The authoress belonged to a family who are characterized by an old ballad, in contrast to the strain of her song, as "the Lindsays light and gay." Lady Ann, daughter of James Lindsay, fifth Earl of Balcarras, afterwards married to Sir Andrew Barnard, was accustomed to hear a servant of her father's sing an old Scots song, The Bridegroom grat when the Sun gaed down. Wishing to sing the tune, but disliking the words to which it was sung, she set about writing some suitable verses. Her idea was to make the song a "little history of virtuous distress in humble life,”—of a maiden, with her lover at sea, her father and mother oppressed by poverty and sickness, wooed by a wealthy old suitor. A difficulty occurred in the composition; and she applied to her little sister Elizabeth, afterwards Lady Hardwicke, who was the only person in the room beside her. She told her that she was writing a ballad, in which she was overwhelming the heroine with misfortunes. ""I have already sent her Jamie to sea, and broken her father's arm, and made her mother fall sick, and sent her Auld Robin Gray for her 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 Annie,' said the little Elizabeth. The cow was immediately lifted by me, and the song completed." 1 The song is a perfect embodiment of the finest spirit of tragedy. On the one hand, there is the remorseless tyranny of external circumstances over human affection, in the rapid accumulation of calamities around the path of the heroine, closing her in to a destiny from which all 1 See the authoress's well-known letter to Sir Walter Scott. F the instincts of her heart shrink back. On the other hand, there is the sublime victory of human will over the tyranny of external events, in the unwavering virtue with which the heroine accepts the obligations of the unkindly destiny to which they had shut her up,-a virtue which appears affectingly in the authoress's own description of the interview with Jamie after his return, but which is obscured in an unhappy popular alteration of the passage "O sair did we greet, and mickle say o' a', I gied him ae kiss, and bade him gang awa'!"1 There are several other touches of nature in the details of the song, which open up additional sources of its power over our feelings. One of these it may be sufficient to point out. and the mother in her sickness, were both anxious that their daughter should accept Auld Robin Gray's proposal to marry him for their sakes; and the contrast in the expression of this anxiety, by the harder nature of the father and the more sympathetic tenderness of the mother, forms a family picture of irresistible pathos :"My father urged me sair2: my mither didna speak; But she lookit in my face till my heart was like to break." The father with his broken arm, 1 The popular alteration referred to gives "O sair sair did we greet, and mickle did we say; We took but ae kiss, and we tore ourselves away." 2 A common variation of this passage, which is perhaps an improvement, gives "My faither argued sair." The version given by Herd, in the edition of 1776, presents the father in a That heart is not to be envied, which, picturing the whole scene with that mother's look, does not feel like to break too. The popularity of such a song is not astonishing; but the great wave of enthusiasm which swept even over England, and touched the Continent, is almost unprecedented. Not the least significant indication of this popularity is the fact that the fame of the greatest genius among the contemporaries of the authoress was eclipsed in the fashions of the time by a "Robin Gray hat". superseding one that had been named after Goethe's "Werther." 1 The authoress herself gave a happy résumé of the various forms of popularity which her song enjoyed on one of those occasions- the source of some capital stories-on which she parried the attempts that were made to surprise her into the acknowledgment, from which she shrank, of having written the song. The secretary of some Antiquarian Society, deputed to inquire into the authorship, was subjecting her to an impertinent cross-examination. "The ballad in ques tion," she replied, “has, in my opinion, met with attention beyond its deserts. It set off with having a very fine tune put to it by a doctor of music; was sung by youth and beauty for five years and more; had a romance composed on it by a man of eminence; was the subject of a play, of an opera, of a panto more amiable light, referring the persistent pressure of the suit to Auld Robin Gray : "Auld Robin argued sair." 1 See "The Songstresses of Scotland," by Sarah Tytler and J. L. Watson, vol. i. p. 171. mime; was sung by the united armies in America, acted by Punch, and afterwards danced by dogs in the street; but never more honoured than by the present investigation!"1 One effect, however, of this popularity was unfortunate; it gave rise to a Continuation of Auld Robin Gray, which was sung about the streets, and even found its way into magazines, greatly to the annoyance of the authoress. This was probably a chief motive with her in writing the second part, in which the tragic pathos of the original song is wholly dissolved, by Auld Robin being made a martyr to the poetical justice of romance, and yielding his place in his comfortable home to young Jamie by considerately dying soon after his marriage. She may have been influenced partly also by affection for her mother, who used to ask some gratification of her curiosity about the fate of the lovers: “Annie, I wish you would tell me how that unlucky business of Jeanie and Jamie ended." 2 But it was an evil day, for our perfect sympathy with the tragedy, when she abandoned her original conception of the absolute blamelessness of the three main sufferers, and adopted the hint thrown out by the Laird of Dalzell, in an exclamation which he uttered on listening to the first part: "Oh! the villain! Oh! the auld rascal! I ken wha stealt the poor cow-it was Auld Robin Gray himsel'!" 3 With regard to those songs which refer to the more ordinary disappointment arising from unreciprocated 1 See "The Songstresses of Scotland," vol. ii. pp. 88-9. 3 Ibid. pp. 99, 100. love, the most and the best are free from a weak Wertherian sentiment. They are mostly the utterances of men and women who have not leisure for such sentiment, to whom love is nothing if it is not a sustaining force in the rough battle of life, and who conquer in life's industry the griefs which conquer the idle. It is pleasing, therefore, to meet in these songs with sentiment of high generosity asserting itself in the midst of. painful reminiscences, and of the painful foreboding that these reminiscences will cling to the mind through life. This is finely illustrated in that delicious bit of lyrical composition by Mrs. Grant of Carron, Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch, in which the jilted lover cannot choose but doat on the provoking witchery of his mistress's charms, even while he is fretting at her faithlessness. Take the chorus with the last verse : Roy's wife of Aldivalloch! As I cam o'er the braes o' Balloch? "Her hair sae fair, her een sae clear, Her wee bit mou sae sweet and bonnie, Though she's for ever left her Johnnie." The sentiment, however, finds perfect expression, on the part of a maiden, in an old song, My Heart's my ain, which will be quoted in the sequel. But it is not surprising that the manful feeling which pulsates in these songs of disappointed love should thrill the singer at times with the vigorous indignation of |