[A composite volume : containing The ballads and songs of Ayrshire ...

HAKDYKNUTE.
of clues. A suspicion arose that it was liei' own composition. Some
able judges asserted it [to] be modern.
acknowledge it to be so.
The lady did, in a manner,
Being desired to show an additional stanza,
as a proof of this, she produced the three last, beginning with " loud
and shiill," &c., which were not in the copy that was first printed.
The late Lord President Forbes,* and Mr Gilbert Elliot of Minto
(now Lord Justice-Clerk for Scotland), who had believed it ancient,
contributed to the expense of printing the first edition, which came
out in folio about the year 1720. This account is transmitted from
\ Scotland by a gentleman of distinguished rank, learning, and genius,
\ who yet is of opinion, that part of the ballad may be ancient, but re-
\
touched and much enlarged by the lady above mentioned. Indeed,
he hath been informed that the late William Thomson, the Scottish
musician, who published the Orpheus Caledonius, 1733, 2 vols. 8vo,
declared he had heard fragments of it repeated during his infancy,
before ever Mrs Wardlaws' copy was heard of."
The suspicion thus hinted by Dr Percy has long
as an established fact.
since been held
The way in which Lady Wardlaw played off
the hoax is thus related by more recent commentators :
" She caused
her brother-in-law, Sir John Bruce of Kinross, to communicate the \
MS. to Lord Binning (son of the poetical Earl of Haddington, and s
'
himself a poet) with the following account : In perfoi-mance of my
|
promise, I send you a true copy of the manuscript I found, a few
weeks ago, in an old vault at Dunfennline. It is written on vellum,
in a fair Gothic character, but so much defaced by time, as you will
find, that the tenth part is not legible.'" This is a different version
from the finding of it in the " bottoms of clues."
In confirmation of
the ballad being modern, it is said " that Mr Hepburn of Keith, a
gentleman well known in the early part of last century, often declared
that he was in the house with Lady Wardlaw at the time she wrote
it ; and Mrs Wedderburn of Gasford, Lady Wardlaw's daughter, and
Mrs Menzies of Woodend, her sister-in-law, used to be equally positive
as to the fact."t
Notwithstanding this testimony, there still seems to be some
ground for the opinion of Dr Percy's correspondent, " that part of
* Duncan Forbes of Culloden.
f
Chambers' Ballads.
46