University of Virginia Library

—was printed at Glasgow, by Robert and Andrew Foulis, MDCCLV. 8vo. 12 pages.—We are indebted for its publication (with many other valuable things in those volumes) to Sir David Dalrymple, Bart. who gave it as it was preserved in the memory of a lady, that is now dead.

The reader will here find it improved, and enlarged with several fine stanzas, recovered from a fragment of the same ballad, in the Editor's folio MS. It is remarkable that the latter is intitled Captain Adam Carre, and is in the English idiom. But whether the author was English or Scotch, the difference originally was not great. The English Ballads are generally of the North of England, the Scottish are of the South of Scotland, and of consequence the country of Ballad-singers was sometimes subject to one crown, and sometimes to the other, and most frequently to neither. Most of the finest old Scotch songs have the scene laid within 20 miles of England; which is indeed all poetic ground, green hills, remains of woods, clear brooks. The pastoral scenes remain: Of the rude chivalry of former ages happily nothing remains, but the ruins of the castles, where the more daring and successful robbers resided. The House, or Castle of the Rodes, stood about a measured mile south from Duns in Berwickshire: some of the ruins of it may be seen to this day. The Gordons were anciently seated in the same county: the two villages of East and West Gordon lie

about 10 miles from the castle of the Rodes . Whether this ballad hath any foundation in fact, we have not been able to discover. It contains however but too just a picture of the violences practised in the feudal times all over Europe.

From the different titles of this ballad, it should seem that the old strolling bards or minstrels (who gained a livelihood by reciting these poems) made no scruple of changing the names of the personages they introduced, to humour their hearers. For instance, if a Gordon's conduct was blame-worthy in the opinion of that age, the obsequious minstrel would, when among Gordons, change the name to Car, whose clan or sept lay further west, and vice versâ. In the third volume the reader will find a similar instance. See the song of Gil Morris, the hero of which had different names given him, perhaps from the same cause.

It may be proper to mention, that in the English copy, instead of the “Castle of the Rodes,” it is the “Castle of Bittons-borrow,” (or “Diactours-borrow,” for it is very obscurely written), and “Capt. Adam Carre” is called the “Lord of Westerton-town.” Uniformity required that the additional stanzas supplied from that copy should be clothed in the Scottish orthography and idiom: this has therefore been attempted, though perhaps imperfectly.