Sure no man will like an old song the
worse of being somewhat harmonious. After stanza xxiv. you may read
stanzas xxv. to xxxiv. Then after xxxviii. read xxxix.
Now we know all that can be known about the copy of the ballad which,
in 1805, Scott received from Hogg. Up to stanza xxiv. it is as given
by the two old reciters. The crazy man may be the daft man who recited
to Hogg Burns's Tam o' Shanter, and inspired him with the ambition to
be a poet. The deranged woman, like mad Madge Wildfire, was rich in
ballad scraps. From stanza xxv. to xxxiv., Hogg confessedly
"harmonises" what he got in plain prose intermixed with verse. Stanza
xxxix. is apparently Hogg's. The last broken stanza, as Hogg said, is
a reminiscence of the Hunting of the Cheviot, in a Scots form, long
lost.
Hogg was not a scientific collector: had he been, he would have taken
down "the plain prose" and the broken lines and stanzas verbally. But
Hogg has done his best.
We have next to ask, How did Scott treat the material thus placed
before him? He dropped five stanzas sent by Hogg, mainly from the part
made up from "plain prose"; he placed in a stanza and a line or two
from Herd's text; he remade a stanza and adopted a line from the
English of 1550, and inserted an incident from Wyntoun's Cronykil
(about 1430).
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