seems probable that there really existed, in the memories of old people, a ballad of Auld Maitland.
What Hogg did to it, if anything, we can only conjecture. If he did much, it is not easy to see how his old mother and uncle learned his additions off by rote. But Scott overlooked the obvious circumstance that a forger could have found the old words which impressed him in an accessible source.
The ballad has:—
"They laid their sowies to the wall,
Wi' mony a heavy peal,
But he threw ower to them agen
Buith pitch and tar barrel.
With springalds, stanes, and gads of Airn,
Among them fast he threw . . . ."
Now Scott himself cited, as an illustration, Blind Harry's
"Up pitch and tar on feil sowis they lest . . . .
Stones on springalds they did cast out so fast
And goads of iron made many grone agast."
Blind Harry was probably well known to Hogg; it was a favourite of the peasantry. If he wanted local colour he would go to Blind Harry. Thus there is a balance of probabilities. The shepherd loved a hoax, but I fail to see how he would obtain a base for his operations; for in 1801 it is all but physically impossible that he would have even heard of the Maitland MSS. of 1560-1580.
The ballad of Otterbourne has caused many searchings of heart, and Scott has even been charged with writing in,
"Take thou the vanguard of the three
And bury me by the bracken bush
That grows upon yon lilye lea."
If so, he foisted them into his first edition, where the Douglas is killed by his own page. This variant of the tale Scott later rejected. His final edition, in place of
"Earl Douglas to the Montgomery said
Take thou the vanguard of the three,"
has
"My wound is deep, I fain would sleep.
Take thou the vanguard of the three."
