'There is more than reason to suspect that it [_Hardyknute_] owes most of its beauties (if not its whole existence) to the pen of a lady within the present century. The following particulars may be depended on. Mrs [mistake for Lady] Wardlaw, whose maiden name was Halket ... pretended she had found this poem, written on shreds of paper, employed for what is called the bottoms of clues. A suspicion arose that it was her own composition. Some able judges asserted it to be modern. The lady did in a manner acknowledge it to be so. Being desired to show an additional stanza, as a proof of this, she produced the two last, beginning with "There's nae light, &c.," which were not in the copy that was first printed. The late Lord President Forbes and Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto (late Lord Justice-clerk for Scotland), who had believed it ancient, contributed to the expense of publishing the first edition, in folio, 1719. This account was transmitted from Scotland by Sir David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes),[13] who yet was of opinion that part of the ballad may be ancient, but retouched and much enlarged by the lady above mentioned. Indeed, he had been informed that the late William Thomson, the Scottish musician, who published the _Orpheus Caledonius_, 1733, declared he had heard fragments of it repeated in his infancy before Mrs Wardlaw's copy was heard of.' [13] It is rather remarkable that Percy was not informed of these particulars in 1765; but in 1767--_Sir John Hope Bruce having died in the interval_ (June 1766)--they were communicated to him. It looks as if the secret had hung on the life of this venerable gentleman. The question as to the authorship of _Hardyknute_ was once more raised in 1794, when Sir Charles Halket, grandson of Mary, third daughter of Lady Wardlaw, wrote a letter to Dr Stenhouse of Dunfermline, containing the following passage: 'The late Mr Hepburn of Keith often declared he was in the house with Lady Wardlaw when she wrote _Hardyknute_.' He also gave the following particulars in a manuscript account of his family, as reported by George Chalmers (_Life of Allan Ramsay_, 1800): 'Miss Elizabeth Menzies, daughter of James Menzies, Esq., of Woodend, in Perthshire, by Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Henry Wardlaw [second baronet], wrote to Sir Charles Halket that her mother, who was sister-in-law to Lady Wardlaw, told her that Lady Wardlaw was the real authoress of _Hardyknute_; that Mary, the wife of Charles Wedderburn, Esq., of Gosford, told Miss Menzies that her mother, Lady Wardlaw, wrote _Hardyknute_. Sir Charles Halket and Miss Elizabeth Menzies concur in saying that Lady Wardlaw 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.'