Scott made his bag, as he tells us, chiefly 'during his early youth,' among 'the shepherds and aged persons in the recesses of the Border mountains,' who 'remembered and repeated the warlike songs of their fathers.' They were gathered on those long pedestrian excursions, with Shortreed or with Leyden (himself a balladist), which were themselves often as full of incident, and of the seeds of future romance, as any old Border raid. The great Master of Romance was, as one of his companions said, 'makin' himsel' a' the time.' Dandie Dinmont, whom the author of _Guy Mannering_ sketches from the traits of a dozen honest yeomen and store farmers, whose hospitality he had shared in his rambles through the wilds of Liddesdale, would a few generations earlier have been a stark moss-trooper, ready to ride to the rescue of Kinmont Willie or to seek his 'beef and kail' in the Merse. The raid on Habbie Elliot of the Heughfoot is but a 'variant' of the lifting of Telfer's kye; and _Wandering Willie's Tale_, if it had been cast in verse, would have been the pick of our ballads of 'glamourie,' instead of the choicest of short prose stories. The rhyme and air that haunted the memory of Henry Bertram--what are they but an echo out of Scott's own romantic youth--out of the enchanted land of ballad poetry?
'"Are these the Links of Forth," she said, "Or are they the crooks of Dee, Or the bonnie woods o' Warroch-head That I so fain would see?"'
It was on one of these excursions up Ettrick that Scott forgathered with Margaret Laidlaw, the mother of the 'Shepherd,' and the repository of an inexhaustible store of fairy tales, songs and ballads, which, as she declared, the compiler of the _Border Minstrelsy_ 'spoiled' by transmitting to print. But the richest and rarest of his 'finds' was Hogg himself. He was nursed in the lap of the Forest and cradled in ballad and fairy lore. Here was the 'heart of pathos' of the older poetry; the head buzzing with its wild fancies; 'the sang o' the linty amang the broom in the spring'; and along with these the shaggy front, the strong hand-grips, the loyalty, and the sturdy sense that are the far-descended inheritance of the Border farmer and shepherd. Surely, to parody his own words, those who love to listen to Allan Ramsay and Burns and Scott, and to the nameless Balladists who were their masters and teachers, will 'never forget a'thegither the Ettrick Shepherd.'