Then says Hogg -


Thy fist made all the table ring,
By -, sir, but that is the thing!


Hogg could not thus describe the scene in addressing Scott himself,
in 1818, if his story were not true. It thus follows that his mother
knew the sixty-five stanzas of the ballad by heart. Does any one
believe that, as a woman of seventy-two, she learned the poem to back
Hogg's hoax? That he wrote the poem, and caused her to learn it by
rote, so as to corroborate his imposture?

This is absurd.

But now comes the source of Colonel Elliot's theory of a conspiracy
between Scott and Hogg, to forge a ballad and issue the forgery.
Colonel Elliot knows scraps of a letter to Hogg of 30th June 1802.
He has read parts, not bearing on the question, in Mr. Douglas's
Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott (vol. i. pp. 12-15), and another
scrap, in which Hogg says that "I am surprised to hear that Auld
Maitland is suspected by some to be a modern forgery." This part of
Hogg's letter of 30th June 1802 was published by Scott himself in the
third volume of The Minstrelsy (April 1803).

Not having the context of the letter, Colonel Elliot seems to argue,
"Scott says he got his first copy in autumn 1802" (Lockhart's
mistake), "yet here are Hogg and Scott corresponding about the ballad