The hawk that flies from tree to tree
is a formula; it comes in the Kinloch MS. copy of the ballad of Jamie Douglas, date about 1690.
I know no proof that Scott was acquainted with variant E of Young Beichan. [120b] If he had been, he could not have introduced into Jamie Telfer lines so utterly out of keeping with Telfer’s circumstances, as Colonel Elliot himself says that stanza xii. is. It may be argued, “if Scott did find stanza xii. in his copy, it was in his power to cut it out; he treated his copies as he pleased.” This is true, but my position is that, of the two, Scott is more likely to have let the stanza abide where he found it (as he did with his MS. of Tamlane, retaining its absurdities) in his copy, than to “pitchfork it in,” from an obscure variant of Young Beichan, which we cannot prove that he had ever heard or read. But as we can never tell that Scott did not know any rhyme, we ask, why did he “pitchfork in” the stanza, where it was quite out of place? Child absolves him from this absurdity.
Thus Scott had before him another than the Sharpe copy; had a copy containing stanza xii. That copy presented the perversion—the transposition of Scott’s and Elliot’s—and into that copy Scott wrote the stanzas which bear his modern romantic mark. Colonel Elliot, we saw, is uncertain whether to attribute stanza xii. to “another hand, an artist of higher stamp than a Border ballad-maker,” or to regard it as belonging “to some other ballad,” and as having been “accidentally pitchforked into this one.” The stanza is, in fact, an old floating ballad stanza, attracted into the cantefable of Susie Pye, and the ballad of Young Beichan (E), and partly into Jamie Douglas. Thus Scott did not make the stanza, and we cannot suppose that, if he knew the stanza in any form, he either “accidentally pitchforked” or wilfully inserted into Jamie Telfer anything so absurdly inappropriate. The inference is that Scott worked on another copy, not the Sharpe copy.
If Scott had not a copy other than Sharpe’s, why should he alter Sharpe’s (vii.)
The moon was up and the sun was down,
into
The sun wasna up but the moon was down?
What did he gain by that? Why did he make Jamie “of” not “in” the Dodhead, if he found “in” in his copy? “In” means “tenant in,” “of” means “laird of,” as nobody knew better than Scott. Jamie is evidently no laird, but “of” was in Scott’s copy.
If the question were about two Greek texts, the learned would admit that these points in A (Scott) are not derived from B (Sharpe). Scott’s additions have an obvious motive, they add picturesqueness to his clan. But the differences which I have noticed do nothing of that kind. When they affect the poetry they spoil the poetry, when they do not affect the poetry they are quite motiveless, whence I conclude that Scott followed his copy in these cases, and that his copy was not the Sharpe MS.