Leslie in Fife and Leslie in Aberdeen are competitors for having given the inspiration to _Christ's Kirk on the Green_, to which Allan Ramsay afterwards added a second part in the same vein. But whether these passages of boisterous merriment, in which 'licht-skirtit lasses and girning gossips' play their part happed under the green Lomond or at Dunideer, there can be no question of the national popularity which the piece long enjoyed. Pope declared that a Scot would fight in his day for its superiority over English ballads; and the author of _Tullochgorum_, in a letter to Robert Burns, tells us that at the age of twelve he had it by heart, and had even tried to turn it into Latin verse. In _Peblis to the Play_, the fun is not less nimble although it is a whit more restrained; there is an infectious spirit of spring-time and gaiety in the strain that sings of the festal gathering at Beltane, when burgesses and country folks fared forth 'be firth and forest,' all 'graithed full gay' to take part in the sports. 'All the wenches of the west' were up and stirring by cock-crow, selecting, rejecting, or comparing their tippets, hoods, and curches. Not only Peebles, but
'Hop-Kailzie, and Cardronow, Gaderit out thick-fald, With "Hey and how rohumbelow" The young folk were full bald. The bag-pipe blew, and they out-threw Out of the townis untald, Lord, what a shout was them amang Quhen thai were ower the wald Their west Of Peblis to the play!'
From a phrase used by John Major, it has been suggested that James I. of Scots was the writer of this poem; and a note on the Bannatyne MS. of _Christ's Kirk_ attributes that companion poem to the same royal authorship. In spite of the adverse judgment pronounced by Professors Guest and Skeat, it does not seem an inconceivable thing that the monarch who wrote the _King's Quair_, and whose daughter kissed the lips of Alain Chartier as the reward of France for his sweet singing, should have written these strains descriptive of rural jollity in localities where the court and sovereign are known to have often resorted for hunting and other diversion. The cast and language of the poems appear, however, to belong to a later date; and the quaint stanza, afterwards employed in a modified form with such effect by Fergusson and Burns, is that used by Alexander Scot in _The Justing at the Drum_, and in other burlesque pieces of the early or middle period of the sixteenth century.