Th’ infernal grace was reverend said;
Yap stood the hungry fiends a’ owre it,
Their grim jaws gaping to devour it,
When Satan cried out, fit to scunner,
‘Owre rank a judgment’s sic a dinner!’”
Not a few of these old Jacobite songs, with little or no alteration in the words, are sung at the present day as pure love-songs, few ever dreaming that they were meant for anything else when first composed: nothing more than this shows the intensity and tenderness of the feeling entertained by the Scotch Jacobites to their hero and idol, Bonnie Prince Charlie. The well-known and apparently perfectly harmless song, “Weel may the keel row,” belongs to this class; and who would ever smell treason in the touching strain “For the sake o’ somebody.”
One of the sweetest and tenderest of all the Jacobite songs is undoubtedly “Wae’s me for Prince Charlie,” beginning “A wee’ bird cam’ to our ha’ door,” and well known to all who have the least knowledge of Scottish song. Yet this song was written only about thirty or forty years ago by Mr. William Glen, a Glasgow merchant; and it is well known that many of the finest of Aytoun’s Lays are animated by this spirit of Jacobitism, showing how much calculated to touch the feelings and rouse the imagination of any one of an impulsive, poetic temperament, is the story of “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” as it is popularly told in song and story.
Perhaps it may be only fair, as a set off to the above, to give one or two of the best Whig songs:—
Haud awa frae me, Donald.
“Haud awa, bide awa,