The Ballad of Otterburne is said to have been constructed from Herd's
version, tempered by Percy's version, with additions from a modern
imagination. We have merely to read Professor Child's edition of
Otterburne, with Hogg's letter covering his MS. copy of Otterburne
from recitation, to see that this is a wholly erroneous view of the
matter. We have all the materials for forming a judgment accessible
to us in print, and have no excuse for preferring our own
conjectures.
"No one now believes," it may be said, "in the aged persons who lived
at the head of Ettrick," and recited Otterburne to Hogg. Colonel
Elliot disbelieves, but he shows no signs of having read Hogg's
curious letter, in two parts, about these "old parties"; a letter
written on the day when Hogg, he says, twice "pumped their memories."
I print this letter, and, if any one chooses to think that it is a
crafty fabrication, I can only say that its craft would have beguiled
myself as it beguiled Scott.
It is a common, cheap, and ignorant scepticism that disbelieves in
the existence, in Scott's day, or in ours, of persons who know and
can recite variants of our traditional ballads.
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