'The Baron o Leys,' in The New Deeside Guide by James Brown [= Joseph Robertson], Aberdeen [1832], p. 15, and The Deeside Guide, Aberdeen, 1889, p. 23, is C. C 4-11 seems to be an interpolation by a later hand.
"Part of this ballad," says Buchan, II, 322, "by ballad-mongers has been confused with the ballad of 'The Earl of Aboyne' [No 240, A b], called in some instances 'The Ranting Laddie.'" Laing, Thistle of Scotland, p. 11, appears to have confounded it with 'The Earl of Aboyne' proper. He gives this stanza:
Herd's Manuscripts, I, 233, II, fol. 71, give the two following stanzas under the title 'The Linkin Ladie:'
'The Linkin Ladie,' judging from this fragment (as it may be supposed to be), was much of a fashion with the ballad which we are engaged with, and may have been an earlier form of it. Sir Walter Scott, who cites these verses from memory (Sharpe's Ballad Book, ed. 1880, p. 162), says that the hero of them was a brother of the celebrated [Thomas] Boston, author of 'The Fourfold State.'
'The Baron o Leys' relates, or purports to relate, to an escapade of one of the Burnetts of Leys, Kincardineshire, Alexander, A, B, George, C. A woman who is with child by him gives him his choice of marriage, death, or the payment of ten thousand crowns. He is a married man; his wife is ready to sell everything, to her silk gowns, to release her husband from his awkward position.
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