Scott, in lxii., gives a
variant of "some reciters," for "That Edward once lay under me," they
read "That Englishman lay under me." This, if a false story, was an
example of an art more delicate than Scott elsewhere exhibits.
One does not know what Professor Child would have said to my arguments.
He never gave a criticism in detail of the ballad and of the
circumstances in which Scott acquired it. A man most reasonable, most
open to conviction, he would, I think, have confessed his perplexity.
Scott did not interpolate a single stanza, even where, as Hogg wrote,
he suspected a lacuna in the text. He neither cut out nor improved the
cryingly modern stanzas. He kept them, as he kept several stanzas in
Tamlane, which, so he told Laidlaw, were obviously recent, but were in
a copy which he procured through Lady Dalkeith. {51a}
By neither adding to nor subtracting from his MS. copy of Auld
Maitland, Scott proved, I think, his respect for a poem which, in its
primal form, he believed to be very ancient. We know, at all events,
that ballads on the Maitland heroes were current about 1580.
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