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STORIES OF
his "Scottish Airs." Then Burns was taken with it, and wrote his famous " Scots, wha hae" in the Kyrielle form of stanza, in which the first three lines rhyme while the fourth is con-verted into a refrain. Burns was of the im-pression, or pretended to be, that it was the melody which Bruce's army used when they marched to the battle of Bannockburn. Several stories have been told as to the circumstances under which Burns wrote his stirring lyric, Lockhart inclining to the belief that he got the first idea of it when standing on the field of Bannockburn some six years before the poem was actually matured. The piece was written in July or August, 1793; in all probability after a thunderstorm in the former month, when he was caught in the rain with his friend John Syme. But what does it matter? Burns seemed to delight in occasionally mystifying his friends by springing poems " impromptu" upon them that had been finished long before.
Just a word about " The Blue Bells of Scot-land." In the Royal Edition of "Songs of Scotland," Dr. Charles Mackay declares the words to be anonymous, while in his " Thou-sand and One Gems of Song" he ascribes them to Mrs. Grant of Laggan, in the year 1799 (who was not the same Mrs. Grant who
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