They buried him when the bonny may
Was on the flow’ring thorn;
And she waked him till the forest grey
Of every leaf was lorn;Till the rowan tree of gramarye
Its scarlet clusters shed,
And the hollin green alone was seen
With its berries glistening red.
Whether Surtees’ “Brown Man of the Muirs,” to which Scott also gave a place in his own poetry, was a true legend or not, the reader may decide for himself.
Concerning another ballad in the “Minstrelsy”—“Auld Maitland”—Professor Child has expressed a suspicion which most readers feel. What Scott told Ellis about it (Autumn, 1802) was, that he got it in the Forest, “copied down from the recitation of an old shepherd by a country farmer.” Who was the farmer? Will Laidlaw had employed James Hogg, as shepherd. Hogg’s mother chanted “Auld Maitland.” Hogg first met Scott in the summer of 1801. The shepherd had already seen the first volume of the “Minstrelsy.” Did he, thereupon, write “Auld Maitland,” teach his mother it, and induce Laidlaw to take it down from her recitation? The old lady said she got it from Andrew Moir, who had it “frae auld Baby Mettlin, who was said to have been another nor a gude ane.” But we have Hogg’s own statement that “aiblins ma gran’-mither was an unco leear,” and this quality may have been hereditary. On the other side, Hogg could hardly have held his tongue about the forgery, if forgery it was, when he wrote his “Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott” (1834). The whole investigation is a little depressing, and makes one very shy of unauthenticated ballads.
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FOOTNOTES
[20] Who knows what may happen? I may die before he sees the light; so I will add among my friends Skalagrim Lamb’s-tail.
[43] Can Mrs. Gamp mean ‘dial’?
[47] 1887.
[50] In his familiar correspondence, it will be observed, Herodotus does not trouble himself to maintain the dignity of history.
[53] Mr. Flinders Petrie has just discovered and sent to Mr. Holly, of Trinity, Cambridge, the well-known traveller, a wall-painting of a beautiful woman, excavated by the Egypt Exploration Society, from the ruined site of the Temple of Aphrodite in Naucratis. Mr. Holly, in an affecting letter to the Academy, states that he recognises in this picture “an admirable though somewhat archaic portrait of She.” There can thus be little or no doubt that She was Rhodopis, and therefore several hundred years older than she said. But few will blame her for being anxious not to claim her full age.