Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Scott's Work As Student And Editor In The Field Of Literary History The Mediaeval Period Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border Scott's early interest in ballads — Casual origin of the Minstrelsy — Importance of the book in Scott's career—Plan of the book — Mediaeval scholarship of Scott's time — His theory as to the origin of ballads and their deterioration — His attitude toward the work of previous editors — His method of forming texts — Kinds of changes he made — His qualifications for emending old poetry—Modern imitations of the ballad included in the Minstrelsy—Remarks on the ballad style — Impossibility of a scientific treatment of folk-poetry in Scott's time — Real importance of the Minstrelsy. We think of the Border Minstrelsy as the first work which resulted from the preparation of Scott's whole youth, between the days when he insisted on shouting the lines of Hardyknute into the ears of the irate clergyman making a parish call, and the time when he and his equally ardent friends gathered their ballads from the lips of old women among the hills. But we have seen that the inspiration for his first attempts at writing poetry came only indirectly from the ballads of his own country. We learn from the introduction to the third part of the Minstrelsy that some of the young men of Scott's circle in Edinburgh were stimulated by what the novelist, Henry Mackenzie, told them of the beauties of German literature, to form a class for the study of that language. This was when Scott was twenty-one, but it was still four years before he found himself writing those translations which mark the sufficiently modest beginning of his literary career. His enthusiasm for German literature was not at first tempered by any critical discrimination, if we may judge from ...