A is from the Percy Manuscript of B Motherwell says (1827): "By testimony of a most unexceptionable description, but which it would be tedious here to detail, the editor can distinctly trace this ballad as existing in its present shape at least a century ago." The ballad was printed at Glasgow by Foulis in 1755 (and in an earlier edition, now lost), with considerable modern improvements. Hume's trag-edy of Douglas, produced in Edinburgh in 1 756, was founded upon the story, and the popularity of the play seems to have given vogue to the ballad. The sophisticated copy passed into recitation, and may very likely have more or less infected those which were repeated from earlier tradition. The poet Gray writes to Mason, June, 1757 (?): "I have got the old Scottish ballad on which Douglas was founded; it is divine, and as long as from here [Cambridge] to Aston." He quotes the first fifteen lines, substantially as in Foulis. Percy's version in the Reliques, 1765 (in, 93), is that of Foulis with further "improvements."
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