Her love it was much but her pity was more.
The words that he said on her fond heart smote,
She knew not in sooth if she lived or not.
She looked to his face, and it kythed so unkind
That her fast coming tears soon rendered her blind.
(Sts. 3, 9, 10.)
Jamie Telfer (190) “was retouched for the Border Minstrelsy, nobody can say how much. The 36th stanza is in Hardyknute style.”[310]
Of Hughie Grame (191), B, 3, 8, “are obviously, as Cromek says, the work of Burns, and the same is true of 103-4.”[311] The Famous Flower of Serving-Men (106), an “English broadside, which may be reasonably believed to be formed upon a predecessor in the popular style,[312] was given in Percy’s Reliques, ..., ‘from a written copy containing some improvements (perhaps modern ones).’ These improvements are execrable in style and in matter, so far as there is new matter, but not in so glaring contrast with the groundwork as literary emendations of traditional ballads.”[313] Such contrast is found in the “hack-rhymester lines” in Bewick and Graham (211, 73, 192), which are “not up to the mark of the general style.”[314] Similarly, King Henry (32) “as published by Jamieson ... is increased by interpolation to thirty-four stanzas [from twenty]. ‘The interpolations will be found enclosed in brackets,’ but a painful contrast of style of itself distinguishes them.”[315] Editorial changes are, however, in some cases confined to slight verbal variations, where the contrast is less evident or painful.[316]
Yet, in spite of its artless, homely, and non-literary style, the ballad is not without conventions of its own. Most striking of these is the use of “commonplaces” or passages which recur in many ballads, like:
When bells were rung and mass was sung,