Suspicions, indeed, of the modern authorship of _Hardyknute_ had arisen in various quarters long before any one person in particular was publicly named as the author. That was first done by Percy in 1767, in the second edition of his _Reliques_, when he gave his reasons for thinking, from information transmitted to him from Scotland by Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, that the ballad was substantially the composition of a Scottish lady, who had died in 1727, eight years after it had first appeared in its less perfect form, and three years after it had appeared with the improvements and the additional stanzas. That lady was Elizabeth Halket, born in 1677, one of the daughters of Sir Charles Halket of Pitfirran in Fifeshire, baronet, but who had changed her name to Wardlaw in the year 1696, when she became the wife of Sir Henry Wardlaw of Pitreavie, also a Fifeshire baronet. All subsequent evidence has confirmed the belief that this Lady Wardlaw was the real author of _Hardyknute_, though, to mystify people, it was first given out by her relatives as an ancient fragment. This was the statement more especially of the already-mentioned Sir John Hope Bruce of Kinross, who was one of her brothers-in-law. Of Lady Wardlaw herself we hear nothing more distinct than that she was “a woman of elegant accomplishments, who wrote other poems, and practised drawing and cutting paper with her scissors, and who had much wit and humour, with great sweetness of temper.” So we must be content to imagine her,—a bright-minded and graceful lady, living in Fifeshire, or coming and going between Fifeshire and Edinburgh, nearly two centuries ago, and who, while attending to her family duties and the duties of her station, could cherish in secret a poetic vein peculiarly her own, and produce at least one fine ballad of an ideal Scottish antique. This in itself would be much. For that was the age of Queen Anne and of the first of the Georges, when poetry of an ideal or romantic kind was perhaps at its lowest ebb throughout the British Islands, and the poetry most in repute was that of the modern school of artificial wit and polish represented by Addison and Pope.