the limits of 1727 and 1805, and who was also the author of a version of the song, ‘Flowers of the Forest,’ had a very indifferent opinion of the Scotswomen of her time. ‘The misses,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘are, I am afraid, the most rotten part of the society. Envy and jealousy of their rivals have, I fear, a possession in their minds, especially the old part of the young ladies, who grow perfect beldames in that small society.’ At that period, the lady leaders of fashion of the faster sort frequented the Edinburgh oyster-cellars, exercised the license of men, and had such promising pupils as Miss Suff Johnstone. In an indirect way we owe to this last lady the song of ‘Auld Robin Gray.’ She was in the habit of singing words far from choice to the old tune. Lady Anne Barnard (while she was the yet unmarried daughter of the Earl of Balcarres) took the tune, and supplied it with the words which tell the well-known tale of virtuous distress. The author was forty years of age when she married Mr. Barnard, son of the Bishop of Limerick. She is almost as celebrated for this one song as the Baroness Nairne (by birth an Oliphant of Gask) was for the ‘Laird o’ Cockpen,’ ‘Caller Herrin,’ and a dozen of Jacobite and other songs, in some of which there are indications of great humour, in others of great pathos. In one verse of ‘Caller Herrin,’ she sketches a picture, as George Cruikshank used to do, with two or three strokes:-- When the creel o’ herrin’ passes Ladies, clad in silk and laces, Gather in their braw pelisses, Cast their heads and screw their faces.