Fashionably Late - Liner Notes by LINDA THOMPSON.

Here's Text with notes of "Barthram's Dirge" from The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, where, on Nine Stone Rig, Scott wrote: "the mention of the Nine-Stane Burn, and Nine-Stane Rig, seems to refer to those places in the vicinity of Hermitage Castle, which is countenanced by the mentioning our Lady's Chapel."

The story of the "fraud" was told in Note on Letter of Mr. Surtees to Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, p. 64 in Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody by Andrew Lang:

No literary forgeries were ever much better done than the sham ballads which Surtees of Mainsforth imposed on Sir Walter Scott. The poems were spirited and good of their kind; and though we wonder now that some of them could take in an expert, it is by no means assured that we are even to-day acquainted with the whole of Surtees' frauds. Why a man otherwise honourable, kindly, charitable, and learned, exercised his ingenuity so cruelly upon a trusting correspondent and a staunch friend, it is hardly possible to guess. The biographers of Surtees maintain that he wanted to try his skill on Scott, then only known to him by correspondence; and that, having succeeded, he was afraid to risk Scott's friendship by a confession. This is plausible; and if good may come out of evil, we may remember that two picturesque parts of "Marmion" are due to one confessed and another certain supercherie of Surtees. It cannot be said in his defence that he had no conception of the mischief of literary frauds; in more than one passage of his correspondence he mentions Ritson's detestation of these practices. "To literary imposition, as tending to obscure the path of inquiry, Ritson gave no quarter," says this arch literary impostor. [...]

English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald (The Harvard Classics) (1909-14) contains this ballad under Robert Surtees (1779-1834).

~Masato