The changes Scott made were usually in style rather than in substance.  Often he merely substituted an archaic word for a modern one; but often whole lines and longer passages offered temptations which the poet in him could not resist, and he “improved” lavishly.  For example, we have his note on Earl Richard—­“The best verses are here selected from both copies, and some trivial alterations have been adopted from tradition,”—­with the comment by Mr. Henderson—­“The emendations of Scott are so many, and the majority relate so entirely to style, that no mere tradition could have supplied them."[60] His versions are in general characterized by a smoothness and precision of meter which to the student of ballads is very suspicious.  But he seems occasionally to have altered or supplied incidents as well as phrases.  The historical event which furnished the purpose for the expedition of Sir Patrick Spens seems to have been introduced into the ballad by Scott, and Mr. Henderson thinks that “when the deeds of his ancestors were concerned it was impossible for him to resist the temptation to employ some of his own minstrel art on their behalf."[61]

Certainly Scott’s qualifications for evolving true poetry out of the crude fragments that sometimes served as a basis formed a very unusual combination when they were united with his knowledge of early history and literature.  He had such confidence in his own powers in this direction that he at one time intended to write a series of imitations of Scottish poets of different periods, from Thomas the Rhymer down, and thus to exhibit changes in language as well as variations in literary style.[62] He evidently thought that the ballads as they appeared in the Minstrelsy were truer to their originals than were the copies he was able to procure from recitation.  Lockhart gives him precisely the kind of praise he would have desired, in saying, “From among a hundred corruptions he seized with instinctive tact the primitive diction and imagery."[63]

It is evident that Scott’s public did not wish him to be more careful than he was in discriminating between new and old matter.  One of his moments of strict veracity seems even to have occasioned some annoyance to the writer of the Edinburgh article, who apparently preferred to believe in the antiquity of The Flowers of the Forest rather than to learn that “the most positive evidence” proved its modern origin.  The editor’s introduction to the poem seems perfectly clear; he names his authority and quotes two verses which are ancient;[64] but the reviewer says with a perverse irritability:  “Mr. Scott would have done well to tell us how much he deems ancient, and to give us the ’positive evidence’ that convinced him the whole was not so."[65] This review was, however, for the most part favorable.