ne copy among his papers of this ballad, corrected
and interlined, in order to mould it to the language, the manners, and
the feelings of the period and of the district to which it refers. Mr
Surtees no doubt had wished to have the success of his attempt tested by
the unbiassed opinion of the very first authority on the subject; and
the result must have been gratifying to him."

In Scott's acknowledgment of the contribution, printed also in the Life
of Surtees, there are some words that must have brought misgivings and
fear of detection to the heart of the culprit, since Scott, without
apparently allowing doubts to enter his mind, yet marked some
peculiarities in the piece, in which it differed from others. "Your
notes upon the parties concerned give it all the interest of authority,
and it must rank, I suppose, among those half-serious, half-ludicrous
songs, in which the poets of the Border delighted to describe what they
considered as the _sport of swords_. It is perhaps remarkable, though it
may be difficult to guess a reason, that these Cumbrian ditties are of a
different stanza and character, and obviously sung to a different kind
of music, from those on the northern Border. The gentleman who collected
the words may perhaps be able to describe the tune."

There is perhaps no system of ethics which lays down with perfect
precision the moral code on literary forgeries, or enables us to judge
of the exact enormity of such offences. The world looks leniently on
them, and sometimes sympathises with them as good jokes. Allan
Cunningham, who, like Ramsay, was called "honest Allan," did not lose
that character by the tremendous "rises" which he took out of Cromek
about those remains of Nithsdale and Galloway song--a case in point so
far as principle goes, but differing somewhat in the intellectual rank
of the victim to the hoax. The temptation to commit such offences is
often extremely strong, and the injury seems slight, while the offender
probably consoles himself with the reflection that he can immediately
counteract it by confession. Vanity, indeed, often joins
conscientiousness in hastening on a revelation. Surtees, however,
remained in obdurate silence, and I am not aware that any edition of
the Minstrelsy draws attention to his handiwork. Lockhart seems not only
to have been ignorant of it, but to have been totally unconscious of the
risk of such a thing, since he always speaks of its author as a
respectable local