each party hanged their prisoners. This Ballad was sent to Mr Scott,
editor of THE BORDER MINSTRELSY, who inserted it in the third volume
of that popular work. In his letter to the author, he observed, that
the stoutest antiquarian in Scotland could not, after perusing AULD
WILLIE’S FAREWELL, suspect that the writer had the misfortune to have
been born _south_ of the Tweed.
[158] l. 1. _Ingle_--Hearth.
[159] l. 2. _Snell_--Bitter.
[160] l. 3. _Bouris_--Chamber.
[161] l. 3. _Heathery_, heathy.
[162] l. 4. _Glourin_, sulky.
[163] l. 7. _Lilting_, singing.
[164] l. 10. _Braw_, handsome.
[165] l. 11. _Aboon_, above.
[166] l. 13. _Wimpling_, dimpling.
[167] l. 16. _Flickering_, twinkling.
[168] l. 18. _Skelp_, dash.
[169] l. 1. _Braes_, high banks.
[170] l. 5. _Soom’d_, swam.
[171] l. 5. _Drumlie_, turbid.
[172] l. 6. _Ilka_, each.
[173] l. 8. _Scaith_, injury.
[174] l. 9. _Wraith_, spectre.
[175] l. 11. _Winsome_, handsome.
[176] l. 13. _Geck_, romp.
[177] l. 14. _Haughs_, meadows.
[178] l. 15. _Gowk_, cuckow.
[179] l. 1. _Pawky_, sly.
[180] l. 7. _The brine_--Bristol Channel. Milton uses the word _brine_
for the sea,
“The air was calm, and on the level brine
“Sleek Panope and all her sisters play’d.”
_Lycidas._
[181] l. 10. _Veranda_--An Italian colonade roofed.
[182] l. 5. _Thy brother_--Mr Mathias.
[183] Written after having seen him in five of his principal characters
on the Lichfield Theatre, June 1807.
[184] l. 10. _Warm marum_--The affection of cats for marum and valerian
is well known. They will beat down the stems, mat them with their feet,
and roll upon them.
[185] l. 13. _Asbestos_--A vegetable substance, soft and pliant as
muslin, and which fire cannot consume.
[186] l. 19. _To Verse_--PARADISE LOST, which, through the long period
intervening between its first publication, in the author’s life-time,
and Addison’s Essays upon it in the Spectator, met little public
notice, while his equally beautiful lesser works, Lycidas, Comus,
L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso, were scarcely known at all, till more than
seventy years after his death.
[187] l. 4. _Thy lays_--“Needwood Forest,” one of the sweetest local
poems in our language, of which Mr Mundy, in 1776, printed 500 copies
for presents to his friends. He has resisted all solicitation to
publish it at large; but such a beautiful work cannot die. It will be
given to future times; so also will the Fall of Needwood.
[188] l. 8. _Dryades_--Milton, in Comus, makes Naiades the plural of
Naiad:
“Amid the flowery-kirtled Naiades.”
[189] l. 10. _Brave Andre_--See Major André’s beautiful letters,
prefixed to the Monody on his disastrous fate.