We have next to ask, How did Scott treat the material thus placed before him? He dropped five stanzas sent by Hogg, mainly from the part made up from “plain prose”; he placed in a stanza and a line or two from Herd’s text; he remade a stanza and adopted a line from the English of 1550, and inserted an incident from Wyntoun’s Cronykil (about 1430). He did these things in the effort to construct what Lockhart calls “a standard text.”
1. In stanza i., for Hogg’s “Douglas went,” Scott put “bound him to ride.”
2. (H.) “With the Lindsays.”
(S.) “With them the Lindesays.”
3. (H.) “Almonshire.”
(S.) “Bamboroughshire.”
(H.) “Roxburgh.”
(S.) “Reidswire.”
6. (H.) “The border again.”
(S.) “The border fells.”