Sir Walter Scott remembered to the day of his death the place where he first made acquaintance with the _Reliques_ in his thirteenth year. ‘I remember well the spot where I read those volumes for the first time. It was beneath a large platanus-tree, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-fashioned arbour in the garden I have mentioned. The summer day sped onward so fast, that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet.’ Almost immediately competitors appeared in the field, and especial attention was given to Scotland, exceedingly rich ground, as it proved. In 1769, David Herd published his collection of _Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc._ Then, at intervals of two or three years only, came the compilations of Evans, Pinkerton, Ritson, Johnson; in 1802 Sir Walter Scott’s _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, fit to be placed side by side with the _Reliques_; in 1806 Jamieson’s _Popular Ballads and Songs_; then Finlay, Gilchrist, Laing, and Utterson. In 1828 the egregious Peter Buchan produced _Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland, hitherto unpublished_. Buchan hints that he kept a pedlar or beggarman--‘a wight of Homer’s craft’--travelling through Scotland to pick up ballads; and one of the two--probably Buchan--must have been possessed of powerful inventive faculties. Each of Buchan’s ballads is tediously spun out to enormous and unnecessary length, and is filled with solecisms and inanities quite inconsistent with the spirit of the true ballad. But Buchan undoubtedly gained fresh material, however much he clothed it; and his ballads are now reprinted, as Professor Child says, for much the same reason that thieves are photographed. Scotland continued the work with two excellent students and pioneers, George Kinloch and William Motherwell. Next, Robert Chambers published a collection of eighty ballads, some being spurious. This was in 1829. Thirty years later Chambers came to the conclusion that ‘the high-class romantic ballads of Scotland ... are not older than the early part of the eighteenth century, and are mainly, if not wholly, the production of one mind.’ And this one mind, he thinks, was probably that of Elizabeth, Lady Wardlaw, the acknowledged forger of the ballad _Hardyknute_, which deceived so many. Chambers, of course, was absurdly mistaken.