A LYKE-WAKE DIRGE
From the Border Minstrelsy. The ideas are mainly pre-Christian;
the Brig o' Dread occurs in Islamite and Iroquois belief, and in
almost all mythologies the souls have to cross a River. Music for
this dirge is given in Mr. Harold Boulton's and Miss Macleod's
Songs of the North.
THE LAIRD OF WARISTOUN
This version was taken down by Sir Walter Scott from his mother's
recitation, for Jamieson's book of ballads. Jamieson later
quarrelled bitterly with Sir Walter, as letters at Abbotsford
prove. A variant is given by Kinloch, and a longer, less poetical,
but more historically accurate version is given by Buchan. The
House of Waristoun is, or lately was, a melancholy place hanging
above a narrow lake, in the northern suburbs of Edinburgh, near the
Water of Leith. Kincaid was the name of the Laird; according to
Chambers, the more famous lairds of Covenanting times were
Johnstons. Kincaid is said to have treated his wife cruelly,
wherefore she, or her nurse, engaged one Robert Weir, an old
servant of her father (Livingstone of Dunipace), to strangle the
unhappy man in his own bedroom (July 2, 1600). The lady was
beheaded, the nurse was burned, and, later, Weir was also executed.
The line
"I wish that ye may sink for sin"
occurs in an earlier ballad on Edinburgh Castle--
"And that all for the black dinner
Earl Douglas got therein."
MAY COLVEN
From Herd's MS. Versions occur in Polish, German, Magyar,
Portuguese, Scandinavian, and in French.
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