The Scottish songs - National Library of Scotland

555
Could I but obtain her,
Happy would I be I
I'll lie down before her,
Bless, sigh, and adore her,
With faint looks implore her,
Till she pity me. *
THE BRIDAL O'T.
ALEXANDER ROSS.f
Tune—Lucy Camphell.
They say that Jockey'Jl speed weel o't,
They say that Jockey'll speed weel o't,
For he grows brawer ilka day
I hope we'll hae a bridal o't
* From Johnson's Musical Museum, vol. I., 1787. " This charming
song," says Burns, [^Cromek''s Reliques,'] " is much older, and indeed superior,
to Ramsay's verses, ' The Toast,' as he calls them. There is another
set of the words, much older still, and which I take to be the original one,
as follows—a song familiar from the cradle to every Scottish ear
Saw ye my Maggie,
Saw ye my Maggie,
Saw ye my Maggie,
Linkin ower the lea ?
High-kiltit was she,
High-kiltit was she,
High-kiltit was she,
Her coat aboon her knee.
; :
What mark has your Maggie,
What mark has your Maggie,
What mark has your Maggie,
That ane may ken her be ? (by).
Though it by no means follows that the silliest verses to an air must, for that
reason, be the original song, yet I take this ballad, of which I have quoted
part, to be the old verses. The two songs in Ramsay, one of them evidently
his own, are never to be met with in the fire-side circle of our peasantry
while that which I take to be the old song is in every shepherd's mouth."
t Author of the Fortunate Shepherdess, a dramatic poem in the Mearns
dialect.
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