The Text.--Of seven or eight variants of this ballad, only three preserve the full form of the story. On the whole, the one here given--from Sharp's Ballad Book, as sung by an old woman in Perthshire--is the best, as the other ...
The Text of the ballad is here given from Kinloch's MSS., where it is in the handwriting of John Hill Burton when a youth. The text of the song Waly, waly, I take from Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany. The song and the ballad have...
The Text is from Ravenscroft's Deuteromelia (1609), the only text that has come down to us of a 'three-man's song' which achieved extraordinary popularity during' the seventeenth century.
The Text of this popular and excellent ballad is given from the Jamieson-Brown MS. It was copied, with wilful alterations, into Scott's Abbotsford MS. called Scottish Songs. Professor Child prints sixteen variants of the ballad...
The Text is taken from Wit Restor'd, 1658, where it is called A Northern Ballet. From the same collection comes the version of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard given in First Series, p. 19. The version popularly known as Johnny...
The Text is taken almost entirely from a copy which was sent in 1780 to Bishop Percy by a Miss Fisher of Carlisle; in the last half of the first stanza her version gives, unintelligibly: ...
The Text is given from a thirteenth-century MS. in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge (B. 14, 39): it is thus the earliest text of any ballad that we possess. In the MS. it is written in long lines, four (or six, as in 4...
The Text is from Herd's MSS., two copies showing a difference of one word and a few spellings. Stt. 3 and 5 are interchanged for the sake of the sense. ...
The Text here printed is taken from Percy's Reliques (1765), vol. ii. p. 302, etc. He compiled his ballad from a broadside and another copy, Kinge John and Bishoppe, that he found in his Folio MS.; and since he made it a much m...
The Text is from Motherwell's Minstrelsy (1827). It is based on a stall-copy, presumably similar to one preserved by Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, combined with a version from recitation, which Child none the less calls 'well...
The Text is from a manuscript at Balliol College, Oxford, No. 354, already referred to in the First Series (p. 80) as supplying a text of The Nut-brown Maid. The manuscript, which is of the early part of the sixteenth century, ...