A. ‘Lady Daisy,’ Aytoun’s Ballads of Scotland, II, 173, 1859.
B. ‘Lady Dayisie,’ from an old lady’s collection formerly in possession of Sir Walter Scott,[29] now belonging to Mr Macmath, Edinburgh.
C. Sharpe’s Ballad Book, p. 12, 1823.
D. ‘Lady Diamond,’ Buchan’s MSS, II, 164; ‘Lady Diamond, the King’s Daughter,’ Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 206; ‘Ladye Diamond,’ Dixon, Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads, p. 71, Percy Society, vol. xvii.
E. ‘Robin, the Kitchie-Boy,’ Joseph Robertson, “Adversaria,” p. 66.
Diamond (Daisy, Dysmal, Dysie), only daughter of a great king, is with child by a very bonny kitchen-boy. The base-born paramour is put to death, and, by the king’s order, his heart is taken to the princess in a cup of gold. She washes it with the tears which run into the cup, A, B, C, and dies of her grief. Her father has a sharp remorse, A, C; his daughter’s shame looks pardonable, when he considers the beauty of the man he has slain, A.
B is blended with ‘Willie o Winsbury,’ No 100; cf. B 4-9, and No 100, A 2-7, B 1-5, etc. In ‘Willie o Winsbury’, B, the princess’s name is Dysmill. A 12, B 11 of ‘Lady Diamond’ also recall ‘Willie o Winsbury.’
In C, D, the kitchen-boy is smothered between two feather-beds.
Isbel was the princess’s name in a copy obtained by Motherwell, but not preserved. Motherwell’s Note-Book, p. 7; C. K. Sharpe’s Correspondence, II, 328.
The ballad is one of a large number of repetitions of Boccaccio’s tale of Guiscardo and Ghismonda, Decamerone, IV, 1. This tale was translated in Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, 1566 (ed. Jacobs, I, 180), and became the foundation of various English poems and plays.[30] Very probably it was circulated in a chap-book edition in Great Britain, as it was in Germany (Simrock, Volksbücher, VI, 153).