THE TWA SISTERS.
This remarkable ballad exists in many versions, and in that melancholy proof of popularity, burlesque. The reader is referred to Professor Child's exhaustive account, Ballads, I, 118 ff.—We print B, omitting 5. The refrain made popular by Scott's version,—'Binnorie, O Binnorie,'—occurs in I, K, M.
61. A regrettable confusion of ocean and mill-stream; see 15 2. 25 ff. In A the 'violl,' made of the breast-bone, plays of itself:
Then bespake the treble string,
'O yonder is my father the king.'
Then bespake the second string,
'O yonder sits my mother the queen.'
And then bespake the strings all three,
'O yonder is my sister that drowned me.'
THE TWA BROTHERS.
Printed in Sharpe's Ballad Book, and Child, II, 435 ff., A. Professor Child prints seven other versions, one American.
2 3-4. Motherwell insists that this must be accidental, or the ballad is spoiled; but Professor Child points out that 'the generosity of the dying man is plainly greater if his brother has killed him in an outburst of passion.'
10 3. Kirk-land, evidently for the kirk-yard of 5 and 6.
BEWICK AND GRAHAME.
From a printed copy; see Child, VII, 144 ff. The ballad, as Scott pointed out, 'is remarkable as containing probably the very latest allusion to the institution of brotherhood in arms.'—The tragic motive of a struggle between two duties, with decision fatal in either case, is used here with admirable if homely power. Hamlet, Rüdiger in the Nibelungen, Rodrigue in the Cid, and all the rest, are presented, of course, with far more art, but not with more fidelity
