Prof. Aytoun points out that vv. 51-58 of Percy's copy, which are now placed within brackets, are taken from _Lady Maisry_, a ballad obtained from recitation and printed by Jamieson (vol. i. p. 73).
"O whan he came to broken briggs He bent his bow and swam, And whan he came to the green grass growin' He slack'd his shoon and ran.
And whan he came to Lord William's yeats He badena to chap or ca', But set his bent bow to his breast And lightly lap the wa'."
It is however only fair to Percy to say that he printed _Gil Morice_ before _Lady Maisry_ was published.
Gray wrote to a friend, "I have got the old Scotch ballad on which _Douglas_ was founded; it is divine, and as long as from hence [Cambridge] to Aston."
Jamieson says, on the authority of Sir Walter Scott, that after the appearance of Home's _Douglas_ six additional stanzas, beginning--
"She heard him speak, but fell despair Sat rooted in her heart She heard him, and she heard nae mair Though sair she rued the smart,"
were written to complete the ballad, and in accordance with the final catastrophe of the tragedy Lord Barnard rushes into the thickest of the fight--
When the play was produced in Edinburgh in 1756 the heroine was named Lady Barnard, and the alteration to Lady Randolph was made on its appearance in England in the following year.
Jamieson gives three stanzas of a traditional version of the ballad, the whole of which neither he nor Motherwell could recover, although Mr. Sharpe told the latter that they were incorporated in an Annandale version which contained a novel feature in the story.
Motherwell prints a version called _Chield Morice_, which he took down from the recitation of an old woman of 70 in 1827, and which she had learned in infancy from her grandmother. She told Motherwell "that at a later period of her life she also committed to memory _Gill Morice_, which began with young lasses like her to be a greater favourite, and more fashionable than the set which her grandmother and other old folks used to sing under the title of _Chield Morice_." He also prints _Child Moryce_, taken down from the singing of widow M'Cormick of Paisley in 1825, and adds his opinion that Morice and Maurice are evident corruptions of Norice--a foster child. The story of Langhorne's _Owen of Carron_ is also taken from this ballad.]