For number and variety, the song chapbook occupies first place. Considerable notice has already been taken of the broadside which flourished during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and is, indeed, far from being extinct even at the present date, and little further need be said here. Of the song chapbook, however, a more detailed account may be given.

It was ordinarily the single sheet broadside folded so as to form a book of 8 pages, and, like the other productions vended by the chapman, was usually badly printed on execrable paper. As is the case with the song-sheets which are still issued from “Poets’ Boxes” and other similar adjuncts of Parnassus, all sorts and conditions of verse were admitted to its pages. The choicest lyrics of Burns and Tannahill, Lady Nairne and Susanna Blamire are found in company with doggerel stanzas by the veriest tyro in rhyme; and verses dealing with local events of momentary importance are sandwiched between songs written for all time. Unholy hands are laid on sacred lines, and poems are sometimes parodied and altered out of all recognition. “Scots Wha Hae” in a common chapbook version was spun out to four verses more than its normal length. The extra stanzas were hardly an improvement, and it is possible that it was this version that came under the notice of the “southron loon” who characterized the war-song as “swaggering rant.”⁠[49] A parody of Burns’s “Ode” was published under the title of “Wellington’s Address,” and the opening stanza may be quoted as a sample:—

If the “Iron Duke” had been as indifferent a soldier as he is a poet in this “Address” put into his mouth, Napoleon might never have learned that little lesson about “striking his medals at London;” or, if Wellington had met the bard, he would probably have told him what he told an ultra-obsequious hero-worshipper who doffed his hat to the great soldier, and remarked how pleased he was to do so—“Don’t be a damned fool!” The author of The Gentle Shepherd waxed wroth with Lucky Reid over the liberties she took with his text, and one wonders what he would have said had he seen the later version of “Lochaber No More.” Borrowing Ramsay’s title, some minstrel who “rhymed in [odd] numbers” composed a Jacobite song, of which the following are the closing stanzas:—

If the Jacobite lines were as broken as these, they were in a sorrowful plight indeed.

It is only fair, however, to say that these doggerel effusions formed a small percentage of the songs which were issued in chapbook form. The best of our national minstrelsy was put in circulation in this way, although acknowledgments of authorship were seldom made. Publishers apparently believed that the song, not the singer, deserved to survive. Burns had a chapbook devoted to himself, and a fairly good selection of his songs is given in it; and he and other bards—Tannahill, Hogg, Scott, Lady Nairne, Susanna Blamire, Jean Elliot, Ramsay, Sempill, Macneill—are represented in many publications.

It is not improbable that, so far as Scottish song is concerned, the chapbook in one way did a distinct disservice to the cause. Rude productions such as those cited were committed to print and stereotyped for all time, or as much of it as they might survive. In this way their crudities were perpetuated. Had topical ballads such as “The Lamentation for Mr. M’Kay” and “Wellington’s Address,” and lyrics of love like “The True Lovers’ Farewell” and “The Sailor’s Journal,” been cast upon the world after the manner of our early ballad minstrelsy, and made to depend for existence on oral tradition, they, in passing from mouth to mouth, might have been shorn of their faulty rhymes and infelicitous expressions as the poly-sided stone is smoothed of its angularities by the ebb and flow of many tides. The means taken for their preservation may have proved their undoing!