Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (V. 3) Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE DAEMON-LOVER This ballad, which contains some verses of merit, was taken down from recitation by Mr. William Laidlaw, tenant in Traquair-knowe. It contains a legend, which, in various shapes, is current in Scotland. I remember to have heard a ballad, in which a fiend is introduced paying his addresses to a beautiful maiden ; but, disconcerted by the holy herbs which she wore in her bosom, makes the following lines the burden of his courtship:? ' Gin ye wish to be leman mine, Lay aside the St. John's wort and the vervain.' The heroine of the following tale was unfortunately without any similar protection. [The Daemon-Lover is related to the black-letter, ' A Warning for Married Women, being an example of Mrs. Jane Reynolds (a west country woman), from near Plymouth, who, having plighted her troth to a seaman, was afterwards married to a carpenter, and at last carried away by a spirit,' of which there are copies in the Crawford, Douce, Ewing, Pepys, and Roxburghe Collections, and which is reprinted in Roxburghe Ballads, ed. Chappell (iii. 200-1). There are also several chapbook derivatives. According to Carruthers (' Abbotsford Notanda' appended to Chambers's Life of Scott, p. 122), whose authority is Laidlaw's memorandum, Laidlaw took it' down from the recitation of Mr. Walter Grieve, then in Craik, on Borthwick Water,' and ' to complete the fragment,' Laidlaw added the 6th, 12th, 17th, and 18th stanzas. This cannot be altogether true of stanza xii., for it is partly a repetition of stanza x., and both closely resemble one in the black-letter :? 'The ship, wherein my love shall sail, Ib glorious to behold ; The sails shall be of the finest silk, And the masts of shining gold.' Moreover, stanza vi. is in part a repetition of stanza iii. But the statement i...Read More