The Canongate Burns (147 page)

Mackay includes this although Kinsley rejects it. Mackay justifies inclusion by stating ‘Published in all major editions except Kinsley. Perhaps the references to “fair Jeanie” were too obvious' (p. 612). This slants the evidence. Both Scott Douglas and then Henley and Henderson question its authenticity. They question the integrity of Alexander Smith who claimed to have seen a manuscript during 1868. No one has seen the manuscript since. Nor is there a motive for suppressing such a song. So, Kinsley was
not
out of step rejecting the song. When it first appeared in Chambers he notes that it featured in
The New York Mirror
in 1846 and is supposedly written about Jean Jeffrey, daughter of the minister of Lochmaben. Burns wrote
The Blue Eyed Lassie
about her and published it in 1790. This work does not have the same originality and reads like an imitation of Burns written to impress a woman that the author is desperate to have as a partner. The phrase ‘pit-a-pat' is not to be found anywhere in Burns. The second stanza does not ring true to Burns's values, as he would hardly have craved the possessions of the Dundas family.

Mackay (p. 614) includes this song without comment as a work of Burns, although neither Kinsley (1969) nor Low (1993) accept it. It has the ring of
Powers Celestial
, once attributed to Burns but found to have been copied by him from
The Edinburgh Magazine
. Burns did not mention this song as his when he sent it to George Thomson in September 1793, merely remarking that it was
old
. There is no reason that Burns might have hidden his authorship of this noncontroversial work. For these reasons it is rejected.

Burns did not sign this work as his own on publication. It appears to be based on a bawdy song preserved in Ritson's
North Country
Chorister
. Burns sent it to Johnson who liberally changed it from
Laddie Lie Near Me
to
Lassie Lie Near Me
, transferring the lyric to the male partner. It is uncertain how much of the song is by Burns, if any of it. Kinsley could not be certain of the poet's influence on the song but included it in the canon as K290 (see Vol. III, p. 1331). In 1793 Burns told Thomson he could not write lyrics to the tune
Laddie Lie Near Me
because ‘I do not know the air, and untill I am compleat master of a tune … I never can compose for it' (Letter 586). If this is correct, the above is not his.

These lines were added to the canon by Mackay (p. 620) after the Dumfries antiquarian James William collated material in 1993 from the manuscripts of Thomas B. Grierson of Thornhill. The ‘evidence' is that these lines were written in a letter by Burns although the letter has never been preserved. Grierson was assured that the lines were genuine, since ‘I had this from Mr. Alexander Hewison'. Such hearsay evidence is not enough.

This is included by Mackay, although doubted, but not rejected, by Kinsley (see notes to K624), even though Scott Douglas cites evidence from William Clark, 1831, who records that it is not from Burns, but a translation of a Latin song. A letter, supposedly by Burns (Letter 343), written from Ellisland to the London
Star
, allegedly included the song, but the letter itself may be the fiction of Allan Cunningham to justify his inclusion of the song, given that De Lancey Ferguson marks the letter as highly questionable. There is no manuscript of the supposed Burns letter and the original copies of the London paper are not extant. There is nothing contextual to suggest Burns in the lyric, so although the language and style
might
be
his, it seems unlikely. It is rejected. We have been unable to trace the original Latin song.

This is rejected because evidence suggests it existed as a Galloway Covenantor Grace long before Burns. Kinsley and Mackay's inclusion of this grace is surprising. Hearsay evidence that Burns
recited
an English version of the Grace during his Galloway tour in the summer of 1793 is no evidence for composition. There is no manuscript, even of an Anglicised translation. If Burns did recite it, it does not make it his. This rather docile, uncontroversial grace has managed to reserve itself a ritualistic recital in the Burns cult at annual Suppers worldwide.

This lengthy work in Standard habbie format was attributed to Burns without comment in Barke's 1955 edition. While it may
accord well with the poet's Biblical knowledge, there are several uses of language which suggest it is a work of the late 19th century. Indeed, it first appeared in
The Agnostic Journal
on 8th April, 1904 under the pen-name Saladin, known to have been employed by William Stewart Ross. The manuscript was apparently found among the Mavisgrove papers unearthed by J.D. Law in 1903. Owing to the popularity of Barke's edition there are probably still many Burnsians who believe this work to be genuine, even though the Kinsley and Mackay editions do not print it, nor do they fully explain why they rejected it. Mackay's useful reference update of Reid's
Concordance
(from the 1890s)
Burns:
A-Z, The Complete
Wordfinder
, in Appendix B, does provide proper explanation of its rejection.

Two versions of this are rejected by Kinsley (K626A–B) but reconstituted to the canon by Mackay (p. 610). They do exist in manuscript but read more like bawdy material merely collected by Burns.

In all her scholarly unravelling of Burns's complex relations with the London press, none approaches in humour Professor Lucyle Werkmeister's account of the comedy of errors which surrounds the appearance of two sets of verses on The Duchess of Gordon in Peter Stuart's
Star
. The paper was funded by the Portland Whigs and was supportive of the Prince of Wales. An attempt at winning the Duchess over to its side having failed, she became the object of satirical attack. The paper travestied her in a parodic version of Burns's vernacular style and, indeed, named Burns as the poet responsible. Werkmeister suggests that one of Stuart's Scottish staff, Andrew MacDonald, may have been responsible. While Kinsley and MacKay discard the poem, though the latter does not make this formally clear, it reveals the lack of authentic empathy for Burns's poetry among nineteenth-century editors that he could have been held responsible for this. If, of course, these editors had had access to the original
Star
piece, they could hardly have missed the parody:

This piece on the 24th March, 1789 was followed by three even worse stanzas on the 27th March: 

This was followed on 4th April by the printing of a piece claiming that the poems had been given by Burns to a peripatetic physician, Dr Theodore Theobald Theophilus Tripe in Mauchline. Had Burns had access to
The Star
he would have seen the joke. Unfortunately he read the first poem in the pages of
The Gazetteer
, whose editor, in the licentious manner of the age, had copied the poem believing it to actually be the work of Burns. Even more oddly, Burns was simultaneously writing to T
he Star
, offering them his
Ode to the Departed Regency Bill
, which (see notes) they politically adulterated. See Burns Letters 320, 321, 322 and 323 dealing with this. The whole story is in Lucyle Werkmeister, ‘Robert Burns and the London Newspapers: With Special reference to the Spurious
Star
(1789)',
Bulletin of the New York Public Library
, Vol. 65, October, 1961, No. 8, pp. 483–504.

This song is accepted to the canon by Kinsley (K295) and Mackay (p. 386). It may be possible that Burns improved a few words here and there, but the body of the song is so mediocre, with several very bad lines, that it does not read or sing as a work that has been through the hands of a genuine poet. Strangely, Kinsley remarks, ‘I am reluctant to take the draft in the Law MS as evidence of
authorship. It is a piece of doggerel, below the level of Burns's worst' (Vol. III, p. 1332). He then justifies leaving the song in the canon by assuming Burns possibly tried to insert a few Scottish words into the original song, Cibber's
'Twas Past Twelve o'Clock on
a Fine Summer Morning
. It is probably a song Burns transcribed for publication. After the first four lines the song is so bad that the poet's authorship must be seriously questioned. Mackay's notion, ‘That Burns had a hand in this, there can be no doubt' is, to say the least, highly questionable.