Then bye there comes a false Forbes, 35 Was riding from Driminere; Says "Here there lies a proud Seton, This day they ride the rear." Cragievar said to his men,[L39] "You may play on your shield; 40 For the proudest Seton in all the lan' This day lies on the field." "O spoil him, spoil him," cried Cragievar, "Him spoiled let me see; For on my word," said Cragievar, 45 "He had no good will at me." They took from him his armour clear, His sword, likewise his shield; Yea they have left him naked there Upon the open field. 50 The Highland men, they're clever men At handling sword and shield, But yet they are too naked men To stay in battle field. The Highland men are clever men[L55] 55 At handling sword or gun, But yet they are too naked men To bear the cannon's rung. For a cannon's roar in a summer night Is like thunder in the air; 60 There's not a man in Highland dress Can face the cannon's fire. 39. Sir William Forbes of Cragievar. 55-62. The Highlanders were thrown into great consternation by cannon shot, to which they were not accustomed. At the Raid of Stonehaven, just previous to the affair of the Bridge of Dee, the first volley made them wheel about and fly in disorder. They declared that they could not abide "the musket's mother." THE HAWS OF CROMDALE. Ritson's _Scottish Songs_, ii. 40. Johnson's _Museum_, p. 502. This ballad, very popular in Scotland, was long sold on the stalls before it was received into the collections. A glance will show that it has at best been very imperfectly transmitted by oral tradition. In fact, the Ettrick Shepherd seems to be right in maintaining that two widely separated events are here jumbled together. The first five stanzas apparently refer to an action in May, 1690, when Sir Thomas Livingston surprised fifteen hundred Highlanders in their beds at Cromdale, and the remainder to the lost battle of Auldern, where Montrose, with far inferior forces, defeated Sir John Hurry with prodigious slaughter, on the 4th of May, 1645. Mr. Stenhouse states, indeed, that after that imprudent division of the army of the Covenant which opened the way to the disaster at Auldern, Hurry surprised and routed at Cromdale a body of Highlanders under the lion-hearted Allaster Macdonald. But this check appears, by his own language, to have been too slight an affair to call forth such verses as those with which the ballad begins. See Hogg's _Jacobite Relics_, ii. 157, Johnson's _Museum_ (1853), iv. 428.