Saw ye my wee thing, saw ye my ain thing,
Saw ye my true love down on yon lea?
Crossed she the meadow yestreen at the gloaming,

Sought she the burnie where flowers the haw-tree?
Her hair it is lint-white, her skin it is milk-white,
Dark is the blue of her soft rolling ee;

Red, red are her ripe lips, and sweeter than roses-
Where could my wee thing wander frae me?'

I saw nae your wee thing, I saw nae your ain thing,
Nor saw I your true love down by yon lea;
But I met my bonny thing late in the gloaming,

Down by the burnie where flowers the haw-tree:
Her hair it was lint-white, her skin it was milk-white,
Dark was the blue of her soft rolling ee;
Red were her ripe lips, and sweeter than roses-
Sweet were the kisses that she gave to me.'

It was nae my wee thing, it was nae my ain thing,
It was nae my true love ye met by the tree :
Proud is her leal heart, and modest her nature;
She never loved ony till ance she lo'ed me.
Her name it is Mary; she's frae Castle-Cary;
Aft has she sat when a bairn on my knee :
Fair as your face is, were 't fifty times fairer,

Young bragger, she ne'er wad gie kisses to thee.'
'It was then your Mary; she's frae Castle-Cary;
It was then your true love I met by the tree;
Proud as her heart is, and modest her nature,

Sweet were the kisses that she gave to me.'
Sair gloomed his dark brow, blood-red his cheek grew,
Wild flashed the fire frae his red rolling ee;
Ye'se rue sair this morning your boasts and your scorning;
Defend ye, fause traitor; fu' loudly ye lie.'
Away wi' beguiling,' cried the youth, smiling-
Off went the bonnet, the lint-white locks flee,
The belted plaid fa'ing, her white bosom shawing,
Fair stood the loved maid wi' the dark rolling ee.

Is it my wee thing, is it my ain thing,
Is it my true love here that I see?'

'O Jamie, forgie me; your heart 's constant to me;
I'll never mair wander, dear laddie, frae thee.'

fly

John Lowe (1750-98), son of the gardener at Kenmure Castle in Galloway, studied for the Presbyterian ministry at Edinburgh. His one popular song, Mary's Dream, was written on the drowning of a ship's-doctor named Miller, who was attached to a daughter of the house in which Lowe was tutor. Lowe afterwards emigrated to America, where he taught a while, then took orders as an Episcopal clergyman, but having made an unhappy marriage, became dissipated, and died in great misery near Fredericksburg in Virginia. Only fragments of his other poems have been printed. Mary's Dream.

The moon had climbed the highest hill
Which rises o'er the source of Dee,

And from the eastern summit shed

Her silver light on tower and tree;

When Mary laid her down to sleep,

Her thoughts on Sandy far at sea,
When, soft and low, a voice was heard,
Saying: 'Mary, weep no more for me!'
She from her pillow gently raised

Her head, to ask who there might be,
And saw young Sandy shivering stand,
With visage pale, and hollow ee.
'O Mary dear, cold is my clay;

It lies beneath a stormy sea.

Far, far from thee I sleep in death;
So, Mary, weep no more for me!
'Three stormy nights and stormy days
We tossed upon the raging main;
And long we strove our bark to save,

But all our striving was in vain.
Even then, when horror chilled my blood,
My heart was filled with love for thee:
The storm is past, and I at rest ;

So, Mary, weep no more for me!

'O maiden dear, thyself prepare;

We soon shall meet upon that shore, Where love is free from doubt and care, And thou and I shall part no more!' Loud crowed the cock, the shadow fled, No more of Sandy could she see; But soft the passing spirit said :

'Sweet Mary, weep no more for me!'

