antiquary, useful to Scott as a harmless drudge.
Perhaps Surtees was afraid of what he had done, like that teller in the
House of Commons who is said by tradition to have attempted to make a
bad joke in the division on the Habeas Corpus Act by counting a fat man
as ten, and, seeing that the trick passed unnoticed, and also passed the
measure, became afraid to confess it.

The literary history of "The Death of Featherstonhaugh" naturally
excited uneasiness about the touching ballad of "Barthram's Dirge," also
contributed to the Minstrelsy as the fruit of the industrious
investigations of Surtees. Most readers will remember this:--

"They shot him dead at the Nine-Stone Rig,
Beside the headless cross,
And they left him lying in his blood,
Upon the moor and moss."

After this stanza, often admired for its clearness as a picture, there
is a judicious break, and then come stanzas originally deficient of
certain words, which, as hypothetically supplied by Surtees, were
good-naturedly allowed to remain within brackets, as ingenious
suggestions:--

"They made a bier of the broken bough,
The sauch and the aspine grey,
And they bore him to the Lady Chapel,
And waked him there all day.

A lady came to that lonely bower,
And threw her robes aside;
She tore her ling [long] yellow hair,
And knelt at Barthram's side.

She bathed him in the Lady Well,
His wounds sae deep and sair,
And she plaited a garland for his breast,
And a garland for his hair."

A glance at the reprint of the Life of Surtees for the book club called
after his name, confirms the suspicions raised by the exposure of the
other ballad--this also is an imposition.[75]

[Footnote 75: The editor of the Life prints the following note by Mr
Raine, the coadjutor of Surtees in his investigations into the history
of the North of England: "I one evening in looking through Scott's
Minstrelsy wrote opposite to this dirge, _Aut Robertus aut Diabolus_.
Surtees called shortly after, and, pouncing upon the remark, justified
me by his conversation on the subject, in adding to my note, _Ita, teste
seipso_."--P. 87.]

Altogether, such affairs create an unpleasant uncertainty about the
paternity of that delightful department of literature, our ballad
poetry. Where next are we to be disenchanted? Of the way in which
ancient ballads have come into existence, there is one sad example
within my