Sir Walter's method of editing, of presenting his traditional
materials, was literary, and, usually, not scientific. A modern
collector would publish things--legends, ballads, or folk-tales--
exactly as he found them in old broadsides, or in MS. copies, or
received them from oral recitation. He would give the names and
residences and circumstances of the reciters or narrators (Herd, in
1776, gave no such information). He would fill up no gaps with his
own inventions, would add no stanzas of his own, and the circulation
of his work would arrive at some two or three hundred copies given
away!

As Lockhart says, "Scott's diligent zeal had put him in possession of
a variety of copies in various stages of preservation, and to the
task of selecting a standard text among such a diversity of materials
he brought a knowledge of old manners and phraseology, and a manly
simplicity of taste, such as had never before been united in the
person of a poetical antiquary."

Lockhart speaks of "The editor's conscientious fidelity . . . which
prevented the introduction of anything new, and his pure taste in the
balancing of discordant recitations." He had already written that
"Scott had, I firmly believe, interpolated hardly a line or even an
epithet of his own." {8a}

It is clear that Lockhart had not compared the texts in The
Minstrelsy with the mass of manuscript materials which are still at
Abbotsford. These, copied by the accurate Mr. Macmath, have been
published in the monumental collection of English and Scottish
Popular Ballads, in ten parts, by the late Professor Child of