hacks; that copy would circulate, be lost, and become in turn a
traditional source, though full of modernisms. Or an educated person
might make a written copy, filling up gaps himself in late
seventeenth or in eighteenth century ballad style, and this might
pass into the memory of the children and servants of the house, and
so to the herds and to the farm lasses. I suspect that this process
may have occurred in the cases of Auld Maitland and of The Outlaw
Murray--"these two bores" Mr. Child is said to have styled them.

When Allan Ramsay, about 1720, took up and printed a ballad, he
altered it if he pleased. More faithful to his texts (wherever he
got them), was David Herd, in his collection of 1776, but his version
did not reach, as we shall see, old reciters in Ettrick. If Scott
found any traditional ballads in Ettrick, as his collectors certainly
did, they had passed through the processes described. They needed
re-editing of some sort if they were to be intelligible, and readable
with pleasure.

In 1800, apparently, while Scott made only brief flying visits from
the little inn of Clovenfords, on Tweed, to his sheriffdom, he found
a coadjutor. Richard Heber, the wealthy and luxurious antiquary and
collector, looked into Constable's first little bookselling shop, and
saw a strange, poor young student prowling among the books. This was
John Leyden, son of a shepherd in Roxburghshire, a lad living in
extreme poverty.

Leyden, in 1800, was making himself a savant. Heber spoke with him,
found that he was rich in ballad-lore, and carried him to Scott. He
was presently introduced into the best society in Edinburgh (which
would not happen in our time), and a casual note of Scott's proves