Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Identifies two surviving fragments of David Sillar's manuscript rules for the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club, transcribes the two fragments of verse associated with them (one in Robert Burns's handwriting), and examines the evidence for Burns's authorship of one of these verse fragments.

Identifies Burns's "English" source that he put into "Scots dress'"for the song 'It is na, Jean, thy bonie face." first published in James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, IV (1792); reviews the evidence that Burns had read the source identified, in Juvenile Poems (1789), by John Armstrong (1771-1797), then a student at Edinburgh University; and explores why Davidson Cook's previous record of this identification, in 1918, has been lost to subsequent Burns scholarship. [in the original article, which was linked at http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/guest-blog-by-professor-patrick-scott-a-burns-puzzle-solved-davidson-cook-and-the-english-original-for-it-is-na-jean-thy-bonie-face-smm-333/, a brief afterword by Murray Pittock put the (re)discovery in the context of other current work on Burns …