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PREFACE
The original intention of
the Editor of this work was to make it a guide to the better
comprehension by English readers of the immortal works of Robert Burns
and Walter Scott, and of the beautiful Scottish poetry to be found in
the ancient and modem ballads and songs of the “North Countrie,”—and not
only to the English but to all other admirers of Scottish literature,
where it differs from that of England, and to present to them in
accessible and convenient form such words as are more poetical and
humorous in the Scottish language than in the English, or are altogether
wanting in the latter. The design gradually extended itself as the
compiler proceeded with his task, until it came to include large numbers
of words derived from the Gaelic or Keltic, with which Dr. Jamieson, the
author of the best and most copious Scottish Dictionary hitherto
published, was very imperfectly or scarcely at all acquainted.
“Broad Scotch,” says Dr. Adolphus Wagner, the erudite and sympathetic
editor of the Poems of Robert Bums, published in Leipzig, in 1835, “is
literally broadened,—i.e., a language or dialect very worn off, and
blotted, whose original stamp often is unknowable, because the idea is
not always to be guessed at” This strange mistake is not confined to the
Germans, but prevails to a large extent among Englishmen, who are of
opinion that Scotch is a provincial dialect of the English,—like that of
Lancashire or Yorkshire,—and not entitled to be called a language. The
truth is, that English and Lowland Scotch were originally the same, but
that the literary and social influences of London as the real metropolis
of both countries, especially after the transfer of the royal family of
Stuart from Edinburgh to London, at the commencement of the seventeenth
century, favoured the infusion of a Latin element into current English,
which the Scotch were slow to adopt.
In the year 1870, the author contributed two papers to Blackwood8
Magazine on “The Poetry and Humour of the Scottish Language.” Those
papers are here reprinted with such copious additions as have extended
the work to more than treble its original dimensions. The whole has
undergone careful revision and emendation, and will, it is hoped, be
found to contain not only characteristic specimens of the peculiar
humour, but of the abounding poetical genius of the ancient and modem
authors who have adorned the literature of Scotland from the days of
Barbour, Douglas, and Montgomery to those of Allan Ramsay, Robert Bums,
and Walter Scott, and down to our own times.
November 1887.
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