The writer says nothing about the origin of this Negro melody, and therefore he is, I presume, unaware of it. But many of your readers will at once recognise the spirited lines, which when once they are read in Walter Scott's _Pirate_, have somehow a strange pertinacity in ringing in one's ears, and creep into a nook of the memory, from which they ever and anon insist on emerging to the lips. The passage occurs at the end of the fifth chapter of the third volume, where the pirates recapture their runaway captain:-- "They gained their boat in safety, and jumped into it, carrying along with them Cleveland, to whom circumstances seemed to offer no other refuge, and pushed off for their vessel, singing in chorus to their oars an _old ditty_, of which the natives of Kirkwall could only hear the first stanza: "'Thus said the Rover To his gallant crew, Up with the black flag, Down with the blue! Fire on the main-top, Fire on the bow, Fire on the gun-deck, Fire down below!'" So run the lines in the original edition, but in the revised one of the collected novels in forty-eight volumes, and in all the subsequent ones, the first two stand thus: "Robin Rover Said to his crew." This alteration strikes one as anything but an improvement, and it has suggested a doubt, which I beg to apply to the numerous and well-informed body of your readers to solve. Are these lines the production of Walter Scott, as they are generally supposed to be; or are they really the fragment of an old ditty? The alteration at the commencement does not seem one that would have found favour in the eyes of an author, but rather the effect of a prompting of memory. I believe, indeed, the lines are inserted in the volume called _The Poetry of the Author of the Waverley Novels_ (which I saw some years ago, but cannot refer to at this moment), but that is not decisive. There is a case in point, which is worth quoting on its own account. In _Peveril of the Peak_, in the celebrated scene of the interview between Buckingham and Fenella, where Fenella leaps from the window, and Buckingham hesitates to follow, there is this passage: "From a neighbouring thicket of shrubs, amongst which his visitor had disappeared, he heard her chant a verse of a comic song, then much in fashion, concerning a despairing lover who had recourse to a precipice. "'But when he came near, Beholding how steep The sides did appear, And the bottom how deep; Though his suit was rejected He sadly reflected, That a lover forsaken A new love may get; But a neck that's once broken Can never be set.'"