Lady Anne Barnard (1750-1825) was the eldest daughter of James Lindsay, fifth Earl of Balcarres. Her life was divided between Balcarres in East Fife and Edinburgh, till in 1793 she married Andrew Barnard, son of the Bishop of Limerick, and afterwards appointed by Dundas as Colonial Secretary, under Lord Macartney, at the Cape of Good Hope. On his death in 1807 she settled in London. Her Auld Robin Gray, one of the most perfect, tender, and affecting of all our ballads of humble life, was written when she was a girl of twenty-two, published anonymously, and assumed to be an ancient piece. She revealed the secret of its authorship, which till then had been carefully kept, in a letter (8th July 1823) to Sir Walter Scott:

Robin Gray, so called from its being the name of the old herd at Balcarres, was born soon after the close of the year 1771. My sister Margaret had married, and accompanied her husband to London. I was melancholy, and endeavoured to amuse myself by attempting a few poetical trifles. There was an English-Scotch melody of which I was passionately fond. Sophy Johnstone, who lived before your day, used to sing it to us at Balcarres. She did not object to its having improper words, though I did. I longed to sing old Sophy's air to different words, and give its plaintive tones some little history of virtuous distress in humble life, such as might suit it. While attempting to effect this in my closet, I called to my little sister [Elizabeth], now Lady Hardwicke, who was the only person near me, 'I have been writing a ballad, my dear; I am oppressing my heroine with many misfortunes. I have already sent her Jamie to sea, and broken her father's arm, and made her mother

fall sick, and given her Auld Robin Gray for a lover; but I wish to load her with a fifth sorrow within the four lines, poor thing! Help me to one!' 'Steal the cow,

sister Anne,' said the little Elizabeth. The cow was immediately lifted by me, and the song completed. At our fireside and amongst our neighbours Auld Robin Gray' was always called for. I was pleased in secret with the approbation it met with; but such was my dread of being suspected of writing anything, perceiving the shyness it created in those who could write nothing, that I carefully kept my own secret.

With this letter Lady Anne sent two continuations of the ballad, which, like most continuations, are greatly inferior to the original. Scott published them, however, in his Auld Robin Gray: a Ballad (Bannatyne Club, 1825), to which reference may be made, as also to Lord Crawford's Lives of the Lindsays (1849). Lady Anne was brought before the public as an authoress once more during the South African troubles in 1899-1902, when nineteen interesting letters written home by her from the Cape in 1797-1801 were published as South Africa a Century Ago (1901). In these admirable specimens of the eighteenth-century style of letterwriting a shrewd, humorous, and widely experienced gentlewoman gives with entire frankness and frequent flashes of wit a clear and instructive account of the state of South Africa when the British flag was first hoisted over Cape Town,' and by no means omits the difficulties that beset attempts to conciliate the Dutch as much as possible' twenty years before her countryman Pringle recorded his experience of the settler's life.

Auld Robin Gray.

When the sheep are in the fauld, when the kye's come
And a' the weary warld to rest are gane,
[hame,
The waes o' my heart fa' in showers frae ma ee,
Unkent by my guidman, wha sleeps sound by me.

Young Jamie lo'ed me weel, and sought me for his bride,
But saving ae crown-piece he had naething beside ;*
To make the crown a pound my Jamie gaed to sea,
And the crown and the pound-they were baith for me.
He hadna been gane a twelvemonth and a day,
When my father brake his arm and the cow was stown
My mither she fell sick-my Jamie was at sea,
And auld Robin Gray came a-courting me.
My father cauldna wark-my mother couldna spin-
I toiled day and night, but their bread I couldna win;
Auld Rob maintained them baith, and, wi' tears in his ee,
Said: 'Jeanie, O for their sakes, will ye no marry me?'

[away;

My heart it said na, and I looked for Jamie back,
But hard blew the winds, and his ship was a wrack,

His ship was a wrack-why didna Jamie die,

Or why am I spared to cry wae is me?

My father urged me sair-my mither didna speak,
But she looked in my face till my heart was like to break;
They gied him my hand-my heart was in the sea-
And so Robin Gray he was guidman to me.

I hadna been his wife a week but only four,.
When, mournfu' as I sat on the stane at my door,

I saw my Jamie's ghaist, for I couldna think it he,
Till he said: 'I'm come hame, love, to marry thee!'

Oh, sair sair did we greet, and mickle say of a',
I gied him ae kiss, and bade him gang awa'—
I wish that I were dead, but I'm na like to die,
For, though my heart is broken, I'm but young, wae is me!

