Page:Posthumous poems (IA posthumousswinb00swin).pdf/17

 believed that he had been boiled to death within the Druid circle of Nine-Stone-Rig, which overlooks and slopes down to the Water of Hermitage. The cauldron in which the unfortunate Soulis was said to have been sodden was long exhibited to the credulous in Liddesdale.

What foundation there may have been for the popular belief that Lord Soulis was a wizard, and held communion with evil spirits, it is now hopeless to conjecture. John Leyden (1775-1811) put together all the rumours which he could collect in the rambling poem of "Lord Soulis" which he wrote about 1801, and which Scott afterwards annotated. Leyden caught something of the true ballad note, and he had the advantage of being himself a borderer, the descendant of small farmers long settled in Teviotdale,

Swinburne's ballad follows Leyden's in no respect, except in the indispensable particular of the boiling of Lord Soulis as a wizard. The three fair mays and the raiding of Eastness and Westness appear to be Swinburne's invention, but they follow exactly the ancient type of border minstrelsy. Everything which regarded the castle of Hermitage was romantically precious to this latest lover of Mary Queen of Scots.

What led Swinburne to the story of "Lord Scales" it is not easy to conjecture. A barony