I have
given antique examples of the same sort of perversions in Otterburn.
If I am right, Colonel Elliot's charge against Scott lacks its base--
that Scott knew none but the Sharpe copy, whence it is inferred that he
not only decorated the song (as is undeniable), but perverted it in a
way far from sportsmanlike.
I may have shaken Colonel Elliot's belief in the historicity of the
ballad. His suspicions of Scott I cannot hope to remove, and they are
very natural suspicions, due to Scott's method of editing ballads and
habit of "giving them a cocked hat and a sword," as he did to stories
which he heard; and repeated, much improved.
Absolute proof that Scott did, or did not, pervert the ballad, and turn
a false Elliot into a false Scott version, cannot be obtained unless
new documents bearing on the matter are discovered.
But, I repeat, as may be read in the chapter on The Ballad of
Otterburne, such inversions and perversions of ballads occurred freely
in the sixteenth century, and, in the seventeenth, the process may have
been applied to Jamie Telfer.
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