of Scott, 1871, p. 122.
In the last edition of Sharpe’s Ballad Book (1880), p. 158, we find this note by Scott: “I remember something of another ballad of diablerie. A man sells himself to the fause thief for a term of years, and the devil comes to claim his forfeit. He implores for mercy, or at least reprieve, and, if granted, promises this:
‘And I will show how the lilies grow