Part 10 (1/2)

29. Hogg's verse is But tell na ane of my brave men That I lie bleeding wan, But let the name of Douglas still Be shouted in the van.

This is precisely what Douglas does say, in Froissart, but Scott deletes the stanza. Probably Hogg got the fact from his reciters, ”in plain prose,” with a phrase or two in verse.

31. (H.) Line 4.

On yonder lily lee.

27. (S.) That his merrie men might not see.

33. (H) Scott deletes the stanza.

35. (H) When stout Sir Hugh wi' Piercy met.

30. (S.) The Percy and Montgomery met. {83a} 36. (H.) ”O yield thee, Piercy,” said Sir Hugh, ”O yield, or ye shall die!”

”Fain would I yield,” proud Percy said, ”But ne'er to loon like thee.”

31. (S.) ”Now yield thee, yield thee, Percy,” he said, ”Or else I vow I'll lay thee low,”

”To whom must I yield,” quoth Earl Percy, ”Now that I see it must be so?”

Scott took this from Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe's MS. copy. {84a}

38. (H) 38. (S.) Scott makes a slight verbal alteration.

39. (H) Line 1.

34. (S.) Line 1.

Scott subst.i.tutes Herd's As soon as he knew it was Montgomery.

40. (H) Hogg's broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, derived from a lost form of the Huntiss of Chevets, named in The Complaynte of Scotland.

35. (S.) Scott omits giving the formula common to the English of 1550 and to Herd. This was the whole of Scott's editorial alteration. Any one may discover the facts from Professor Kittredge's useful abbreviation of Child's collection into a single volume (Nutt. London, 1905). Colonel Elliot quotes Professor Kittredge's book three or four times, but in place of looking at the facts he abounds in the Higher Criticism. Colonel Elliot says that Scott does not tell us of a single line having been borrowed from Percy's version. {84a} Scott has only ”a single line” to tell of, the fourth line in his stanza xxii., ”Till he fell to the ground.”

For the rest, the old English version and Herd's have many inter- borrowings of stanzas, but we do not know whether a Scot borrowed from an Englishman, or vice versa. Thus, in another and longer traditional version--Hogg's--more correspondence must be expected than in Herd's fourteen stanzas. It is, of course, open to scepticism to allege that Hogg merely made his text, invented the two crazy old reciters, and the whole story about them, and his second ”pumping of their memories,”

invented ”Almons.h.i.+re,” which he could not understand, and invented his last broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, to give the idea that The Huntiss of Chevets was mingled in the recollections of the reciters with The Battle of Otterburn. He also gave the sword in place of the pennon of Percy as the trophy of Douglas, ”and the same with intent to deceive,” just as he pretended, in Auld Maitland, not to know what ”springwalls” were, and wrote ”springs: wall-stanes.” If this probable theory be correct, then Scott was the dupe of Truthful James.

At all events, though for three years Scott was moving heaven and earth and Ettrick Forest to find a copy of a Scottish ballad of Otterburn, he did not sit down and make one, as, in Colonel Elliot's system, he easily could and probably would have done.

Before studying his next ill deed, we must repeat that the Otterburn ballads prove that in early times one nation certainly pirated a ballad of a rival nation, and very ingeniously altered it and inverted the parts of the heroes.

We have next to examine a case in a later generation, in which a maker who was interested in one clan, pirated, perverted, and introverted the roles of the heroes in a ballad by a maker interested in another clan.

Either an Elliotophile perverted a ballad by a Scottophile, or a Scottophile perverted a ballad by an Elliotophile.

This might be done at the time when the ballad was made (say 1620-60).

But Colonel Elliot believes that the perversion was inflicted on an Elliotophile ballad by a Scottophile impostor about 1800-1802. The name of this desperate and unscrupulous character was Walter Scott, Sheriff of Ettrick Forest, commonly called Selkirks.h.i.+re.

In this instance I have no ma.n.u.script evidence. The name of ”Jamie of the Fair Dodhead,” the ballad, appears in a list of twenty-two ballads in Sir Walter's hand, written in a commonplace book about 1800-1801.

Eleven are marked X. ”Jamie” is one of that eleven. Kinmont Willie is among the eleven not marked X. We may conjecture that he had obtained the first eleven, and was hunting for the second eleven,--some of which he never got, or never published.