XVIII.
Until we came unto that town
Which some call Billop-Grace;
There were Auld Maitland’s sons, a’ three,
Learning at school, alas!
Now, if I venture to differ from Colonel Elliot here, I may plead that I am practised in the art of ballad-faking, and can produce high testimonials of skill! To me stanzas xv., xviii. seem to differ much from viii.–xi., but not in such a way as Hogg would have differed, had he made them. Hogg’s error would have lain, as Scott’s did, in being, as Scott said of Mrs. Hemans, too poetical.
Neither Hogg nor Scott, I think, was crafty enough to imitate the prosaic drawl of the printed broadside ballad, or the feeble interpolations with which the “gangrel scrape-gut,” or bänkelsänger, supplied gaps in his memory. The modern complete ballad-faker would introduce such abject verses, but Scott and Hogg desired to decorate, not to debase, ballads with which they intermeddled, and we track them by their modern romantic touch when they interpolate. I take it, for this reason, that Hogg did not write stanzas xv., xviii. It was hardly in nature for Hogg, if he knew Ville de Grace in Normandy (a thing not very probable), to invent “Billop-Grace” as a popular corruption of the name—and a popular corruption it is, I think. Probably the original maker of this stanza wrote, in line 4, “alace,” an old spelling—not “alas”—to rhyme with “grace.”
Colonel Elliot then assigns xv., xviii. as most likely of all to be by Hogg. On that I have given my opinion, with my reasons.
These verses, with xviii., lead us to France, and whereas Scott here suspects that some verses have been lost (see his note to stanza xviii.), Colonel Elliot suspects that the stanzas relating to France have been interpolated. But the French scenes occupy the whole poem from xvi. to lxv., the end.
What, if Hogg were the forger, were his sources? He may have known Douglas’s Palice of Honour, which, of course, existed in print, with its mention of Maitland’s grey beard. But how did he know Maitland’s “three noble sons,” in 1801–1802, lying unsunned in the Maitland MSS.?
This is a point which critics of Auld Maitland studiously ignore, yet it is the essential point. How did the Shepherd know about the three young Maitlands, whose existence, in legend, is only revealed to us through a manuscript unpublished in 1802? Colonel Elliot does not evade the point. “We may be sure,” he says, that Leyden, before 1802, knew Hogg, and Hogg might have obtained from him sufficient information to enable him to compose the ballad. [47a] But it was from Laidlaw, not from Leyden, that Scott, after receiving his first copy at Blackhouse, in spring 1802, obtained Hogg’s address. [47b] There is no hint that before spring 1802 Leyden ever saw Hogg. Had he known him, and his ballad-lore, he would have brought him and Scott together. In 1801–02, Leyden was very busy in Edinburgh helping Scott to edit Sir Tristram, copying Arthour, seeking for an East India appointment, and going into society. Scott’s letters prove all this. [47c]
That Hogg, in 1802, was very capable of writing a ballad, I admit; also that, through Blind Harry’s Wallace, he may have known all about “sowies,” and “portculize,” and springwalls, or springald’s, or springalls, mediæval balistas for throwing heavy stones and darts. But Hogg did not know or guess what a springwall was. In his stanza xiii. (in the MS. given to Laidlaw), Hogg wrote—
With springs; wall stanes, and good o’ern
Among them fast he threw.