Familiar Songs - Their Authors & Histories

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THE BLUE BELLS OF SCOTLAND.		503
The following altered version of Mrs. Grant's song became even more popular than the original. Andantino.


What clothes, in what clothes is your Highland laddie clad? His bonnet's of the Saxon green, his waistcoat's of the plaid; And it's oh! in my heart, that I love my Highland lad.	Suppose, oh, suppose that your Highland lad should die ? The bagpipes shall play over him, I'll lay me down and cry; And it'« oh! in my heart, that I wish he may not die!
THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME. " The girl I left behind me " is no doubt of Irish origin. It has been found in a manuscript dated about 1770. "The air was also taken down," says Bunting, "from A. O'Neil, harper, A. D. 1800—author and date unknown. The air was written for a march, and the English version of the words, called ' Brighton Camp,' differs considerably from these." Chappell, while he puts in an English claim to the air, admits that it may be Irish. He thinks it was probably written in 1758, when there were encampments along the coast—at Brighton among the rest—where many tunes of this sort originated. Wherever it was first played, it is now almost a century since it became the soldier's and sailor's loathe-to-leave, and it has so long been played on every man-of-war as she weighed anchor, and for every regiment as it quitted a town where it had been stationed, that an omission would be thought a slight upon the ladies.