Oddly enough,
Sir Walter had once discovered a small sepulchral cross, upset, in
Liddesdale, near the "Nine Stane Rig;" and this probably made him
more easily deceived. Surtees very cleverly put some lines, which
COULD not have been original, in brackets, as his own attempt to
fill up lacunae. Such are
[When the dew fell cold and still,
When the aspen grey forget to play,
And the mist clung to the hill.]
Any one reading the piece would say, "It must be genuine, for the
CONFESSED interpolations are not in the ballad style, which the
interpolator, therefore, could not write." An attempt which
Surtees made when composing the song, and which he wisely rejected,
could not have failed to excite Scott's suspicions. It ran -
They buried him when the bonny may
Was on the flow'ring thorn;
And she waked him till the forest grey
Of every leaf was lorn;
Till the rowan tree of gramarye
Its scarlet clusters shed,
And the hollin green alone was seen
With its berries glistening red.
Whether Surtees' "Brown Man of the Muirs," to which Scott also gave
a place in his own poetry, was a true legend or not, the reader may
decide for himself.
Concerning another ballad in the "Minstrelsy"--"Auld Maitland"--
Professor Child has expressed a suspicion which most readers feel.
What Scott told Ellis about it (Autumn, 1802) was, that he got it
in the Forest, "copied down from the recitation of an old shepherd
by a country farmer.
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