It would not have been out of place in the ballad of The Battle
of Otterbourne, and, indeed, it bears some resemblance to a stanza in
that ballad." Here the Colonel says that the lines "one feels were
written by another hand, by an artist of a higher stamp than a Border
ballad-maker." But "it may also occur to one that the stanza belongs
to some other ballad, and has ACCIDENTALLY" (my italics) "been
pitchforked into this": a very sound inference.
Now if Scott had only the Sharpe version, he was the last man to
"pitchfork" into it, "accidentally," a stanza from "some other ballad,"
that stanza being as Colonel Elliot says "inapplicable" to Telfer and
his circumstances. Poor Jamie, a small tenant-farmer, with ten cows,
and, as far as we learn, not one horse, had no hawks and hounds; no
"vassal lands," and no reason to say that at the Dodhead he "maun never
be again." He could return from his long run! Scott certainly did not
compose these lines; and he could not have pitchforked them into Jamie
Telfer, either by accident or design.
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