Love Gregory (my title)- Sharpe (Galloway) c.1820 Child K
[This is a one stanza fragment.]
[Biography from: Kennedy & Boyd] Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781-1851) was born in May 1781 at Hoddam, Dumfriesshire. His was a social and intellectual ancestry of some distinction, and his early education was nourished on Jacobite story and tradition. This period of Scottish sentiment was to be the main driver of his artistic studies and research, and as a collector of antiquities. CKS was educated in Edinburgh and then at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1806. In 1803, fired by the appearance of the first volume of 'The Minstrelsy Of The Scottish Border' (1802), CKS had contacted Walter Scott. As a result, he contributed two ballads, one of which was 'The Tower of Repentance', to a later volume of the work as well as comments on the origins of several others, among them 'The Twa Corbies'. CKS is also credited with giving Scott his version of ‘The Douglas Tragedy’ and ‘Bessie Bell and Mary Gray’. It was to be a lifelong friendship. CKS abandoned the idea of entering the Church, and at the age of about 30 left his Oxford base and became a resident of Edinburgh. Here he continued his correspondence, his society life, and his studies in literature, music and the fine arts. He had a deserved reputation for waspish caricatures and satires, and a marked weakness for scandal. In later years, CKS became more of a literary recluse, and his peculiarities, manners and eccentricities – including retaining the style of dress that had been in fashion during his early manhood - more pronounced.
CKS died in March 1851, leaving one of the most extensive collections of antiquities ever accumulated by a private individual in Scotland. Much published material survives him, notably The Ballads; Letters; Etchings; studies in Scottish geneaology; and a history of Scottish witchcraft.
[Love Gregory] Version K ; The Lass of Roch RoyalChild 76
Stenhouse's Johnson's Museum, IV, *107, communicated by Kirkpatrick Sharpe, "as generally sung by the people of Galloway and Dumfriesshire."
1 'O open the door, Love Gregory,
O open, and let me in;
The wind blows through my yellow hair,
And the dew draps oer my chin.'