It is now to be remarked of the ballads published by the successors of Percy, as of those which he published, that there is not a particle of positive evidence for their having existed before the eighteenth century. Overlooking the one given by Ramsay in his _Tea-table Miscellany_, we have neither print nor manuscript of them before the reign of George III. They are not in the style of old literature. They contain no references to old literature. As little does old literature contain any references to them. They wholly escaped the collecting diligence of Bannatyne. James Watson, who published a collection of Scottish poetry in 1706-1711, wholly overlooks them. Ramsay, as we see, caught up only one. Even Herd, in 1769, only gathered a few fragments of some of these poems. It was reserved for Sir Walter Scott and Robert Jamieson, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to obtain copies of the great bulk of these poems--that is, the ballads over and above the few published by Percy--from A LADY--a certain 'Mrs Brown of Falkland,' who seems to have been the wife of the Rev. Andrew Brown, minister of that parish in Fife--is known to have been the daughter of Professor Thomas Gordon, of King's College, Aberdeen--and is stated to have derived her stores of legendary lore from the memory of her aunt, a Mrs Farquhar, the wife of a small proprietor in Braemar, who had spent the best part of her life among flocks and herds, but lived latterly in Aberdeen. At the suggestion of Mr William Tytler, a son of Mrs Brown wrote down a parcel of the ballads which her aunt had heard in her youth from the recitation of nurses and old women.[28] Such were the external circumstances, none of them giving the least support to the assumed antiquity of the pieces, but rather exciting some suspicion to the contrary effect. [28] _Minstrelsy Scot. Border_, I. cxxvi.