Note 86 — Chapter XXII

— The beautiful and pathetic “Lament,” so well known to Scotsmen under the title of “The Flowers of the Forest,” was penned to express “the lamentation, mourning, and woe” that filled the historic land of “mountain and of flood,” on the tidings reaching “brave, bonnie Scotland” of the “woeful fight” of Flodden Field. At the funeral of that gallant soldier and fine Scotsman, the late General Wauchope, of the Regiment known as the Black Watch, the pipers played this plaintive air, “The Flowers of the Forest.” Who does not hope that those funereal strains may be prophetic that, through the power of far-sighted wisdom, human sympathy, and the healing hand of Time, there may be a reconciliation as real and deep and true betwixt England’s kinsman-foe of to-day and herself as there is betwixt herself and her kinsman-foe of the year 1513 — the year of Flodden Field!

See also Professor Aytoun’s “Edinburgh after Flodden,” in his “Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers” (Routledge & Sons); also, of course, Sir Walter Scott’s well-known “Marmion.”