The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume 5‪.‬

A king’s throne, the opening poem warns, rests not on armies but on “laws loving and right”—and even a crown must answer to truth and honour.

In this mid-nineteenth-century gathering of Scotland’s songs from the past half-century, Charles Rogers lets many voices ring out: a ship drives through storm toward a western home, a young woman laughs off Auld Peter MacGowan’s rings and acres, and lovers measure absence against devotion. The verses move between moral counsel and playful courtship, public courage and private longing, in English and Scots. Their people face tempests at sea and tests of the heart, but return to a question the opening song sets like a beacon: what can a person hold fast to when fortune turns?

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