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434 HISTORICAL NOTES |
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of modem English Bacchanalians.' This Dunlop Manuscript, incomplete, is in the possession of Mrs. Pruyn of Albany, New York. The copy differs from the published versions, and it is obvious that Burns revised the song before sending it for publication. The first and fifth stanzas and chorus are as follows:—
First Stanza. Chorus.
'Should auld acquaintance be forgot, For auld lang syne, my jo,
And never thought upon ? For auld lang syne;
, Lets hae a waught o' Malaga, Lets hae a waught o' Malaga,
For auld lang syne. For auld lang syne.
Fifth Stanza. ' And there's a han' my trusty fiere,
And gie 's a han' o thine ; And we'll tak a right gudewilly waught, For auld lang syne.'
The rest is substantially the same as that in Johnson's Museum, The manuscript of the Johnson copy has disappeared. The song having been written for the Museum, it may be assumed that Burns, soon after the Dunlop letter, sent his verses to Johnson, who however put them aside because the air for which they were written had already appeared with the verses of Allan Ramsay in the first volume of the Museum published in 1787. Johnson afterwards discovered the merit of the song which caused him eventually to publish it, and thus to take the unusual step of reprinting a tune which had already appeared in his collection. To Johnson therefore must be given the credit of the original publication of Auld lang syne.
Some years later—in September, 1793—Burns forwarded a third copy to. George Thomson with the following note : ' One song more, and I have done, Auld lang syne. The air is but mediocre ; but the following song—the old song of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man's singing—is enough to recommend any air.' In November 1794, or after a lapse of more than.a year, Burns writes again to Thomson, apparently in answer to a reference the latter had previously made to the music. (Thomson had probably discovered from Clarke, the musical reviser of the Museum, that Johnson was in possession of a copy of Aulii lang syne.) He says: ' The two songs you saw in Clarke's are neither of them worth your attention. The words of Auld lang syne are good, but the music is an old air, the rudiments of the modern tune of that name. The other tune you may hear as a common Scots country dance.' I have marked the last sentence in italics as I will refer to it in the Notes on Thomson's set following. The fourth copy of the verses unsuspected and unknown I have discovered in the Interleaved Museum which I have been permitted to examine. These four precious volumes have been hidden from the public for nearly one hundred years, and Cromek, who, in his Reliques of Robert Bunts, 1808, pretended to have printed a verbatim copy of the Notes written by Burns, has misled the public in several ways as to the contents. In connexion with Auld lang syne he quotes what is not in the Interleaved Museum, and he omits what is there, which is : ' The original and by much the best set of the words of this song is as follows' as in our text. The Dunlop and Interleaved Museum copies definitely settle the disputed gude-willy controversy which need not have caused any controversy, as the term is Old English and occurs for example in the line ' A I faire lady I Welwilly found at al,' in John Lydgate's {c. 1375-1462) Complaint of the black knight. A ' gude-willy waught' means a deep drink of good fellowship.
It is necessary to explain what Burns meant by 'an old song.' Most of his numerous contributions to the Museum were original, but many were earlier fragments with his additions and corrections, and these he has described in the |
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