The ballad-maker, like Homer, always uses a formula if he can
find one. But Kinmont Willie is so much superior to the two others, so
epic in its speed and concentration of incidents, that the question
rises, had Scott even fragments of an original ballad of the Kinmont,
"much mangled by reciters," as he admits, or did he compose the whole?
No MS. copies exist at Abbotsford. There is only one hint. In a list
of twenty-two ballads, pasted into a commonplace book, eleven are
marked X (as if he had obtained them), and eleven others are unmarked,
as if they were still to seek. Unmarked is Kinmount Willie.
Did he find it, or did he make it all?
In 1888, in a note to Kinmont Willie, I wrote: "There is a prose
account very like the ballad in Scott of Satchells' History of the Name
of Scott" (1688). Satchells' long-winded story is partly in unrhymed
and unmetrical lines, partly in rhymes of various metres. The man,
born in 1613, was old, had passed his life as a soldier; certainly
could not write, possibly could not read.
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