got the ballad when Laidlaw asked for it. They, again, learned it from their father, Hogg's grandfather, and from another old man, Andrew Moor, who had been in the service of the famous Boston, minister of Ettrick. The blind reciter mentioned by Scott was probably this Andrew Moor.
This is the external evidence for the authenticity of Auld Maitland. Laidlaw's good faith is undoubted. Scott, he says, had not made previous inquiries as to Auld Maitland. Laidlaw first heard of it from a girl on his farm who knew some verses. Laidlaw is clearly the "country farmer" who took the song down from the lips of "the old shepherd," Hogg's uncle, the man who made the confusion about the "Soudan Turk" in The Outlaw Murray. This was Scott's "first copy." He preferred to publish the piece as recited by old Mrs. Hogg, sister of "the old shepherd."
Laidlaw reckoned this "a good pedigree for the old ballad, though it is possible that Hogg may have dashed in a few stanzas 'to trap the Shirra' and evince his own powers."
Aytoun adds that there was a rival collector, Jamieson, in the field, and that the advent of a collector stimulates forgery. But where are we to look for the forger? A literary hoax was notoriously dear to Hogg. But, if there was no real ballad, how could Hogg hit on the theme of Auld Maitland? No inquiry by Scott for the piece gave him the hint, and Scott heard of the ballad from Laidlaw. Clever as he was, Hogg could not, in 1801, have read the Maitland MSS. in the Library of the University of Edinburgh and reconstructed a ballad on the hints supplied in MSS. of the sixteenth century. Even if he had read Gawain Douglas's Palace of Honour, nothing is said there of Maitland's three sons. How, then, and whence, could Hogg draw his materials? Is it probable that he made the ballad, and taught it to Laidlaw's servant girl, to his old uncle, and his old mother, "and the same with intent to deceive"? If a forger there was, Hogg alone can have been the man; and the difficulties of the hypothesis are immense. If there was no real ballad, he must have been acquainted, in 1801, with MSS. in an old hand which he could not read, and must have laid a complicated plot, involving his uncle, his mother, and a rustic maid. Even if the old people were likely to lend themselves to it, we can hardly believe that the memory of old age could have acquired a long new poem. Thus, on the whole, it
