Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy

In Satchells, Buccleuch leaves half his men at the “Stonish bank” (Staneshaw bank) “_for fear they had made noise or din_.” An old soldier should have known better, and the ball...

DEAR SIR,—I have been perusing your minstrelsy very diligently for a while past, and it being the first book I ever perused which was written by a person I had seen and converse...

Colonel Elliot attempts to meet this difficulty by his theory of the route taken by the Captain, which he illustrates by a map. {102a} The ballad gives no details except that th...

Douglas bids Percy yield, but Percy slays Douglas (as in Walsingham’s and other contemporary chronicles, stanzas li.–lvi.). The Scottish losses are then enumerated (only eightee...

“Now yield thee, yield thee, Percy,” he said, “Or else I vow I’ll lay thee low,” “To whom must I yield,” quoth Earl Percy, “Now that I see it must be so?”

I know no proof that Scott was acquainted with variant E of _Young Beichan_. {120b} If he had been, he could not have introduced into _Jamie Telfer_ lines so utterly out of keep...

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,...

PERSONS not much interested in, or cognisant of, “antiquarian old womanries,” as Sir Walter called them, may ask “what all the pother is about,” in this little tractate. On my s...

The truth is that Scott was easily deceived by a modern imitation, if he liked the poetry. Surtees hoaxed him not only with _Barthram’s Dirge_ and _Anthony Featherstonhaugh_, bu...

{25} Ritson of 10th April 1802, in his _Letters of Joseph Ritson_, _Esq._, vol. ii. p. 218. Letter of 10th June 1802, _Ibid._, p. 207. Ritson returned the original manuscript of...