I print this letter, and, if any one chooses to think that it is a
crafty fabrication, I can only say that its craft would have beguiled
myself as it beguiled Scott.

It is a common, cheap, and ignorant scepticism that disbelieves in
the existence, in Scott's day, or in ours, of persons who know and
can recite variants of our traditional ballads. The strange song of
The Bitter Withy, unknown to Professor Child, was recovered from
recitation but lately, in several English counties. The ignoble lay
of Johnny Johnston has also been recovered: it is widely diffused.
I myself obtained a genuine version of Where Goudie rins, through the
kindness of Lady Mary Glyn; and a friend of Lady Rosalind Northcote
procured the low English version of Young Beichan, or Lord Bateman,
from an old woman in a rural workhouse. In Shropshire my friend Miss
Burne, the president of the Folk-Lore Society, received from Mr.
Hubert Smith, in 1883, a very remarkable variant, undoubtedly
antique, of The Wife of Usher's Well. {0a} In 1896 Miss Backus
found, in the hills of Polk County, North Carolina, another variant,
intermediate between the Shropshire and the ordinary version. {0b}

There are many other examples of this persistence of ballads in the
popular memory, even in our day, and only persons ignorant of the
facts can suppose that, a century ago, there were no reciters at the
head of Ettrick, and elsewhere in Scotland. Not even now has the
halfpenny newspaper wholly destroyed the memories of traditional
poetry and of traditional tales even in the English-speaking parts of
our islands, while in the Highlands a rich harvest awaits the
reapers.