Colonel Elliot is ignorant of the facts in the case. He gropes his
way under the misleading light of a false date, and of fragments torn
from the context of a letter which, in its complete form, has never
till now been published. Where positive and published information
exists, it has not always come within the range of the critic's
researches; had it done so, he would have taken the information into
account, but he does not. Of the existence of Scott's "first copy"
of the ballad in manuscript our critic seems never to have heard;
certainly he has not studied the MS. Had he done so he would not
assign (on grounds like those of Homeric critics) this verse to Hogg
and that to Scott. He would know that Scott did not interpolate a
single stanza; that spelling, punctuation, and some slight verbal
corrections, with an admirable emendation, were the sum of his
industry: that he did not even excise two stanzas of, at earliest,
eighteenth century work.

I must now clear up misconceptions which have imposed themselves on
all critics of the ballad, on myself, for example, no less than on
Colonel Elliot: and must tell the whole story of how the existence
of the ballad first became known to Scott's collector and friend,
William Laidlaw, how he procured the copy which he presented to Sir
Walter, and how Sir Walter obtained, from recitation, his "second
copy," that which he printed in The Minstrelsy in 1803.

In 1801 Scott, who was collecting ballads, gave a list of songs which
he wanted to Mr. Andrew Mercer, of Selkirk. Mercer knew young Will
Laidlaw, farmer in Blackhouse on Yarrow, where Hogg had been a
shepherd for ten years. Laidlaw applied for two ballads, one of them
The Outlaw Murray, to Hogg, then shepherding at Ettrick House, at the
head of Ettrick, above Thirlestane. Hogg replied on 20th July 1801.