I gang like a ghaist, and I carena much to spin,
I darena think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin,
But I'll do my best a gude wife to be,
For, oh! Robin Gray, he is kind to me.

Robert Fergusson.

Robert Fergusson was born, on 5th September 1750, in Cap-and-Feather Close, off the High Street of Edinburgh. His father was a poor clerk, but both father and mother were of gentle Aberdeenshire blood, and a maternal uncle was a landed proprietor and factor in that county; his best biographer, Dr Grosart, assigns him two clerical great-grandfathers. Fergusson was sent to a private school at the age of six, and entered Edinburgh High School in 1758. He spent four years there, and is reputed to have been quick at making up leeway lost by frequent absences due to native delicacy of constitution, and to have been a devourer of books. In 1761 he procured a bursary which provided for 'maintenance and education' at the Grammar School of Dundee and the University of St Andrews, and after spending three years at the School he matriculated at St Andrews in 1765. Student life at St Andrews was not refined. The town swarmed with ale-houses, and the bursars had a too liberal supply of ale in their otherwise not too generous commons. So it is mainly the 'larks' of Fergusson's university career that contemporary gossip has preserved; a college servant described him as ‘a tricky callant, but a fine laddie for a' that;' and careless biographers have stated wrongly that he was expelled for participation in a row.' But he is reputed to have loved and known Virgil and Horace; he read much good English; and he had a close friend in Professor William Wilkie, whom Charles Townshend pronounced the most singular combination of god and brute he had ever met (see page 441). Fergusson had rhymed in the vernacular from a very early period, and one of his extra-academical performances was an elegy on the death of Professor Gregory, which showed that at fifteen he was on equal terms with Ramsay:

Now mourn, ye college masters a'!

And frae your een a tear let fa',
Fam'd Gregory Death has taen awa'

might have helped him to a career, proved fruitless, ending indeed in a violent quarrel. His mother had to support herself by 'taking lodgers,' and want of means barred all the professions to him.

He secured employment in the office of the Commissary Clerk in Edinburgh, and remained there, an industrious drudge, till shortly before his early death. He was accustomed to eke out the scanty wage he got for his mechanical office work by copying other legal documents; and he did not discontinue his essays in verse. R. Fergusson' was announced as the author of the 'words' of three favourite Scots airs' incorporated in Arne's opera, Artaxerxes, as performed in the Theatre-Royal, Edinburgh, in 1769. At this period he was unaware that the vernacular to which he had been faithful in boyhood was the right medium for his poetic ideas. The prose-writers who had made Edinburgh a literary centre were laborious imitators of English models. So when an opportunity of printing his manuscripts came to Fergusson, it was natural that he should emulate Pope and Gay rather than Ramsay or Hamilton. The Weekly Magazine in 1771 offered hospitality first to three pastorals of the conventional type, then to 'A Saturday's Expedition: in mock heroics,' to another serious 'Pastoral Elegy,' and a burlesque, all in English. Immediately, however, Fergusson found his métier, and showed that he knew it by signing the pieces in the vernacular which he contributed to the Magazine in rapid succession throughout 1772 and 1773; taking his place between Ramsay and Burns in that long line of realist-painters of the humours of homely Scottish life, a line which included the authors of Peblis to the Play and Chrystis Kirk in the sixteenth century (see Vol. I. p. 210), and the Sempills in the seventeenth (Vol. I. pp. 818, 819). The first of these vernacular pieces was 'The Daft Days.' Then an Elegy on the Death of Scots Music' proved pretty conclusively that a poet had arrived who could use his mother-tongue skilfully, if unequally, to paint nature and express natural though as yet superficial feeling :

Nae lasses now, on simmer days,
Will lilt at bleachin' o' their claes;
Nae herds on Yarrow's bonny braes,
Or banks of Tweed,

Delight to chant their hamely lays,
Sin' Music's dead.

