Ch. 7: Conclusions

We have now examined critically the four essentially Border ballads which Sir Walter is suspected of having "edited" in an unrighteous manner. Now he helps to forge, and issues Auld Maitland. Now he, or somebody, makes up Otterburne, "partly of stanzas from Percy's Reliques, which have undergone emendations calculated to disguise the source from which they came, partly of stanzas of modern fabrication, and partly of a few stanzas and lines from Herd's version." {148a} Thirdly, Scott, it is suggested, knew only what I call "the Elliot version" of Jamie Telfer, perverted that by transposing the roles of Buccleuch and Stobs, and added picturesque stanzas in glorification of his ancestor, Wat of Harden. Fourthly, he is suspected of "writing the whole ballad" of Kinmont Willie, "from beginning to end."

Of these four charges the first, and most disastrous, we have absolutely disproved. Scott did not write one verse of the Auld Maitland; he edited it with unusual scrupulosity, for he had but one copy, and an almost identical recitation. He could not "eke and alter" by adding verses from other texts, as he did in Otterburne.

Secondly, Scott did not make up Otterburne in the way suggested by his critic. He took Hogg's MS., and I have shown minutely what that MS. was, and he edited it in accordance with his professed principles. He made "a standard text." It is only to be regretted that Hogg did not take down VERBATIM the words of his two reciters and narrators, and that Scott did not publish Hogg's version, with his letter, in his notes; but that was not his method, nor the method of his contemporaries.

Thirdly, as to Jamie Telfer, long ago I wrote, opposite

"The lyart locks of Harden's hair,"

aut Jacobus aut Diabolus, meaning that either James Hogg or the devil composed that stanza. I was wrong. Hogg had nothing to do with it; on internal evidence Scott was the maker. But that he transposed the Scott and Elliot roles is incapable of proof; and I have shown that such perversions were made in very early times, where national, not clan prejudices were concerned. I have also shown that Scott's version contains matter not in the Elliot version, matter injurious to the poem, as in one stanza, certainly not composed by himself, the stanza being an inappropriate stray formula from other ballads. But, in the absence of manuscript materials I can only produce presumptions, not proofs.

Lastly, Kinmont Willie, and Scott's share in it, is matter of presumption, not of proof. He had been in quest of the ballad, as we know from his list of desiderata; he says that what he got was "mangled" by reciters, and that, in what he got, one river was mentioned where topography requires another. He also admits that, in the three ballads of rescues, he placed passages where they had most poetical appropriateness. My arguments