Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy | Page 6

Again, in the towns, street ballads on remarkable events, as early at
least as the age of Henry VIII., were written or printed. Knox speaks of

ballads on Queen Mary's four Maries. Of these ballads only one is left,
and it is a libel. The hanging of a French apothecary of the Queen, and
a French waiting-maid, for child murder, has been transferred to one of
the Maries, or rather to an apocryphal Mary Hamilton, with Darnley for
her lover. Of this ballad twenty-eight variants--and extremely various
they are--were collected by Professor Child in his English and Scottish
Popular Ballads (ten parts, 1882- 1898). In one mangled form or
another such ballads would drift at last even to Ettrick Forest.
A ballad may be found in a form which the first author could scarcely
recognise, dozens of hands, in various generations, having been at work
on it. At any period, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the cheap press might print a sheet of the ballads, edited and
interpolated by the very lowest of printer's hacks; that copy would
circulate, be lost, and become in turn a traditional source, though full of
modernisms. Or an educated person might make a written copy, filling
up gaps himself in late seventeenth or in eighteenth century ballad style,
and this might pass into the memory of the children and servants of the
house, and so to the herds and to the farm lasses. I suspect that this
process may have occurred in the cases of Auld Maitland and of The
Outlaw Murray--"these two bores" Mr. Child is said to have styled
them.
When Allan Ramsay, about 1720, took up and printed a ballad, he
altered it if he pleased. More faithful to his texts (wherever he got
them), was David Herd, in his collection of 1776, but his version did
not reach, as we shall see, old reciters in Ettrick. If Scott found any
traditional ballads in Ettrick, as his collectors certainly did, they had
passed through the processes described. They needed re-editing of
some sort if they were to be intelligible, and readable with pleasure.
In 1800, apparently, while Scott made only brief flying visits from the
little inn of Clovenfords, on Tweed, to his sheriffdom, he found a
coadjutor. Richard Heber, the wealthy and luxurious antiquary and
collector, looked into Constable's first little bookselling shop, and saw a
strange, poor young student prowling among the books. This was John
Leyden, son of a shepherd in Roxburghshire, a lad living in extreme
poverty.
Leyden, in 1800, was making himself a savant. Heber spoke with him,
found that he was rich in ballad-lore, and carried him to Scott. He was

presently introduced into the best society in Edinburgh (which would
not happen in our time), and a casual note of Scott's proves that he did
not leave Leyden in poverty. Early in 1802, Leyden got the promise of
an East Indian appointment, read medicine furiously, and sailed for the
East in the beginning of 1803. It does not appear that Leyden went
ballad-hunting in Ettrick before he rode thither with Scott in the spring
of 1802. He was busy with books, with editorial work, and in aiding
Scott in Edinburgh. It was he who insisted that a small volume at five
shillings was far too narrow for the materials collected.
Scott also corresponded with the aged Percy, Bishop of Dromore,
editor of the Reliques, and with Joseph Ritson, the precise collector,
Percy's bitter foe. Unfortunately the correspondence on ballads with
Ritson, who died in 1803, is but scanty; nor has most of the
correspondence with another student, George Ellis, been published.
Even in Mr. Douglas's edition of Scott's Familiar Letters, the portion of
an important letter of Hogg's which deals with ballad-lore is omitted. I
shall give the letter in full.
In 1800-01, "The Minstrelsy formed the editor's chief occupation," says
Lockhart; but later, up to April 1801, the Forest and Liddesdale had
yielded little material. In fact, I do not know that Scott ever procured
much in Liddesdale, where he had no Hogg or Laidlaw always on the
spot, and in touch with the old people. It was in spring, 1802, that Scott
first met his lifelong friend, William Laidlaw, farmer in Blackhouse, on
Douglasburn, in Yarrow. Laidlaw, as is later proved completely,
introduced Scott to Hogg, then a very unsophisticated shepherd.
"Laidlaw," says Lockhart, "took care that Scott should see, without
delay, James Hogg." {4a} These two men, Hogg and Laidlaw, knowing
the country people well, were Scott's chief sources of recited balladry;
and probably they sometimes improved, in making their copies, the
materials won from the failing memories of the old. Thus Laidlaw,
while tenant in Traquair Knowe, obtained from recitation, The Daemon
Lover. Scott does not tell us whether or