Familiar Songs - Their Authors & Histories

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	THE HARP THAT ONCE THRO TAMA'S HALLS.	569


	FLOWERS OF THE FOREST. " The Forest * was a tract which comprehended the county of Selkirk, with portions of Peebleshire and Lanarkshire. It was a hunting forest of the Scottish kings, and at the battle of Flodden, the famed archers of the forest fell almost to a man. Miss Jean Elliot, author of the following song, was bora at Minto in 1727. Sao was a quiet, elegantly cultivated girl, and at the age of nineteen, during the stormy days of the rebellion of 1745, she received with so much composure a party of Jacobites who came to arrest her father, Sir Gilbert Elliot, Lord Justice, a staunch Whig, that the men rode off, convinced that he was well out of the way, —when he was within a stone's throw of the house. The family removed to Edinburgh, and there she continued to lead the life of a retired gentlewoman, the last of her generation who kept a sedan chair, in which she was. carried out for her daily airings on the shoulders of caddies. She died March 29, 1805.