These, copied by the accurate Mr. Macmath, have been
published in the monumental collection of English and Scottish
Popular Ballads, in ten parts, by the late Professor Child of
Harvard, the greatest of scholars in ballad-lore. From his book we
often know exactly what kinds of copies of ballads Scott possessed,
and what alterations he made in his copies. The Ballad of Otterburne
is especially instructive, as we shall see later. But of the most
famous of Border historical ballads, Kinmont Willie, and its
companion, Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead, Scott has left no
original manuscript texts. Now into each of these ballads Scott has
written (if internal evidence be worth anything) verses of his own;
stanzas unmistakably marked by his own spirit, energy, sense of
romance, and, occasionally, by a somewhat inflated rhetoric. On this
point doubt is not easy. When he met the names of his chief,
Buccleuch, and of his favourite ancestor, Wat of Warden, Scott did,
in two cases, for those heroes what, by his own confession, he did
for anecdotes that came in his way--he decked them out "with a cocked
hat and a sword.
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