‘Dear Sir—I received yours, with the transcript, on the day before St Boswell’s Fair’ [17th of July], ‘and am sorry to say it will not be in my power to procure you manuscripts of the two old ballads, especially as they which Mr Scott hath already collected are so near being published. I was talking to my uncle concerning them, and he tells me they are mostly escaped his memory, and they really are so—in so much, that of the whole long transactions betwixt the Scottish king and Murray, he cannot make above half-a-dozen of stanzas to metre, and these are wretched. He attributed it to James V., but as he can mention no part of the song or tale from whence this is proven, I apprehend, from some expressions, it is much ancienter. Upon the whole, I think the thing worthy of investigation—the more so as he’ [Murray of the ballad] ‘was the progenitor of a very respectable family, and seems to have been a man of the utmost boldness and magnanimity. What way he became possessed of Ettrick Forest, or from whom he conquered it, remains to me a mystery. When taken prisoner by the king at Permanscore, above Hanginshaw, where the traces of the encampments are still visible, and pleading the justice of his claim to Ettrick Forest, he hath this remarkable expression:
“I took it from the Soudan Turk
When you and your men durstna come see.”[3]
Who the devil was this Soudan Turk? I would be very happy in contributing any assistance in my power to the elucidating the annals of that illustrious and beloved though now decayed house, but I have no means of accession to any information. I imagine the whole manuscript might be procured from some of the connections of the family. Is it not in the library at Philiphaugh?[4] As to the death of the Baron of Oakwood and his brother-in-law on Yarrow, if Mr Mercer or Mr Scott, or either of them, wisheth to see it poetically described, they might wait until my tragedy is performed at the Theatre-royal; and if that shall never take place, they must sit in darkness and the shadow of death for what light the poets of Bruce’s time can afford them!
‘I believe I could get as much from these traditions as to make good songs out of them myself. But without Mr Scott’s permission this would be an imposition; neither would I undertake it without an order from him in his own handwriting, as I could not bring my language to bear with my date. As a supplement to his songs, if you please, you may send him the one I sent last to you: it will satisfy him, yea or nay, as to my abilities. Haste; communicate this to him; and ask him if, in his researches, he hath lighted on that of John Armstrong of Gilnockie Hall, as I can procure him a copy of that. My uncle says it happened in the same reign with that of Murray, and if so, I am certain it has been written by the same bard. I could procure Mercer some stories—such as the tragical, though well-authenticated one of the unnatural murder of the son and heir of Sir Robert Scott of Thirlstane, the downfall of the family of Tushilaw, and the horrid spirit that still haunts the Alders. And we might give him that of John Thomson’s Aumrie, and the Bogle of Bell’s Lakes.
‘My muse still lies dormant, and with me must sleep for ever, since a liberal public hath not given me what my sins and mine iniquities deserved.—I am yours for ever.
James Hogg.
‘July 20th, 1801.’
The ‘liberal public’ had given a reception ‘the north side of friendly,’ as Bailie Nicol Jarvie says, to a small publication which made its appearance about six months before the date of the above letter, entitled ‘Scottish Pastorals, Poems, &c., by James Hogg, Farmer at Ettrick’—a most unlucky speculation.
Mr Laidlaw was constantly annoyed, he said, to find how much the affectation and false taste of Allan Ramsay had spoiled or superseded many striking and beautiful old strains of which he got traces and fragments, and how much Scott was too late in beginning his researches, as many aged persons, who had been the bards and depositaries of a former generation, were then gone.