A person who cannot conceive that Scott wrote
Except Sir Gilbert Elliot, called
The laird of Stobs, I mean the same,
will hold that Scott knew some ballad fragments, disjecta membra. But
I quite agree with Colonel Elliot, that the ballad, AS IT STANDS (with
the exception, to my mind, of some thirty stanzas, themselves emended),
"belongs to the early nineteenth century, not to the early
seventeenth." The time for supposing the poem, AS IT STANDS, to be
"saturated with the folk-spirit" all through is past; the poem is far
too much contaminated by the genius of Scott itself; like Burns'
transfiguration of "the folk-spirit" at its best.
Near the beginning of this paper I said, in answer to a question of
Colonel Elliot's, that I myself was the person who had suspected Scott
of composing the whole of Kinmont Willie, and I have given my reasons
for not remaining constant to my suspicions. But in a work which
Colonel Elliot quotes, the abridged edition of Child's great book by
Mrs. Child-Sargent and Professor Kittredge (1905), the learned
professor writes, "Kinmont Willie is under vehement suspicion of being
the work of Sir Walter Scott.
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