"At e'en, in the gloaming, nae younkers are roaming,"


an artifice rare in genuine ballads, might alone have proved to Scott
that the poem of Miss Elliot is not popular and ancient.

I have cleared my conscience by confessing Scott's literary sins.
His interpolations, elsewhere mere stopgaps, are mainly to be found
in Kinmont Willie and Jamie Telfer. His duty was to say, in his
preface to each ballad, "The editor has interpolated stanza" so and
so; if he made up the last verses of Kinmont Willie from the
conclusion of a version of Archie o' Ca'field, he should have said
so; as he does acknowledge two stopgap interpolations by Hogg in Auld
Maitland. But as to the conclusion of Kinmont Willie, he did, we
shall see, make confession.

Professor Kittredge, who edited Child's last part (X.), says in his
excellent abridged edition of Child (1905), "It was no doubt the
feeling that the popular ballad is a fluid and unstable thing that
has prompted so many editors--among them Sir Walter Scott, whom it is
impossible to assail, however much the scholarly conscience may
disapprove--to deal freely with the versions that came into their
hands."

Twenty-five years after the appearance of The Border Minstrelsy, in
1827, appeared Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern.
Motherwell was in favour of scientific methods of editing. Given two
copies of a ballad, he says, "perhaps they may not have a single
stanza which is mutual property, except certain commonplaces which