When the king and his men was not to see.’
In the copy printed in the Border Minstrelsy, this is Soudron—i. e., Southron or English, which I have no doubt is the proper reading.—Aytoun.
[4] The Shepherd’s conjecture proved correct. Mr Aytoun procured his copy of the ballad from the charter-chest at Philiphaugh. The copy in the Border Minstrelsy was printed from one found among the papers of Mrs Cockburn, authoress of The Flowers of the Forest.
[5] MS. notes by W. Laidlaw. Professor Aytoun says that one cause of his doubts as to the antiquity of Auld Maitland was that it wanted a clear intelligible story and main plot, so that it could not be retained in memory for a couple of months. If the Professor (alas, now no more!) had chanced, in any of his angling excursions on the Tweed, to have fallen in with a brother of the rod, Mr Stirling, Depute Sheriff-clerk of Peebles (also now gone), he would have found at least one gentleman who could repeat the whole ballad without a break, though he had not read a line of it for more than twenty years. Hogg states explicitly that when the sheriff visited his cottage at Ettrick, his mother recited or chanted the ballad; and in a poetical address to Scott congratulating him on his elevation to the baronetcy, the Shepherd says:
‘When Maitland’s song first met your ear,
How the furled visage up did clear,
Beaming delight! though now a shade
Of doubt would darken into dread,
That some unskilled presumptuous arm
Had marred tradition’s mighty charm.