so, in what sense, antique and traditional? That Hogg made the whole
of it is to me incredible. He had told Laidlaw on 20th July 1801, that
he would make no ballads on traditions without Scott's permission,
written in Scott's hand. Moreover, how could he have any traditions
about "Auld Maitland, his noble Sonnis three," personages of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? Scott had read about them in
poems of about 1580, but these poems then lay in crabbed manuscripts.
Again, Hogg wrote in words ("springs, wall-stanes") of whose meaning he
had no idea; he took it as he heard it in recitation. Finally, the
style is not that of Hogg when he attempts the ballad. Scott observed
that "this ballad, notwithstanding its present appearance, has a claim
to very high antiquity." The language, except for a few technical
terms, is modern, but what else could it be if handed down orally? The
language of undoubted ballads is often more modern than that which was
spoken in my boyhood in Ettrick Forest. As Sir Walter Scott remarked,
a poem of 1570-1580, which he quotes from the Maitland MSS., "would run
as smoothly, and appear as modern, as any verse in the ballad (with a
few exceptions) if divested of its antique spelling."

We now turn to the historical characters in the ballad.

Sir Richard Maitland of Lauder, or Thirlestane, says Scott, was already
in his lands, and making donations to the Church in 1249. If, in 1296,
forty-seven years later, he held his castle against Edward I., as in
the ballad, he must have been a man of, say, seventy-five. By about
1574 his descendant, Sir Richard Maitland, was consoled for his family
misfortunes (his famous son, Lethington, having died after the long
siege of Edinburgh Castle, which he and Kirkcaldy of Grange held for
Queen Mary), by a poet who reminded him that his ancestor, in the
thirteenth century, lost all his sons--"peerless pearls"--save one,