"Jemmy Dawson" was a ballad written by William Shenstone on a young
officer of Manchester volunteers who was hanged, drawn, and quartered
in 1746 on Kennington Common for having served the Pretender. He was
engaged to a young lady, who came to the execution, and when it was
over fell back dead in her coach.

"William and Margaret," by David Mallet, published in 1727, is another
example of the tendency to the revival of the ballad in the eighteenth
century.

"Elfinland Wood," by the Scottish poet William Motherwell, who died in
1835, aged thirty-seven, is a modern imitation of the ancient Scottish
ballad. Mrs. Hemans, who wrote "Casabianca," died also in 1835. But
the last ballad in this bundle, Lady Anne Barnard's "Auld Robin Gray,"
was written in 1771, and owes its place to a desire that this volume,
which begins with the best of the old ballads, should end with the
best of the new. Lady Anne, eldest daughter of the fifth Earl of
Balcarres, married Sir Andrew Barnard, librarian to George III., and
survived her husband eighteen years. While the authorship of the
piece remained a secret there were some who attributed it to Rizzio,
the favourite of Mary Queen of Scots. Lady Anne Barnard acknowledged
the authorship to Walter Scott in 1823, and told how she came to write
it to an old air of which she was passionately fond, "Bridegroom grat
when the sun gaed down." When she had heaped many troubles on her
heroine, and called to a little sister to suggest another, the
suggestion came promptly, "Steal the cow, sister Anne." And the cow
was stolen.

H. M.