Page:The Book of Scottish Song.djvu/46

28 My Peggy sings sae saftly.

And in her sangs are tauld,

Wi' innocence the wale o' sense,

At wauking o' the fauld.

[ the words and the beautiful air of The Ewe-Bughts are of undoubted antiquity. They are given in the Orpheus Caledonius, published in 1725, but belong to a period considerably earlier. Ramsay, in his Tea Table Miscellany, marks the song with a Q, signifying that it was an old song with additions. Ramsay's additions were merely a trifling verbal alteration or two.]

[ simple yet energetic song, to the tune of The Ewe-Bughts, was written by in early life. He afterwards sent it to George Thomson for publication in his collection, and thus wrote of it:—"In my very early years, when I was thinking of going to the West Indies, I took the following farewell of a dear girl: it is quite trifling, and has nothing of the merit of the Ewe-Bughts. You must know that all my earlier love-songs were the breathings of ardent passion; and though it might have been easy in after times to have given them a polish, yet that polish to me would have defaced the legend of the heart which was so faithfully inscribed on them. Their uncouth simplicity was, as they say of wines, their race." Thomson did not at first see the beauty of Burns's words to the tune of the Ewe-Bughts, but afterwards adopted them in his collection.]