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FAMOUS SONGS
often met with now, though Robert Burns wrote a stanza for the same in 1787, and two more stanzas in 1796, and called it, "O Whistle an* I'll come to you, my lad," which has not a very Scottish ring. The air is unmistakably Irish in method and construction, and Bunting gives it as an example of a very early style, with the defective fourth and seventh. A claim was put in for one Bruce, a performer on the violin, but John Maine, the author of " Logan Water" and the " Siller Gun," declared that although Bruce was a good performer, he had never been known to compose anything. It was made startlingly popular in London, and then throughout Eng-land, by O'Keefe, who introduced it into his musical farce, "The Poor Soldier," at Covent Garden, in 1782, with other Irish melodies. The original Irish was a comic song, " Go de sin den te sin," "What is that to him?" In the opera the melody was sung by the character Kathlane, to words beginning, "Since love is the plan." Indeed O'Keefe, who wrote such standard lyrics as "I am a Friar of Orders Grey," " The Ploughboy," " The Wolf," " The Thorn," and others, was in the habit of con-verting the songs of his own country to practical uses in his operas and plays, of which he is said to have written about two hundred.
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