GILDEROY. After the current version adapted from the original by Sir Alexander Halket or his sister, Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, the composer of _Hardyknute_. There is extant a black-letter broadside printed in England as early as 1650, and the ballad appears in several miscellanies of later date. The reviser added the sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas. It is mortifying to learn that this "winsome Gilderoy "--the name, properly Gillie roy, signifying in Gaelic "the red-haired lad"--was in reality one Patrick Mac-Gregor, who was hanged at the cross of Edinburgh, 1638, as a common cateran or free-booter. That the romantic element in the ballad so outweighs the historical, must account for its classification here. _Soy_, silk. _Cess_, black-mail. _Gear_, property. BONNY BARBARA ALLAN. After the version given in Ramsay's _Tea-Table Miscellany_ and followed by Herd, Ritson, and others. Percy prints with this in the _Reliques_ a longer, but poorer copy. In Pepys's _Diary_, Jan. 2,1666, occurs an allusion to the "little Scotch song of Barbary Alien." _Gin_, if. _Hooly_, slowly. _Jow_, knell. THE GARDENER. After Kinloch. Buchan gives a longer, but less valuable version. _Jimp_, slender. _Weed_, dress. _Camorine_, camomile. _Kail-blade_, cabbage-leaf. _Cute_, ankle. _Brawn_, calf. _Blaewort_, witch bells. ETIN THE FORESTER. Collated. No single version of this ballad is satisfactory, not Kinloch's fine fragment, _Hynde Etin_, nor Buchan's complete but inferior version, _Young Akin_, nor the modernized copy, _Young Hastings_, communicated by Buchan to Motherwell. Earlier and better renderings of the ballad have doubtless been lost. In the old Scottish speech, an Etin signified an ogre or giant, and although the existing versions show but faint traces of a supernatural element, it is probable that the original character of the story has been changed by the accidents of tradition, and that the Etin was at the outset in line with such personages as Arnold's Forsaken Merman. In the beautiful kindred ballads which abound in the Norse and German literatures, the Etin is sometimes represented by a merman, though usually by an elf-king, dwarf-king, or hill-king. _Hind chiel_, young stripling. _Spier_, ask. _Bigg_, build. _Their lane_, alone. _Brae_, hillside. _Gars_, makes. _Greet_, weep. _Stown_, stolen. _Laverock_, lark. _Lift_, air. _Buntin'_, blackbird. _Christendame_, christening. _Ben_, in. _Shaw_, forest. _Louted_, bowed. _Boun'_, go.