This ballad had appeared in Allan Ramsay's _Tea-Table Miscellany_ so long ago as 1724, and it was followed by Hamilton's most ambitious effort, the poem "Contemplation," in 1739, but the general public of Scotland only seem to have awakened to their merits after the poet espoused the Jacobite cause in 1745, and celebrated the victory of Prestonpans by his "Ode to the Battle of Gladsmuir"--the name the Jacobites preferred to give the battle. This ode, which had been set to music by M'Gibbon, became a great favourite in Jacobite households, and created so much popular interest in the author's other works that imperfect versions of some of his unpublished poems, and even of those which were already in print, began to appear. The author was himself an outlaw, and could not intervene. The ode which had lifted him into popularity had at the same time driven him into exile, and he was then living with a little group of young Scotch refugees at Rouen, and completely shattered in bodily health by his three months' hiding among the Grampians. Under those circumstances his friends thought it advisable to forestall the pirated and imperfect collections of his poems which were in contemplation by publishing as complete and correct an edition of them as could possibly be done in the absence of the author. And this edition was issued from the famous Foulis press in Glasgow in 1748. In doing so they acted, as they avow in the preface, "not only without the author's consent, but without his knowledge," but it is absurd to call an edition published under those circumstances, as the new _Dictionary of National Biography_ calls it, a "surreptitious edition." It was published by the poet's closest personal friends as a protection for the poet's reputation, and perhaps as a plea for his pardon.