#A.# '[The] Cruel Brother, or the Bride's Testament.' #a.# Alex. Fraser Tytler's Brown MS. #b.# Jamieson's Popular Ballads, I, 66. #B.# The Kinloch MSS, I, 21. #C.# 'Ther waur three ladies,' Harris MS., p. 11 b. #D. a.# Notes and Queries, 1st S., VI, 53. #b.# 2d S., V, 171. #E.# Notes and Queries, 4th S., V, 105. #F.# 'The Three Knights,' Gilbert's Ancient Christmas Carols, 2d ed., p. 68. #G.# 'Fine Flowers of the Valley.' #a.# Herd's MSS, I, 41. #b.# Herd's Scottish Songs, 1776, I, 88. #H.# Fragment appended to #G#. #I.# The Kinloch MSS, I, 27. #J.# As current in County Meath, Ireland, about 1860. #K.# Notes and Queries, 4th S., IV, 517. #A a# was obtained directly from Mrs Brown of Falkland, in 1800, by Alexander Fraser Tytler. Jamieson says that he gives #b# verbatim from the recitation of Mrs Arrott; but it would seem that this must have been a slip of memory, for the two agree except in half a dozen words. #B#, #C#, #I#, #J# are now for the first time printed. #G# only was taken down earlier than the present century. Aytoun remarks (1858): "This is, perhaps, the most popular of all the Scottish ballads, being commonly recited and sung even at the present day." The copy which he gives, I, 232, was "taken down from recitation," but is nevertheless a compound of #G# and #A b#, with a few unimportant variations, proceeding, no doubt, from imperfect recollection.[143] The copy in Dixon's Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs, p. 56, repeated in Bell's volume of the same title, p. 50, is Gilbert's #F#. Dixon informs us that the ballad was (in 1846) still popular amongst the peasantry in the west of England. Cunningham gives us a piece called 'The Three Ladies of Leithan Ha,' Songs of Scotland, II, 87, which he would fain have us believe that he did not know he had written himself. "The common copies of this tragic lyric," he truly says, "differ very much from this; not so much in the story itself as in the way it is told." All versions but #K#, which has pretty nearly lost all point, agree after the opening stanzas. #A-E# have three ladies and only one knight; #F# has three knights and one lady; #G#, #I#, #J#, #K# have three ladies and three knights [lords in #G#, "bonny boys" in #I#, the first line being caught from 'Sir Hugh.'] Three knights are to no purpose; only one knight has anything to do. The reason for three ladies is, of course, that the youngest may be preferred to the others,--an intention somewhat obscured in #B#. The ladies are in colors in #B#, #C#, #I#, #J#, and this seems to be the better interpretation in the case of #G#, though a strict construction of the language would rather point to the other. The colors are transferred to the knights in #F# because there is only one lady. In #K# this is a part of the general depravation of the ballad.