Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy by Andrew Lang
page 50 of 162 (30%)
page 50 of 162 (30%)
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XVIII.
Until we came unto that town Which some call Billop-Grace; There were Auld Maitland's sons, a' three, Learning at school, alas! Now, if I venture to differ from Colonel Elliot here, I may plead that I am practised in the art of ballad-faking, and can produce high testimonials of skill! To me stanzas xv., xviii. seem to differ much from viii.-xi., but not in such a way as Hogg would have differed, had he made them. Hogg's error would have lain, as Scott's did, in being, as Scott said of Mrs. Hemans, TOO POETICAL. Neither Hogg nor Scott, I think, was crafty enough to imitate the prosaic drawl of the printed broadside ballad, or the feeble interpolations with which the "gangrel scrape-gut," or bankelsanger, supplied gaps in his memory. The modern complete ballad-faker WOULD introduce such abject verses, but Scott and Hogg desired to decorate, not to debase, ballads with which they intermeddled, and we track them by their modern romantic touch when they interpolate. I take it, for this reason, that Hogg did not write stanzas xv., xviii. It was hardly in nature for Hogg, if he knew Ville de Grace in Normandy (a thing not very probable), to invent "Billop-Grace" as a popular corruption of the name--and a popular corruption it is, I think. Probably the original maker of this stanza wrote, in line 4, "alace," an old spelling--not "alas"--to rhyme with "grace." Colonel Elliot then assigns xv., xviii. as most likely of all to be by |
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