The hypothesis of Mr. Child could only be DEMONSTRATED incorrect by proving that there was no Russian scandal at all, or by producing a printed or manuscript copy of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ older than 1719. We can do neither of these things; we can only give the reader his choice of two improbabilities--(a) that an historical event, in 1718-19, chanced to coincide with the topic of an old ballad; (b) that, contrary to all we know of the evolution of ballads and the state of taste, a new popular poem on a fresh theme was composed in a style long disused,* was offered most successfully to the public of 1719, and in not much more than half a century was more subjected to alterations and interpolations than ballads which for two or three hundred years had run the gauntlet of oral tradition. *A learned Scots antiquary writes to me: ‘The real ballad manner hardly came down to 1600. It was killed by the Francis Roos version of the Psalms, after which the Scottish folk of the Lowlands cast everything into that mould.’ I think, however, that ‘Bothwell Brig’ is a true survival of the ancient style, and there are other examples, as in the case of the ballad on Lady Warriston’s husband murder. As for our own explanation of the resemblance between the affair of Miss Hamilton, in 1719, and the ballad story of Mary Hamilton (alias Mild, Myle, Moil, Campbell, Miles, or Stuart, or anonymous, or Lady Maisry), we simply, with Scott, regard it as ‘a very curious coincidence.’ On the other theory, on Mr. Child’s, it is also a curious coincidence that a waiting-woman of Mary Stuart WAS hanged (not beheaded) for child-murder, and that there WERE written, simultaneously, ballads on the Queen’s Maries. Much odder coincidences than either have often, and indisputably, occurred, and it is not for want of instances, but for lack of space, that we do not give examples. Turning, now, to a genuine historic scandal of Queen Mary’s reign, we find that it might have given rise to the many varying forms of the ballad of ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ There is, practically, no such ballad; that is, among the many variants, we cannot say which comes nearest to the ‘original’ lay of the frail maid and her doom. All the variants are full of historical impossibilities, due to the lapses of memory and the wandering fancy of reciters, altering and interpolating, through more than two centuries, an original of which nothing can now be known. The fancy, if not of the first ballad poet who dealt with a real tragic event, at least of his successors in many corners of Scotland, raised the actors and sufferers in a sad story, elevating a French waiting-maid to the rank of a Queen’s Marie, and her lover, a French apothecary, to the place of a queen’s consort, or, at lowest, of a Scottish laird.