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STORIES OF
acknowledge it as her own until two years before her death when she wrote to Sir Walter Scott and confided the histoiy of the ballad to him. Lady Anne Barnard died May 6th, 1825, in her seventy-fourth year."
Mr. JEneas Mackay, in a paper entitled " The Songs and Ballads of Fife" which appeared in "Blackwood" for September, 1891, says: "A song altogether of Fife origin and authorship marks the commencement of the period of modern ballads. It will be acknowledged that 'Auld Robin Gray' has few superiors, either amongst its predecessors or successors, though to call it the ' King of Scottish Ballads,' as Chambers does, is to raise it to a dangerous eminence which it would not be prudent even for the most patriotic native of the ' Kingdom' to claim for it." And he then gives an extract from the letter Lady Anne Barnard wrote in 1823 to Sir Walter Scott, who had referred in the "Pirate" to "Jeannie Gray," the village heroine in Lady Anne Lindsay's beautiful ballad. From Dr. Charles Mackay's "Thousand and One Gems of Songs" (1889) I quote as below:
" This beautiful ballad, of which the author-ship was long a mystery, was written by Lady Anne Lindsay. . . . It appears to have been composed at the commencement of 1772, when
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