seems to me very recent, whoever made it. Scott, in lxii., gives a variant of “some reciters,” for “That Edward once lay under me,” they read “That Englishman lay under me.” This, if a false story, was an example of an art more delicate than Scott elsewhere exhibits.
One does not know what Professor Child would have said to my arguments. He never gave a criticism in detail of the ballad and of the circumstances in which Scott acquired it. A man most reasonable, most open to conviction, he would, I think, have confessed his perplexity.
Scott did not interpolate a single stanza, even where, as Hogg wrote, he suspected a lacuna in the text. He neither cut out nor improved the cryingly modern stanzas. He kept them, as he kept several stanzas in Tamlane, which, so he told Laidlaw, were obviously recent, but were in a copy which he procured through Lady Dalkeith. [51a]
By neither adding to nor subtracting from his MS. copy of Auld Maitland, Scott proved, I think, his respect for a poem which, in its primal form, he believed to be very ancient. We know, at all events, that ballads on the Maitland heroes were current about 1580. So, late in the sixteenth century, were the ballads quoted by Hume of Godscroft, on the murder of the Knight of Liddesdale (1354), the murder of the young Earl of Douglas in Edinburgh Castle (1440), and the battle of Otterburn. Of these three, only Otterburne was recovered by Herd, published in 1776. The other two are lost; and there is no prima facie reason why a Maitland ballad, of the sort current in 1580, should not, in favourable circumstances, have survived till 1802.
As regards the Shepherd’s ideas of honesty in ballad-collecting at this early period, I have quoted his letter to Laidlaw of 20th July 1802.
Again, in the case of his text from recitation of the Ballad of Otterburne (published by Scott in The Minstrelsy of 1806), he gave the Sheriff a full account of his mode of handling his materials, and Scott could get more minute details by questioning him.
To this text of Otterburne, freely attacked by Colonel Elliot, in apparent ignorance, as before, of the published facts of the case, and of the manuscript, we next turn our attention. In the meantime, Scott no more conspired to forge Auld Maitland than he conspired to forge the Pentateuch. That Hogg did not forge Auld Maitland I think I have made as nearly certain as anything in this region can be. I think that the results are a lesson to professors of the Higher Criticism of Homer.
THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE
Scott’s version of the Ballad of Otterburne, as given first in The Minstrelsy of 1806, comes under Colonel Elliot’s most severe censure. He concludes in favour of “the view that it consists partly of stanzas from Percy’s Reliques, which have undergone emendations calculated to disguise the source from which they came, partly of stanzas of modern fabrication, and partly of a very few stanzas and lines from Herd’s version” (1776). [53a]
As a matter of fact we know, though Colonel Elliot does not, the whole process of construction of the Otterburne in The Minstrelsy of 1806. Professor Child published all the texts with a letter. [53b] It is a pity that Colonel Elliot overlooks facts in favour of conjecture. Concerning historical facts he is not more thorough in research. The story, in Percy’s Reliques, of the slaying of Douglas by Percy, “is, so far as I know, supported neither by history nor by tradition.” [53c] If unfamiliar with the English chroniclers (in Latin) of the end of the fourteenth century, Colonel Elliot could find them cited by Professor Child. Knyghton, Walsingham, and the continuator of Higden (Malverne), all assert that Percy killed Douglas with his own hand. [54a] The English ballad of Otterburne (in MS. of about 1550) gives this version of Douglas’s death. It is erroneous. Froissart, a contemporary, had accounts of the battle from combatants, both English and Scottish. Douglas, fighting in the front of the van, on a moonlight night, was slain by three lance-wounds received in the mellay. The English knew not whom they had slain.