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FAMOUS SONGS
readers may be aware, is taken from the French. The poem of Paradis de Moncrif, which served as a model to Lady Anne Barnard, is entitled, 'Les Constantes Amours d'Alix et d'Alexis/ and though more than a century old, is still considered to be the finest example of what the French call a romance." I beg to disclaim here any extraordinary faith in the certainty with which this writer makes his interesting dis-covery of similarity between the two pieces; the fact is, I hardly know what to think. He pro-ceeds : " It has the naivete and the prolixity so charming in its apparent triviality proper to that kind of composition; and in comparing it with Lady Anne's poem, it is interesting to observe how in the passage of the tale northwards the romantic beauty of the original gives place to a tragic intensity in harmony with the severer-genius of the Scottish Muse." The author of this truly beautiful poem was born in 1687, was made a member of the French Academy in 1733, and died in 1770 at the age of eighty-three, just a year before "Auld Robin Gray" was composed. In the French poem there are thirty-seven stanzas, which are too many to quote. In the first verse, by the way, the poem begins by asking the parents why they should have broken off the engagement between the
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