A squib on the birth of the Chevalier St George, beginning
Bessy Bell and Mary Grey,
Those famous bonny lasses,
shows that this little ballad, or song, was very well known in the last years of the seventeenth century.[[51]] The first stanza was made by Ramsay the beginning of a song of his own, and stands thus in Ramsay’s Poems, Edinburgh, 1721, p. 80:[[52]]
O Bessy Bell and Mary Gray,
They are twa bonny lasses;
They biggd a bower on yon Burn-brae,
And theekd it oer wi rashes.
Cunningham, Songs of Scotland, III, 60, gives, as recited to him by Sir Walter Scott, four stanzas which are simply a with ‘Lyndoch brae’ substituted in the third for Sharpe’s ‘Stronach haugh.’ ‘Dranoch haugh,’ nearly as in b, is, as will presently appear, the right reading. Sharpe’s third stanza, with the absurd variation of royal kin, occurs in a letter of his of the date November 25, 1811 (Letters, ed. Allardyce, I, 504), and is printed in the Musical Museum, IV, *203, ed. 1853.
In the course of a series of letters concerning the ballad in The Scotsman (newspaper), August 30 to September 8, 1886, several verses are cited with trivial variations from the texts here given.