O'ER THE MUIR AMANG THE HEATHER. 147 O'ER THE MUIR AMANG THE HEATHER. COMING through the Craigs o' Kyle, Keeping a' her ewes thegither. O'er the muir amang the heather, Says I, "My dear, where is thy hame? Says she, "I tent the fleecy flocks That feed amang the blooming heather." We laid us down upon a bank, Sae warm and sunny was the weather; While thus we lay she sung a sang, Till echo rang a mile and farther; And aye the burden o' the sang Was "O'er the muir amang the heather." She charmed my heart, and aye sinsyne By sea and sky she shall be mine, O'er the muir amang the heather, JOHN PINKERTON. 1758-1826. Though Pinkerton is remembered as an antiquarian and historian, his fame has suffered from his peccadilloes as a writer of poetry. While extremely severe on others who ventured upon anything like literary deception, he was himself unable to resist the temptation of foisting some of his own compositions upon the public as antique. Thus in his Scottish Tragic Ballads in 1781 he printed a second part of "Hardyknute," for which he stated that he was "indebted to the memory of a lady in Lanarkshire, but which, later, in his Select Scottish Ballads and Ancient Scottish Poems he acknowledged to be his own composition. In the same way, in his Select Scottish Ballads, he printed the stanzas which follow as the old words of the beautiful and ancient air of "Bothwell Bank." The song when stripped of its pseudo-antique orthography stands confessedly modern. Both disguised in his antiquarian collections, and confessedly in his own Rimes and other volumes, he published a good deal of fair original poetry. BOTHWELL BANK. ON the blithe Beltane, as I went I heard a damsel speak her wae. I willows. I woods. "O Bothwell bank, thou bloomest fair, "But he left me ae dreary day, JOHN MAYNE. 1759-1836. A native of Dumfries, and in youth a compositor's apprentice under the celebrated Foulises of Glasgow, John Mayne was for the greater part of his life connected, as printer and part proprietor, with the "Star" newspaper in London. His principal poem "The Siller Gun" celebrates a relic of ancient Wapinschawing surviving in his time at Dumfries-the competition for a trophy presented by James VI. After appearing in part on a broadsheet in 1777, and in Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine in 1780, it was printed in a final edition of five cantos, with the author's revision, by Cadell in 1836. As a description, vivid and terse, of a rustic festival, "The Siller Gun" is no unworthy example of the vein of Scots poetry represented by James V.'s "Christ's Kirk on the Green" and Fergusson's "Leith Races." It was highly praised by Sir Walter Scott and by Lord Woodhouselee. Another considerable poem by Mayne, entitled "Glasgow," was published in 1803. His verses on "Hallowe'en" appeared first in Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine for November, 1780, and were included in an edition of "The Siller Gun" in 1783; while "The King's Welcome Home," one of the poetic eulogies which hailed the northern visit of George IV. in 1822, was printed in the edition of 1836. But perhaps Mayne's most famous composition is the song of "Logan Braes. The tune of "Logan Water" to which the words are set, is said to be as old, at least, as the latter end of the seventeenth century, and was formerly attached to a somewhat indelicate ditty, beginning— "Ae simmer night on Logan Braes, I helped a lassie on wi' her claes, The two first stanzas of Mayne's composition, written and sung at Glasgow in 1781, were printed in the "Star" newspaper, May 23, 1789. Four additional stanzas appeared in the Pocket Encyclopædia of Songs (Glasgow, 1816), but were probably not all Mayne's. His own final edition of the song, consisting of three stanzas, he printed in the preface to his "Siller Gun 1836. Four years after the first appearance of Mayne's song, Burns, who had heard the tune and the refrain, adopted the latter as a fragment of an old song, and wrote to it his wellknown stanzas of "Logan Water." in |