sing slopes

By the end of 1773 his contributions to the Magazine had accumulated to such an extent that he felt warranted in publishing a selection of eleven of the best; and he cleared £50 by the volume. Then the poet's sun set suddenly. Fergusson was eminently sociable, but he was also physically incapable of sparing 'slices of his constitution' to those who courted his society. The Magazine had at once profited by his contributions and brought him fame. He was both talker and singer, and clearly an attractive personality apart from his growing reputation as a poet. The Edinburgh of

was seemingly glorious to Fergusson as it was to nine out of ten men of his day. He was Sir Precentor of the Cape Club, and retained his St Andrews fondness for high jinks. There is plenty of evidence to show that he never neglected his daily task, and that he was not more dissipated than the average of his contemporaries ; much less so, indeed, than many who have escaped the lash of the moralist that has fallen too heavily on the shoulders of the 'poor poet.' He had a severe illness in the beginning of 1774, and gradually sank into religious melancholia. He had to be confined in a madhouse, and expired there on the 16th of October 1774, at the age of twenty-four. He was buried in the Canongate churchyard, where, fifteen years later, Burns, at his own expense, erected a memorial-stone with a poetical inscription on it to his elder brother in the Muses.'

It is neither possible nor desirable to dissociate the achievements of Robert Fergusson from the 'acute painful youth' of 'the poor, high-soaring, deep-falling, gifted and misguided man' he has been described by the most generous and accurate of his censors. From first to last, from the St Andrews bursar's protest against 'rabbits hot and rabbits cold' to the 'half-fed, half-mad, halfsarket' law-clerk's spirited protest against Samuel Johnson's representation of Scotland, this undergraduate in life and in literature was a realist and a humourist-a humourist because he was a realist. It is, therefore, at once impossible to say how much he might have done within the field which Nature had marked out for him, and easy to mark the bounds of that field. 'His limitations,' says Mr Aitken, are evident enough. He had no lyric vein, no high reach of imagination, and no large constructive skill.' The observation is as true as it is succinct. He had no lyric vein because he had had no lyric experiences. The battle of life was hard enough with him, and went against him; but it was not sufficiently varied or long to allow him to escape from his dreary, if also picturesquely sordid, environments into the audacious satire of Dunbar, into the mystical yet profoundly humanitarian confidence of Burns that 'the universal plan will all direct,' or even into the sagacious and mildly sensual Horatianism of Allan Ramsay. Even if time and sanity had been allowed him, Fergusson could not have risen to the heights of the 'Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis' or the ultra-Rabelaisanism of the 'Tournament;' he could not have given 'the wandering train 'immortal glory and almost immortal justification in 'The Jolly Beggars,' or supplied a democracy

-of which he had but an imperfect conceptionwith such a marching song as ‘A man's a man for a' that.' It is even doubtful whether he could have written a second and truer Gentle Shepherd. Although he knew every potato on 'Epigoniad,' Wilkie's farm in Fife, and every inch of ground within walking or ferrying distance of Edinburgh, the world of lads and lasses, of 'the cannie hour at e'en,' and of the rigs o' barley' was outside the range of his sympathy, and its adequate representation was 'abune his micht.' But there is no reason to believe that he could not have written many companion sketches to 'Leith Races' and 'The Farmer's Ingle,' 'The Election' and 'The Daft Days,' 'Braid Claith' and 'Hallow-Fair.' Nay, given time and a little judicious encouragement on the part of the 'Embro' gentry,' this warm-hearted lad, who could be satiric but never bitter, would have done justice to that solid, strenuous, municipal Edinburgh which was springing up in his time, whose members had their faults of habit and demeanour, but yet, on the showing of the courteous and gently scanning Topham, were not 'so intemperate as the Germans.' Judged even by the torso of his poetry, Fergusson must be accounted a man not of talent but of genius. Much of his English verse-the bulk of what he has to say on Boreas and Phoebus, Cynthia and Clarinda, Sol and Damon-is unreal enough, but not a whit more unreal than that of the majority of his English contemporaries. When he was satirically in earnest he could write English that was sufficiently incisive, as in his metrical parody of Johnsonese or in verses like:

and

Thanks to the gods who made me poor! No lukewarm friends molest my door Who always show a busy care

In being legatee or heir.

