Anne Barnard

“ While attempting to effect this in my closet, I called to my little sister, 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 her lover ”

“ We do not here give the continuation or second part of "Auld Robin Gray," in which the old gentleman is made to die, and "young Jamie" to marry the widow, as it is admitted on all hands to be a failure, and to destroy totally the beauty of the original story. In the present version we follow chiefly the old reading, which differs somewhat from that given by the authoress when late in life, as the alterations she then made do not appear to us to be improvements. ”

“ There is an old tune, called "The Bridegroom greits when the sun gaes down," united to old words of a somewhat indelicate character. About the end of 1771 or beginning of 1772, a young lady in Fifeshire, the daughter of a noble family there, and then only in her twenty-first year, being very fond of the tune, but scrupulous about the words, thought she would try her hand at making new words to it. ”