Or hurt my virgin honour;
My youthful heart was won by love,
But death will me exoner’ (C, 2, 42).
are “not homely enough.”[301] Moreover,
‘At Fyvie’s yetts there grows a flower,
It grows baith braid and bonny;
There’s a daisie in the midst o it,
And it’s ca’d by Andrew Lammie’ (A, 1.).
“the mystical verses with which A and B begin are also not quite artless.”[302] The ninth stanza of The New-Slain Knight (263) “is pretty, but not quite artless.”[303] In the true ballad the conceit is out of place. Scott’s version (C) of Thomas Rymer (37) closes with two satirical stanzas not popular in style. “‘The repugnance of Thomas to be debarred the use of falsehood when he should find it convenient,’ may have, as Scott says, ‘a comic effect,’ but is, for a ballad, a miserable conceit.”[304] In The Mother’s Malison (216), A 81-2, C 101-2,
Make me your wrack as I come back,