Of this stamp no one will ever follow, The youth that's favoured by Apollo;

Virtue and vice in him alternate reign'd, That fill'd his mind and this his pocket drain'd; Till in the contest they so stubborn grew, Death gave the parting blow and both withdrew. Fergusson was above all things the poetical Jan Steen of the Old Town of Edinburgh during its transition through 'jink and drink' from poverty to comfort, of the tipsy brotherhood and sinning sisterhood of its closes, of the coarse joys of its burghal life, of the often dismal gaieties of its high feasts and festivals, of the 'wanwordy, crazy, dinsome' noise of its bells and its crowds-in a word, of the good-nature and good-fellowship of 'Auld Reekie,' where

All the world knows what Burns owes to his elder brother in misfortune-it was loudly and cordially proclaimed from the house-tops by the debtor, and has been exhibited in innumerable 'parallels' ever since for the conception and execution of 'The Cottar's Saturday Night,' 'The Twa Brigs,' 'Hallowe'en,' and 'The Mouse.' There are anticipations of Robert Louis Stevenson not only in the life of 'the poor white-faced, drunken, vicious boy that raved himself to death in an Edinburgh madhouse,' but in the dry causticity of 'Braid Claith' and in such legitimate tours de force of style as: Through his minimum o' space

Frae naked groves nae birdie sings,
To shepherd's pipe nae hillock rings,
The breeze nae od'rous flavour brings
From Borean cave,

An' dwynin' Nature droops her wings, decaying

Wi' visage grave.

Frae the big stack, weel-winnow't on the hill,
Wi' divets theekit frae the weet and drift,
Sods, peats, and heath'ry trufs the chimley fill,
And gar their thick'ning smeek salute the lift;
The gudeman, new come hame, is blythe to find,
Whan he out o'er the halland flings his een,
That ilka turn is handled to his mind,

That a' his housie looks sae cosh and clean;
For cleanly house loes he, tho' e'er sae mean.
Weel kens the gudewife that the pleughs require
A heartsome meltith, and refreshing synd
O' nappy liquor, o'er a bleezing fire:

Sair wark and poortith downa weel be join'd.
Wi' butter'd bannocks now the girdle reeks:
I' the far nook the bowie briskly reams;
The readied kail stands by the chimley cheeks,
And hauds the riggin het wi' welcome streams;
Whilk than the daintiest kitchen nicer seems. . . .
The couthy cracks begin whan supper 's o'er,
The cheering bicker gars them glibly gash
O'simmer's showery blinks and winter's sour,
Whase floods did erst their mailin's produce hash.
'Bout kirk and market eke their tales gae on,
How Jock woo'd Jenny here to be his bride,
And then how Marion, for a bastart son,
Upo' the cutty-stool was forc'd to ride,
The waefu' scald o' our Mess John to bide. . .

Then a' the house for sleep begin to grien,
Their joints to slack frae industry a while;
The leaden god fa's heavy on their ein,
And hafflins steeks them frae their daily toil :
The cruizy too can only blink and bleer,
The restit ingle 's done the maist it dow;
Tacksman and cottar eke to bed maun steer,
Upo' the cod to clear their drumly pow,
Till wauken'd by the dawning's ruddy glow.

...

Gloming, twilight; keeks, peeps; ca's, drives; byre, cow-house; sair dung, sorely tired; stecks, shuts; dighting, winnowing; bangs, defeats; fu' leal, right well; gars, makes; dowie, melancholy; fley'd, frights; divets, turfs; theekit, thatched; sods, peats, and heath'ry trufs, various turf fuels; gar, make; smeek, smoke; lift, sky; halland, partition; ilka, each; cosh, cosy; meltith, meal; synd, wash-down; downa, dare not; bannocks, cakes; girdle, hotplate; reeks, smokes; bowie, beer-barrel; reams, foams; riggin, roof of open hearth; couthy cracks, cosy talks; bicker, cup; gars, makes; gash, prattle; mailin's, farm; cutty-stool, stool of repentance; scald, scold; grien, long; hafflins steeks, half shuts; cruizy, oil-lamp; restit, roasted; ingle, chimney-corner; dow, can; cod, pillow; drumly pow, confused head.