Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/453

 REVIEWS.

Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Edited by T. F. Henderson. 4 vols., 8vo. Wm. Black- wood and Sons, 1902. Price JQ2 2s. net.

These four handsome volumes are a worthy presentation of a work which has long since become a classic without losing a whit of its freshness or charm. In size and type they pleasantly recall the familiar originals, while they are enriched with a number of useful and business-like notes and with a very pleasing photo- gravure from the portrait of Sir Walter by Sir William Allan. All criticisms notwithstanding, this is an edition which any book- lover may be proud to possess.

Mr. Henderson is evidently a thoroughly competent local anti- quary, and has completed, elucidated, and occasionally corrected, Scott's historical notes with the most conscientious care and pains, and in a very satisfactory manner. He has also examined all the still-existing MS. and other copies of the ballads from which Scott worked, and he gives the variorum readings in footnotes, showing clearly which portions of the published ballads are due to Scott himself, and which to his authorities. (Scott's method was to collate the several variants, choosing the best lines and stanzas of each, but not scrupling to add lines and even stanzas when his authorities did not satisfy him.)

All this part of Mr. Henderson's work is excellent. We say this the more emphatically, as we have some serious criticisms to make in other respects. He approaches the ballads themselves rather from the standpoint of the local historian or the biographer than from that of the lover of poetry, of romance, or of folklore. "The most valuable and original part of Scott's undertaking," he says, nected with the Border"; and his own interest in the work lies chiefly in tracing the part played by these legendary and anti- quarian studies in giving its special distinction to the genius of
 * ' was the preservation and annotation of ballads specially con-

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