Glen Collection of printed music > Printed text > Songs of Scotland prior to Burns

338 SONGS OF SCOTLAND.
To Maggie my love I did tell,
My tears did my passion express ;
Alas ! for I lo'ed her ower weel,
And the women lo'e sic a man less.
Her heart it was frozen and canld ;
Her pride had my ruin decreed ;
Therefore I maun wander abroad,
And lay my banes far frae the Tweed.
In the reign of George I., when our national melodies and
songs were beginning to make their way into good company,
there was a young gentleman named Robert Crawford, who
manifested a decided gift in pastoral poesy. There has been
some doubt as to his family, and even his Christian name ;
but it may now be regarded as settled that he was not
William Crawford of the Auchinames family, in Renfrewshire,
as was at one time commonly set forth, but Robert Crawford,
second son of Patrick Crawford of Drumsoy, in that county.
Having an elder brother named Thomas, who was successively
secretary to the embassy of the Earl of Stair, and envoy extra-
ordinary to the court of Versailles, Robert came, by a natural
train of circumstances, to spend some years in France, and it is
believed that he died in returning from that country in the year
1732. There is so much obscurity about him, that we are glad
to lay hold of any tolerably well-authenticated fact which brings
him as a reality before us ; and therefore I here recall that
Mr Ramsay of Auchtertyre, writing to Robert Burns in 1787,
speaks of a conversation he had just had with a Colonel Edmond-
stone, who remembered being at his cousin Robert Crawford's
funeral fifty-five years before. Colonel Edmondstone added the
interesting particular, that he was ' a pretty young man.'
Robert Crawford's poetical genius was entirely for the Scottish
pastoral, an idealisation of the life of the hard-working peasantry
of his native country into shepherds with pipes and crooks and
coy damosels, seated among purling brooks and shady groves.
His strains had at the same time a mellowness and flow — even