Glen Collection of printed music > Printed text > Scottish songs > Volume 1

XVlll
about thirty years after Douglas, mentions it, and an-
other tune besides, in a satirical address to the magis-
trates of Edinburgh :
Your common menstrales hes no tune,
But, " Now the day daws," and " Into June."
Thus, also, in " the Muses' Threnodie," a local poem
written at Perth in the reign of James VI., " Hey, the
day now dawnes," is quoted as the name of a celebra-
ted old Scotch song ; and in " The Life and Death of
the Piper of Kilbarchan, or the Epitaph of Habbie
Simpson,'" published in Watson's Collection of Scots
Poems, 1706, the following line occurs :
Now, who shal] play, The day it daws ?
When Dunbar's allusion is associated with this last,
we are led to conclude, that the air in question was,
throughout a round period of two centuries, the com-
mon reveillee played by the town pipers, who, till re-
cent times, used to parade the streets of certain royal
burghs which supported them, at an early hour in the
morning, for the purpose of rousing the inhabitants to
their daily labour.
Passing over the two excellent songs which tradi-
tion, but tradition alone, ascribes to James the Fifth,
— " The Gaberlunzie Man," and " the Jolly Beggar"
— we find that this monarch, if not himself a song-
writer, was at least the cause why song- writing was in
others. After his death, the noblemen taken at the
battle of So! way Moss were conducted to London,
and afterwards liberated by King Henry VIIL, with
honours and presents, designed to make them exert
themselves in favour of his views among their country-
men. We are informed, however, by Sir Ralph Sad-
ler, tlie English king's ambassador at the Scottish court,
that, when they returned, they were universally exe-
crated under the epithet of the English lords ; it be-