Note 43 — 271
Reading edition
Edward Guilpin, in his Skialethia, or A Shadow of Truth, 1598, has this couplet:
Yet like th’ olde ballad of the Lord of Lorne, Whose last line in King Harrie’s days was borne. Chappell, Popular Music, p. 228.
It is possible that Guilpin meant that the last line (stanza?) showed the ballad to be of Henry VIII’s time; but he may have meant exactly what he says, that the last line was of Henry VIII’s time. We do not know what the last line of the copy intended by Guilpin was, and all we learn from the couplet is that ‘The Lord of Lorn’ was called an old ballad before the end of the sixteenth century.