So far it is perfectly easy to take his point of view.  But it is more difficult to reconcile his practice with his professions.  We find this declaration in the forefront of the book:  “No liberties have been taken either with the recited or written copies of these ballads, farther than that, where they disagreed, which is by no means unusual, the editor, in justice to the author, has uniformly preserved what seemed to him the best or most poetical rendering of the passage....  Some arrangement was also occasionally necessary to recover the rhyme, which was often, by the ignorance of the reciters, transposed or thrown into the middle of the line.  With these freedoms, which were essentially necessary to remove obvious corruptions and fit the ballads for the press, the editor presents them to the public, under the complete assurance that they carry with them the most indisputable marks of their authenticity."[49] In the face of this fair announcement we are surprised, to say the least, at the number of lines and stanzas which scholars have discovered to be of Scott’s own composition.[50]

Occasionally his notes give some slight indication of his method of treatment, as for instance this, on The Dowie Dens of Yarrow:  “The editor found it easy to collect a variety of copies; but very difficult indeed to select from them such a collated edition as might in any degree suit the taste of ‘these more light and giddy-paced times.’” Notes on some others of the ballads say that “a few conjectural emendations have been found necessary,” but no one of these remarks would seem really ingenuous in a modern scholar when we consider how far the “conjectural emendations” extended.  Moreover, changes were often made without the slightest clue in introduction or note.[51]

The case was complicated for Scott by the poetical tastes of his assistants.  Leyden[52] was apparently quite capable of taking down a ballad from recitation in such a way as to produce a more finished poem than one would expect a traditional ballad to be.  And Hogg,[53] who supplied several ballads from the recitations of his mother and other old people, was probably still less strict.  “Sure no man,” he is quoted as having said, “will think an old song the worse of being somewhat harmonious."[54] Yet it is easy to see that Scott’s friends might have acted differently if his own practice had favored absolute fidelity to the texts.

A remark in Scott’s review of Evans’s Old Ballads seems a pretty definite arraignment of his own procedure.  “It may be asked by the severer antiquary of the present day, why an editor, thinking it necessary to introduce such alterations in order to bring forth a new, beautiful, and interesting sense from a meagre or corrupted original, did not in good faith to his readers acquaint them with the liberties he had taken and make them judge whether in so doing he transgressed his limits.  We answer that unquestionably such would be the express duty of a modern editor, but such were not the rules of the service when Dr. Percy first opened the campaign."[55]