And now, I think, Monkbarns, you prick up your ears and wipe your spectacles. That is the motto, as every one of the learned family of antiquaries is well aware, and, as you have often told me, of your great forbear, the venerable and praiseworthy Aldobrand Oldenbuck the Typographer, who fled from the Low Countries during the tyrannical attempt of Philip II. to suppress at once civil and religious liberty. As all the world knows, he withdrew from Nuremberg to Scotland, and set up his Penates and (what you may not hitherto have been aware of) his Printing Press at Fairport, and under your ancestral roof of Monkbarns. But, what will surprise you yet more, the parchment sheet which bears Aldobrand’s motto in German contains printed matter in good Scots! This excellent and enterprising man must have set himself to ply his noble art in his new home, and in our unfamiliar tongue.
Yet, even now, we are not at the end of this most fortunate discovery. It would appear that there was little demand for works of learning and religion in Scotland, or at least at Fairport; for the parchment sheet contains fragments of a Ballad in the Scots tongue. None but a poor and struggling printer would then have lent his types to such work, and fortunate for us has been the poverty of your great ancestor. Here we have the very earliest printed ballad in the world, and, though fragmentary, it is the more precious as the style proves to demonstration, and against the frantic scepticism even of a Ritson, the antique and venerable character of those compositions. I send you a copy of the Ballad, with the gaps (where the tooth of time or of the worm, _edax rerum_, hath impaired it) filled up with conjectural restorations of my own. But how far do they fall short of the original simplicity! _Non cuivis contingit_. As the title is lacking, as well as the imprint, I have styled it
THE FRAGMENT OF THE FAUSE LOVER AND THE DEAD LEMAN.
O Willie rade, and Willie gaed Atween the shore and sea, And still it was his dead Lady That kept him company.
O Willie rade, and Willie gaed Atween the [loch and heather], And still it was his dead Lady That [held his stirrup leather].
“O Willie, tak’ me up by ye, Sae far it is I gang; O tak’ me on your saddle bow, Or [your day shall not be lang].”