"pottinger," or apothecary, as in the real old Scotch affair. (3)
The number of variants of a ballad is likely to be proportionate to
its antiquity and wide distribution. Now only Sir Patrick Spens
has so many widely different variants as Mary Hamilton. These
could hardly have been evolved between 1719 and 1790, when Burns
quotes the poem as an old ballad. (4) We have no example of a poem
so much in the old ballad manner, for perhaps a hundred and fifty
years before 1719. The style first degraded and then expired:
compare Rob Roy and Killiecrankie, in this collection, also the
ballads of Loudoun Hill, The Battle of Philiphaugh, and others much
earlier than 1719. New styles of popular poetry on contemporary
events as Sherriffmuir and Tranent Brae had arisen. (5) The
extreme historic inaccuracy of Mary Hamilton is paralleled by that
of all the ballads on real events. The mention of the Pottinger is
a trace of real history which has no parallel in the Russian
affair, and there is no room, says Professor Child, for the
supposition that it was voluntarily inserted by reciter or copyist,
to tally with the narrative in Knox's History.

On the other side, we have the name of Mary Hamilton occurring in a
tragic event of 1719, but then the name does not uniformly appear
in the variants of the ballad. The lady is there spoken of
generally as Mary Hamilton, but also as Mary Myle, Lady Maisry, as
daughter of the Duke of York (Stuart), as Marie Mild, and so forth.
Though she bids sailors carry the tale of her doom, she is not
abroad, but in Edinburgh town. Nothing can be less probable than
that a Scots popular ballad-maker in 1719, telling the tale of a
yesterday's tragedy in Russia, should throw the time back by a
hundred and fifty years, should change the scene to Scotland (the
heart of the sorrow would be Mary's exile), and, above all, should