cnd wrote: For anyone like myself not previously familiar with Hogg, he seems to have been fairly prone to crafting new amalgamations where concrete evidence lacked.

That's a pretty good summary. For instance, a very large fraction of so-called Jacobite songs come from Hogg's works (notably the Jacobite Relics of Scotland) cannot be shown to have existed before he published them -- I just checked the entries for the Jacobite Relics in the Ballad Index, and half of them list Hogg as the earliest source. Moreover, with the exception of "The Haughs o' Cromdale," not one of these songs has more than five other citations of any period.

Sometimes it's coincidence; sometimes Hogg found a scrap somewhere and fixed it up. But Hogg is pretty untrustworthy as a "founding source."

To be fair, a lot of what he touched up turned out pretty well.