The Text is from Sharpe's Ballad Book. A parody of this ballad, concerning an episode of the end of the seventeenth century, shows it to have been popular not long after its making. In England it has become a nursery rhyme (see...
The Texts are taken respectively from Alexander Fraser Tytler's Brown MS., and from Herd's MSS., vol. i. fol. 49, where it is stated that a verse is wanting.
The Text is from the Percy Folio, given literatim, with two rearrangements of the lines (in stt. 4 and 22) and a few obvious corrections, as suggested by Hales, and Furnivall, and Child. The Folio version was printed by Jamieso...
The Text is from Lovely Jenny's Garland, as given with emendations by Professor Child. There is also a curiously perverted version in Herd's manuscript, in which the verses require rearrangement before becoming intelligible....
The Text is from a copy taken down from North Devon tradition by the Rev. S. Baring Gould, and printed by Child; since when other versions have been found still in circulation in England. A Sussex version, though perhaps derive...
The Text here given is the version printed, with very few variations, in Wit Restor'd, 1658, Wit and Drollery, 1682, Dryden's Miscellany, 1716, etc. The Percy Folio contains a fragmentary version, consisting of some dozen stanz...
The Text is from the Glenriddell MSS., and is the one on which Sir Walter Scott based the version given in the Border Minstrelsy. Byron notes in the preface to Childe Harold that 'the good-night in the beginning of the first ca...
The Text given here is from Sharpe's Ballad Book (1824). Professor Child collected and printed some twenty-eight variants and fragments, of which none is entirely satisfactory, as regards the telling of the story. The present t...
The Text is modernised from a MS. in the University Library, Cambridge (MS. Ff. v. 48), which belongs to the middle of the fifteenth century. We have also a single leaf of another MS. version, of about the same date, preserved ...
The Text is given from Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, where it first appeared in the tenth edition (1740) in vol. iv. pp. 356-7. Child had not seen this, and gave his text from the eleventh edition of 1750. There is, howe...
Text.--The Percy Folio is the sole authority for this excellent lively ballad. It is here given as it stands in the manuscript, except for division into stanzas. Percy printed the ballad 'verbatim,'--that is, with emendations--...
The Text is from Kinloch's MSS., 'from the recitation of T. Kinnear, Stonehaven.' Child remarks of it that 'probably by the fortunate accident of being a fragment' it 'leaves us to put our own construction upon the weird seaman...
The Text is from the Percy Folio MS. The only other known text is a fragment from Sir Walter Scott's recollection, printed in C. K. Sharpe's Ballad Book.
The Text is from the early part of the Percy Folio, and the ballad is therefore deficient. Where gaps are marked in the text with a row of asterisks, about nine stanzas are lost in each case--half a page torn out by a seventeen...
The Text is from Arnold's Chronicle, of the edition which, from typographical evidence, is said to have been printed at Antwerp in 1502 by John Doesborowe. Each stanza is there printed in six long lines. Considerable variations...
The Text is derived, with trivial alterations, from Herd's MSS. In the first edition of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Scott says the principal copy he employed was one 'apparently of considerable antiquity' among the p...