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THE CLERK'S TWA SONS 0' OWSENFORD. |
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" This singularly wild and beautiful old ballad," says Chambers, (Scottish Ballads, p. 345,) " is chiefly taken from the recitation of the editor's grandmother, who learned it, when a girl, nearly seventy years ago, from a Miss Anne Gray, resident at Neidpath Castle, Peeblesshire; some additional stanzas, and a few various readings, being adopted from a less perfect, and far less poetical copy, published in Mr. Buchan's [Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland, i. 281,] and from a fragment in the Border Minstrelsy, entitled The Wife of Usher's Well, [vol. i. p. 214, of this collection,] but which is evidently the same narrative."*
" The editor has been induced to divide this ballad into two parts, on account of the great superiority of what follows over what goes before, and because the latter portion is in a great measure independent of the other, so far as sense is concerned. The first part is composed of the Peeblesshire version, mingled with that of the northern editor: the second is formed of the Peeblesshire version, mingled with the fragment called The Wife of Usher's Well."
* There is to a certain extent a resemblance between this ballad and the German ballad Das Schloss in OesUrrekh, found in most of the German collections, and in Swedish and Danish. |
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