EDINBURGH PAISLEY LONDON OLIVER & BOYD AND JOHN MENZIES & Co. ALEXANDER GARDNER. SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, & Co., LIMITED. WHISTLE-BINKIE; COLLECTION OF SONGS FOR THE SOCIAL CIRCLE. VOL. I. GLASGOW: DAVID ROBERTSON & CO. MDCCCXC. PREFACE TO THIS EDITION. IN issuing this new and enlarged edition of WHISTLE-BINKIE, the Publishers are complying with many urgent requests, frequently made to them by the passing generation, to put within their reach a publication which was a great household favourite thirty or forty years ago, and around which so many genial, sunny, and innocent associations cluster; as well as to let the rising or risen generation have easy access to this broad, fresh, living stream of healthy Scottish song. Scotland is pre-eminently the land of song-writers and lyrical poets, who, sprung from her historic soil, have celebrated in tuneful verse the living annals and social characteristics, the triumphs and misfortunes, the joys and sorrows of the ancient land which gave them birth. There is hardly an event in her long and chequered history which is not chronicled by some of her bard-historians, there are few scenes in "the land of the mountain and the flood" which are not mirrored by her poets; and it may be affirmed that there is hardly a flower which adorns her verdant sod, or a tree in her ancient forests, whose praises have not been sung, nor one of the social habits or customs, and more important events in the life of her people, joyous or sorrowful, lightsome or solemn, which have not been rendered classic by the poet sons and daughters of Scotland. |