'History of English Poetry,' followed Sharpe and Professor Child,
and says: 'It is very remarkable that one of the very latest of the
Scottish popular ballads should be one of the very best.'

The occurrence would not only be remarkable, but, as far as
possibility goes in literature, would be impossible, for several
reasons. One is that neither literary men nor mere garreteers and
makers of street ballads appear, about 1719-1730, to have been
capable of recapturing the simplicity and charm of the old ballad
style, at its best, or anything near its best. There is no
mistaking the literary touch in such ballads as Allan Ramsay
handled, or in the imitation named 'Hardyknute ' in Allan's 'Tea
Table Miscellany,' 1724. 'It was the first poem I ever learned, the
last I shall ever forget,' said Scott, and, misled by boyish
affection, he deemed it 'just old enough,' 'a noble imitation.'*
But the imitation can deceive nobody, and while literary imitators,
as far as their efforts have reached us, were impotent to deceive,
the popular Muse, of 1714-1730, was not attempting deception.
Ballads of the eighteenth century were sarcastic, as in those on
Sheriffmuir and in Skirving's amusing ballad on Preston Pans, or
were mere doggerel, or were brief songs to old tunes. They survive
in print, whether in flying broadsides or in books, but, popular as
is 'The Queen's Marie,' in all its many variants (Child gives no
less than eighteen), we do not know a single printed example before
Scott's made-up copy in the 'Border Minstrelsy.' The latest ballad
really in the old popular manner known to me is that of 'Rob Roy,'
namely, of Robin Oig and James More, sons of Rob Roy, and about
their abduction of an heiress in 1752. This is a genuine popular
poem, but in style and tone and versification it is wholly unlike
'The Queen's Marie.' I scarcely hope that any one can produce,