a, from the collection of broadsides made by David Laing, now in the possession of Lord Rosebery, may probably have been printed at the beginning of the last century, at Edinburgh, b was taken "from a tolerably old copy printed at Glasgow." Excepting the lack of two stanzas, the variations from a are mostly of slight consequence; two or three are for the better, c (only the beginning, stanzas 1-41) was communicated by C.K. Sharpe, from a " Manuscript copy of some antiquity." d-g are of no authority, d, e are fragmentary stanzas, misremembered if not corrupted, f has ten stanzas, eight of which (some with a word or two changed) are from d. g is a washy rifacimento.
d is printed in Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, 1776, II, 3. The copy in Johnson's Museum, No 456, p. 469, is d without the first stanza.
Stanzas 19-21 of a, b, and their representatives in d, e, recall 'The Gypsy Laddie.'
Lizzie Baillie, of Castle Gary, Stirlingshire, while paying a visit to a sister at Gartartan, Perthshire, makes an excursion to Inchmahome, an island in Loch Menteith. Here she meets Duncan Graham, who, against the opposition of her parents, persuades her to prefer a Highland husband to any Lowland or English match.
"The heroine of this song," says Sharpe, "was a daughter of Baillie of Castle Carey, and sister, as it is said, to the wife of Macfarlane of Gartartan." The Baillies, as Maidment has shown, acquired Castle Gary "at a comparatively recent date," and that editor must be nearly, or quite, right in declaring the ballad to be not older than the commencement of the last century. Buchan has a bit of pseudo-history anent Lizie Baillie in his notes, at II, 326.
The story is told in a somewhat disorderly way even in a, and we may believe that we have not attained the original yet, though this copy is much older than any that has appeared in previous collections.
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