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xvi |
PREFACE |
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partly in Mauchline and partly at Ellisland—a period which included many sorrows, ending in a prudent marriage and a solitary residence on the banks of the Nith preparing a home for his wife. Such was his life while he wrote the Honeymoon and other songs1 for the Museum.
More than fifty songs in this third volume are his own, and during the process of preparation for the press he was constantly informed of the progress of the volume and exhibited' the greatest interest in it. He asks Johnson ' to send any tunes or anything to correct,' and afterwards tells him that when he comes to Edinburgh he will overhaul the whole collection.
Immediately after the publication of the fourth volume, in August, 1792, the attention of Burns was diverted from the Museum by the intervention of George Thomson, and four years elapsed between the appearance of the fourth and the posthumous fifth volume, which, however, was all sketched and nearly ready for publication at the poet's death. Thus, about the end of 1793, Burns informed Johnson that he was laying out materials for the fifth volume; a few months later he sent ' forty-one songs,' and still later he requests that 'those tunes and verses that Clarke and you cannot make out' should be sent to him. In June, 1794, Johnson intimated that the fifth volume was actually begun. In March, 1795, Burns returned a packet of songs, and a .year afterwards had proofs sent him to correct. In this way Burns knew the contents of the posthumous volume, which was indeed far advanced in the press when he died. The surplus songs left over from this and the previous volumes constitute nearly one-third of the last and sixth volume, yet it .took Johnson seven years to complete and publish it.
The Scots Musical Museum remains the standard collection of Scottish Song, and as a work of reference cannot be superseded. Considerably more than one-half of the pieces in the following pages were originally published there, and next to the authorized
1 A facsimile, which follows the Bibliography, of the holograph list of songs proposed for the third volume and heretofore unnoticed is an Important document. It discloses Burns as the author of a considerable number of songs hitherto unsuspected and anonymous, among which may be named Sir John Cope (No. 291), The Campbells are comin (No. Jj6), Joknie Blunt (No. jjj), and many others. |
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