, and the patience.
But for the purposes of reading, for the purposes of poetic enjoyment,
such a collection is nearly valueless. We must have it for reference, of
course; nobody grudges the guineas he has spent for the best part of the
last twenty years on Professor Child's stately, if rather cumbrous,
volumes. But who can _read_ a dozen versions, say, of 'The Queen's
Marie' with any pleasure? What is exquisite in one is watered, messed,
spoiled by the others.

Therefore I shall maintain that though the most excellent way of all
might have been to record his alterations, and the original, in an
appendix-dustbin of _apparatus criticus_, Scott was right, and trebly
right, in such dealing as that with the first stanza of 'Fause
Foodrage,' which I have quoted and praised. That stanza, as it stands
above, does not occur in any of the extant quasi-originals. 'Mrs.
Brown's MS.,' from which, as Professor Child says, with almost silent
reproach, Scott took his text, 'with some forty small changes,' reads--

'King Easter has courted her for her gowd,
King Wester for her fee,
King Honour for her lands sae braid,
And for her fair bodie.'

Now this is clearly wrong. Either 'gowd' or 'lands' is a mere repetition
of 'fee,' and if not,[8] the reading does not point any ethical
antithesis between Kings Easter and Wester and their more chivalrous
rival. As it happens, there are two other versions, shorter and less
dramatic, but one of them distinctly giving, the other implying, the
sense of Scott's alteration. Therefore I say that Scott was fully
justified in adjusting the one text that he did print, especially as he
did it in his own right way, and not in the wrong one of Percy and
Mickle. There is here no Bentleian impertinence, no gratuitous meddling
with the at least possibly genuine text of a known and definite author.
The editor simply picks out of the mud, and wipes clean, something
precious, which has been defaced by bad usage, and has become
masterless.

The third volume of the _Minstrelsy_ was pretty speedily got ready, with
more matter; and _Sir Tristrem_ (which is in a way a fourth) was not
very long in following. This last part contained a _tour de force_ in
the shape of a completion of the missing part by Scott himself, a
completion which, of course, shocks philologists, but which was
certainly never written for them, and possesses its own value for
others.

Not the least part of the interest of