Glen Collection of printed music > Printed text > Scottish songs > Volume 2

555
Could I but obtain her,
Happy would I be I
I'll lie down before her,
Bless, sigh, and adore her,
With faint looks implore her,
Till she pity me. *
THE BRIDAL O'T.
ALEXANDER ROSS.f
Tune — Lucy Camphell.
They say that Jockey'Jl speed weel o't,
They say that Jockey'll speed weel o't,
For he grows brawer ilka day ;
I hope we'll hae a bridal o't :
* From Johnson's Musical Museum, vol. I., 1787. " This charming
song," says Burns, [^Cromek''s Reliques,'] " is much older, and indeed supe-
rior, to Ramsay's verses, ' The Toast,' as he calls them. There is another
set of the words, much older still, and which I take to be the original one,
as follows— a song familiar from the cradle to every Scottish ear :
Saw ye my Maggie,
Saw ye my Maggie,
Saw ye my Maggie,
Linkin ower the lea ?
High-kiltit was she,
High-kiltit was she,
High-kiltit was she,
Her coat aboon her knee.
What mark has your Maggie,
What mark has your Maggie,
What mark has your Maggie,
That ane may ken her be ? (by).
Though it by no means follows that the silliest verses to an air must, for that
reason, be the original song, yet I take this ballad, of which I have quoted
part, to be the old verses. The two songs in Ramsay, one of them evidently
his own, are never to be met with in the fire-side circle of our peasantry ;
while that which I take to be the old song is in every shepherd's mouth."
t Author of the Fortunate Shepherdess, a dramatic poem in the Mearns
dialect.