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510 ENGLISH SONG AND BALLAD MUSIC. |
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Bull, in Cornhill," 1683 (8vo.); and there entitled, " The generous Loyer, a new song, set by Mr. Tho. Farmer." In the same year, they were included in the fourth book of " Choice Ayres and Songs to sing to the Theorbo-lute or Bass-viol: being most of the newest Ayres and Songs sung at Court, and at the Public Theatres; Composed by several Gentlemen of His Majesty's Musick, and others;" and the tune alone, printed in " The Genteel Companion for the Recorder, by Humphrey Salter, Gent." It then passed into Pills to purge Melancholy, and was included in the first volume of every edition; the tune was also introduced into many ballad-operas.
I may here remark that the Pills of 1719, having been made up by D'Urfey, the two first volumes consist exclusively of his songs. Older songs which were contained in the first and second volumes of prior editions were then transferred from the first to the third, from the second to the fourth, and some to the fifth. He removed only two or three of his own songs.
Although there can be no doubt of the authorship of the words and music of this song, it has been claimed as Scotch. About fifty years after its first publication, the tune appears in a corrupt form, in Thomson's Orpheus Caledonius, ii. 14 (1733). The alterations may have arisen from having been traditionally sung, or may have been made by Thomson. There are also a few changes in the words, such as the name of " Stella " altered to " Nelly," and " she rose and let me in " to " she raise and loot me in." These were copied from vol. ii. of Allan Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany, in which the song is marked " z," as being old.
Allan Ramsay was not particular as to the nationality of his songs,—it sufficed that they were popular in Scotland. His collection includes many of English origin; and several of the tunes to which the songs were to be sung are English and Anglo-Scottish. Ritson claimed this, in his Essay on Scottish Song, as " an English song of great merit, which has been scotified by the Scots themselves." Upon which, Mr. Stenhouse, in his notes to Johnson's Scot's Musical Museum, asks, " Could any person in his sound senses affirm that such lines as the following, in Playford's edition of the song, printed in his fourth volume of Choice Ayres and Songs, with the music, in 1683, were not only English, but English of great merit, too ?" Mr. Stenhouse's opinion of the merits or demerits of the song are of little importance: it suffices to say that Burns differed from him;—but to assert that the copy in Playford's Choice Ayres is not English, betrays an excess of nationality that made him utterly regardless of his own future credit for veracity. In the forty lines, of which the song consists, there is not a single Scotch word,—not even one that could be mistaken for Scotch, unless it were " bern " for " child!" If Mr. Stenhouse had only a pocket dictionary, which did not contain old words, he certainly used a copy of Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry, in the glossary to which he would have found " barne, berne—man, person. " If " bairn " had been the word, the mistake would have been more excusable, because it is the more common form in Scotland; but whether written " barn," " bern," " beam," or " bairn," all are English, and words in use at that time. D'Urfey spells it " beam," in his Songs and Poems, as in Bailey's |
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