P. 809. B. "The ballad about Lady Livingston appears to be founded on a truth; her fate is mentioned by Sir R. Gordon. Only her mother, Lady Huntley, is made a queen; which it was natural enough in a Highland poet to do." Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe to Sir Walter Scott, Letters, XV, No 231, Abbotsford, 1825 or 26.
What Sir Robert Gordon says is: "In July 1616 yeirs, Elizabeth Gordoun, Ladie of Livingstoun (wyff to the Lord Livingstoun, now Earleof Lithgow), daughter to the Marquis of Huntly, died in chyld-bed, at Edinburgh, of a son called George, who is now Lord Livingstoun." (Genealogy of the Earls of Sutherland, p. 335.) The characteristic particulars are wanting.
D is also in Kinloch Manuscripts, V, 363, in the youthful handwriting of J.H. Burton, and is probably the original copy. The differences from the text of D, p. 314, except spellings, are these:
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