of learning and good taste fitted him to influence a broader public than that of specialists.  At the same time he was a delightful and stimulating friend to other scholars.  Southey was becoming known as an authority on the history and literature of the Spanish peninsula.  A review in the Quarterly a dozen years later mentions these three,—­Ellis, Scott, and Southey,—­as “good men and true” to serve as guides in the remote realms of literature.[38] Ellis’s friend, John Hookham Frere, had great abilities but was an incurable dillettante.  Scott particularly admired a Middle-English version of The Battle of Brunanburgh which Frere wrote in his school-boy days, and considered him an authoritative critic of mediaeval English poetry.  Robert Surtees[39] and Francis Douce[40] were antiquaries of some importance, and both, like all the others named, were friends of Scott.  Mr. Herford calls this period a day of “Specimens” and extracts:  “Mediaeval romance was studied in Ellis’s Specimens,” he says, “the Elizabethan drama in Lamb’s, literary history at large in D’Israeli’s gently garrulous compilations of its ‘quarrels,’ ‘amenities,’ ‘calamities,’ and ‘curiosities.’"[41] But the scholarship of the time on the whole is worthy of respect.  In the case of ballads and romances notable work had been done before Scott entered the field,[42] and he and his contemporaries were carrying out the promise of the half century before them—­continuing the work that Percy and Warton had begun.

Among the problems connected with ballad study, that which arises first is naturally the question of origins.  Scott made no attempt to formulate a theory different in any main element from that which was held by his predecessors.  He agreed with Percy that ballads were composed and sung by minstrels, and based his discussion on the materials brought forward by Percy and Ritson for use in their great controversy.[43] Ritson himself never doubted that ballads were composed and sung by individual authors, though he might refuse to call them minstrels.  The idea of communal authorship, which Jacob Grimm was to suggest only half a dozen years after the first edition of the Minstrelsy, would doubtless have been rejected by Scott, even if he had considered it.  But we have no evidence that he did so.  Probably he did not, as he never felt the need of a new theory.[44]

Scott’s opinion in regard to the transmission of ballads followed naturally from his theory of their origin.  His aristocratic instincts perhaps helped to determine his belief that ballads were composed by gifted minstrels, and that they had deteriorated in the process of being handed down by recitation.  He called tradition “a sort of perverted alchymy which converts gold into lead.”  “All that is abstractedly poetical,” he said, “all that is above the comprehension of the merest peasant, is apt to escape in frequent repetition; and the lacunae thus created are filled up either by lines from other ditties or from the mother wit of the reciter or singer.  The injury, in either case, is obvious and irreparable."[45] From this point of view Scott considered that the ballads were only getting their rights when a skilful hand gave them such a retouching as should enable them to appear in something of what he called their original vigor.[46]