Harvard, the greatest of scholars in ballad-lore. From his book we
often know exactly what kinds of copies of ballads Scott possessed,
and what alterations he made in his copies. The Ballad of Otterburne
is especially instructive, as we shall see later. But of the most
famous of Border historical ballads, Kinmont Willie, and its
companion, Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead, Scott has left no
original manuscript texts. Now into each of these ballads Scott has
written (if internal evidence be worth anything) verses of his own;
stanzas unmistakably marked by his own spirit, energy, sense of
romance, and, occasionally, by a somewhat inflated rhetoric. On this
point doubt is not easy. When he met the names of his chief,
Buccleuch, and of his favourite ancestor, Wat of Warden, Scott did,
in two cases, for those heroes what, by his own confession, he did
for anecdotes that came in his way--he decked them out "with a cocked
hat and a sword."

Sir Walter knew perfectly well that he was not "playing the game" in
a truly scientific spirit. He explains his ideas in his "Essay on
Popular Poetry" as late as 1830. He mentions Joseph Ritson's
"extreme attachment to the severity of truth," and his attacks on
Bishop Percy's purely literary treatment of the materials of his
Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765).

As Scott says, "by Percy words were altered, phrases improved, and
whole verses were inserted or omitted at pleasure." Percy
"accommodated" the ballads "with such emendations as might recommend
them to the modern taste." Ritson cried "forgery," but Percy, says
Scott, had to win a hearing from his age, and confessed (in general
terms) to his additions and decorations.