On the banks of Italy.’
Satan, being no horticulturist, pays no attention to this proffer.” Scott’s memory seems to have gone quite astray here.
[144]. Why the ghost should wait four years, and what is meant in st. 18 by his travelling seven years, it is not easy to understand. The author would probably take up the impregnable position that he was simply relating the facts as they occurred.
[145]. We must not be critical about copies which have been patched by tradition, but F 3 is singularly out of place for a “dæmon lover.”
[146]. Justifying Thackeray’s ‘Little Billee.’
[147]. Five are named in C 3, 4, but that is too many to allow. Probably two versions may have been combined here. B has only the three mentioned in C 4; the three of A 3 are repeated in A 9; and there are three only in E 7–9. The Black Burgess of C 3 occurs in A 3, and ‘the smack calld (caud) Twine’ of C 3 looks like a corruption of ‘the small (sma’) Cordvine.’
[148]. In a note at the end of E (which he regarded as a variety of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’), Burton says: “There appears to be still lurking in some part of Aberdeenshire a totally different version of this ballad, connected with the localities of the North [that is, not with Dunfermline, with which ‘Young Allan’ has no concern, or with Linn or Lee, which are in Outopia]. A person who remembered having heard it said that it ends happily, with the mariners drinking the bluid-red wine at Aberdeen. It mentions Bennachie, or the Hill of Mist, a celebrated hill in Aberdeenshire, which is seen far out at sea, and seems to have guided the gallant mariner to the shore.” All the copies “end happily” so far as Young Allan is concerned, and this is all that we are supposed to care for.
[149]. Mr Macmath informs me that all the traditional pieces in “Scottish Songs” are in the hand of Scott, of about 1795. At folio 11 (the top part of which has been torn away), Scott says: “These ballads are all in the Northern dialect, but I recollect several of them as recited in the south of Scotland divested of their Norlandisms, and also varying considerably in other respects. In a few instances where my memory served me, I have adopted either additional verses or better readings than those in Mr Tytler’s collection. Such variations can excite no reasonable surprise in any species of composition which owes preservation to oral tradition only.”
[150]. ‘C,’ safely to be identified with John Wilson Croker, says Colonel W. F. Prideaux, who, in Notes and Queries, VI, xii, 223, has brought together most of the matter pertaining to this ballad. If Colonel Prideaux’s supposition is well founded, ‘The Grey Cock’ was known in Ireland in the last century.
[151]. Scott suggested that the passage in Knox was the foundation of the ballad, January, 1802, in the first edition of his Minstrelsy, where only three stanzas were given. The Rev. Mr Paxton, however, first saw Scott’s fragment not long before 1804, and then in the second number of the Edinburgh Review, where there is no mention of the apothecary. Thereupon, he says, I “instantly” wrote the enclosed piece from the mouth of my aged mother. There is no room, consequently, for the supposition that either mother or son might have taken a hint from Knox, and put in the pottinger.