a style long disused,* was offered most successfully to the public
of 1719, and in not much more than half a century was more subjected
to alterations and interpolations than ballads which for two or
three hundred years had run the gauntlet of oral tradition.

*A learned Scots antiquary writes to me: 'The real ballad manner
hardly came down to 1600. It was killed by the Francis Roos version
of the Psalms, after which the Scottish folk of the Lowlands cast
everything into that mould.' I think, however, that 'Bothwell Brig'
is a true survival of the ancient style, and there are other
examples, as in the case of the ballad on Lady Warriston's husband
murder.

As for our own explanation of the resemblance between the affair of
Miss Hamilton, in 1719, and the ballad story of Mary Hamilton (alias
Mild, Myle, Moil, Campbell, Miles, or Stuart, or anonymous, or Lady
Maisry), we simply, with Scott, regard it as 'a very curious
coincidence.' On the other theory, on Mr. Child's, it is also a
curious coincidence that a waiting-woman of Mary Stuart WAS hanged
(not beheaded) for child-murder, and that there WERE written,
simultaneously, ballads on the Queen's Maries. Much odder
coincidences than either have often, and indisputably, occurred, and
it is not for want of instances, but for lack of space, that we do
not give examples.

Turning, now, to a genuine historic scandal of Queen Mary's reign,
we find that it might have given rise to the many varying forms of
the ballad of 'The Queen's Marie.' There is, practically, no such
ballad; that is, among the many variants, we cannot say which comes
nearest to the 'original' lay of the frail maid and her doom. All