es are here selected from both
copies, and some trivial alterations have been adopted from
tradition,"--with the comment by Mr. Henderson--"The emendations of
Scott are so many, and the majority relate so entirely to style, that no
mere tradition could have supplied them."[60] His versions are in
general characterized by a smoothness and precision of meter which to
the student of ballads is very suspicious. But he seems occasionally to
have altered or supplied incidents as well as phrases. The historical
event which furnished the purpose for the expedition of Sir Patrick
Spens seems to have been introduced into the ballad by Scott, and Mr.
Henderson thinks that "when the deeds of his ancestors were concerned it
was impossible for him to resist the temptation to employ some of his
own minstrel art on their behalf."[61]

Certainly Scott's qualifications for evolving true poetry out of the
crude fragments that sometimes served as a basis formed a very unusual
combination when they were united with his knowledge of early history
and literature. He had such confidence in his own powers in this
direction that he at one time intended to write a series of imitations
of Scottish poets of different periods, from Thomas the Rhymer down, and
thus to exhibit changes in language as well as variations in literary
style.[62] He evidently thought that the ballads as they appeared in the
_Minstrelsy_ were truer to their originals than were the copies he was
able to procure from recitation. Lockhart gives him precisely the kind
of praise he would have desired, in saying, "From among a hundred
corruptions he seized with instinctive tact the primitive diction and
imagery."[63]

It is evident that Scott's public did not wish him to be more careful
than he was in discriminating between new and old matter. One of his
moments of strict veracity seems even to have occasioned some annoyance
to the writer of the _Edinburgh_ article, who apparently preferred to
believe in the antiquity of _The Flowers of the Forest_ rather than to
learn that "the most positive evidence" proved its modern origin. The
editor's introduction to the poem seems perfectly clear; he names his
authority and quotes two verses which are ancient;[64] but the reviewer
says with a perverse irritability: "Mr. Scott would have done well to
tell us how much he deems ancient, and to give us the 'positive
evidence' that convinced him _the whole_ was not so."[65] This review
was, ho