Scott (stanza xviii.) reads “Catslockhill” where the Sharpe MS. reads “Catlockhill.” In Scott’s time it was a mound, but the name was then known to Mr. Grieve, the tenant of Branksome Park. To-day I cannot find the mound; is it likely that Scott, before making the change, sought diligently for the mound and its name? If so, he found “Catlochill,” for so Mr. Grieve writes it, not Catslockhill.
Meanwhile Colonel Elliot, we know, has no Catlockhill where he wants it; he has only Gatliehill, unless his Blaeu varies from my copy, and Gatliehill is not Catlockhill.
Scott gives (xlviii.) the speech of the Captain after he is shot through the head and in another dangerous part of his frame—
“Hae back thy kye!” the Captain said,
“Dear kye, I trow, to some they be,
For gin I suld live a hundred years,
There will ne’er fair lady smile on me.”
This is not in Sharpe’s MS., and I attribute this redundant stanza to Scott’s copy. The Captain, remember, has a shot “through his head,” and another which must have caused excruciating torture. In these circumstances would a poet like Scott put in his mouth a speech which merely reiterates the previous verse? No! But the verse was in Scott’s copy.
Colonel Elliot has himself noted a more important point than these: he quotes Scott’s stanza xii., which is absent from the Sharpe MS.—
My hounds may a’ rin masterless,
My hawks may fly frae tree to tree,
My lord may grip my vassal lands,
For there again maun I never be!
“They are, doubtless, beautiful lines, but their very beauty jars like a false note. One feels they were written by another hand, by an artist of a higher stamp than a Border ‘ballad-maker.’ And not only is it their beauty that jars, but so also does their inapplicability to Jamie Telfer and to the circumstances in which he found himself—so much so, indeed, that it may well occur to one that the stanza belongs to some other ballad, and has accidentally been pitchforked into this one. It would not have been out of place in the ballad of The Battle of Otterbourne, and, indeed, it bears some resemblance to a stanza in that ballad.” Here the Colonel says that the lines “one feels were written by another hand, by an artist of a higher stamp than a Border ballad-maker.” But “it may also occur to one that the stanza belongs to some other ballad, and has accidentally” (my italics) “been pitchforked into this”: a very sound inference.
Now if Scott had only the Sharpe version, he was the last man to “pitchfork” into it, “accidentally,” a stanza from “some other ballad,” that stanza being as Colonel Elliot says “inapplicable” to Telfer and his circumstances. Poor Jamie, a small tenant-farmer, with ten cows, and, as far as we learn, not one horse, had no hawks and hounds; no “vassal lands,” and no reason to say that at the Dodhead he “maun never be again.” He could return from his long run! Scott certainly did not compose these lines; and he could not have pitchforked them into Jamie Telfer, either by accident or design.
Professor Child remarked on all this: “Stanza xii. is not only found elsewhere (compare Young Beichan, E vi.), but could not be more inappropriately brought in than here; Scott, however, is not responsible for that.” [120a]