That is exactly what I say; but Martin says, “When ye come in at the Hermitage Slack, warn doughty Will o’ Gorranberry.” Why go to warn him, when, as Colonel Elliot says, the news is running through Hermitage water, and the men are most probably acting on it,—as they certainly would do?
Martin’s orders, in Sharpe xxv., are taken, I think, from Buccleuch’s, in Scott’s xxvii.
The point is that Martin had no need to warn men so far away as Gorranberry,—they were roused already. Yet he orders them to be warned, and about a combined movement of Martin and Simmy on different lines the ballad says not a word. All this is inference merely, inference not from historical facts, but from what may be guessed to have been in the mind of the poet.
Thus the Elliot or Sharpe version has topography that will not hold water, while the Scott topography does hold water; and the Elliot song seems to borrow the lines on the Hermitage Slack and Gorranberry from a form of the Scott version. This being the case, the original version on which Scott worked is earlier than the Elliot version. In the Scott version the rescuers must come down the Hermitage Slack: in the Elliot they have no reason for riding back to that place.
VII
SCOTT HAD A COPY OF THE BALLAD WHICH WAS NOT THE SHARPE COPY
Did Scott know no other version than that of the Sharpe MS.? In Scott’s version, stanza xlix., the last, is absent from the Elliot version, which concludes triumphantly, thus—
Now on they came to the fair Dodhead,
They were a welcome sight to see,
And instead of his ain ten milk-kye
Jamie Telfer’s gotten thirty and three.
Scott too gives this, but ends with a verse not in Sharpe—
And he has paid the rescue shot
Baith wi’ goud and white money,
And at the burial o’ Willie Scott
I wat was mony a weeping ee.
Did Scott add this? Proof is impossible; but the verse is so prosaic, and so injurious to the triumphant preceding verse, that I think Scott found it in his copy: in which case he had another copy than Sharpe’s.