Excerpt from The Scottish Ballads: Collected and Illustrated Since the publication of a few Scottish Ballads by Percy, in 1755, but especially during the present century, the public have been put in possession of many various collections of popular narrative poetry; among which the chief are - Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1801 - Jamieson's Popular Ballads and Songs, 1806 - Finlay's Historical and Romantic Ballads, 1808 - Kinloch's Ancient Ballads, 1826 - Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, 1827 - and Buchan's Ancient Ballads of the North of Scotland, 1828. Each of these works contains a certain number of ballads, which the editors recovered from the mouths of the common people, and printed for the first time; as also a considerable number, which can only be called various versions of similar compositions elsewhere published. One way and another, nearly two hundred distinctly different ballads have been thus laid before the public; some of them in no fewer than six different forms. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.