Note on Letter of Mr. Surtees to Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, p. 64.
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.
A brief account of Surtees’ labour in the field of sham ballad writing
may be fresh to many people who merely know him as the real author of
“Barthram’s Dirge” and of “The Slaying of Anthony Featherstonhaugh.” In
an undated letter of 1806, Scott, writing from Ashestiel, thanks Surtees
for his “obliging communications.” Surtees manifestly began the
correspondence, being attracted by the “Border Minstrelsy.” Thus it
appears that Surtees did _not_ forge “Hobbie Noble” in the first edition
of the “Minstrelsy”; for he makes some suggestions as to the “Earl of
Whitfield,” dreaded by the hero of that ballad, which Scott had already
published. But he was already deceiving Scott, who writes to him about
“Ralph Eure,” or “Lord Eure,” and about a “Goth, who melted Lord Eure’s
gold chain.” This Lord Eure is doubtless the “Lord Eurie” of the ballad
in the later editions of the “Border Minstrelsy,” a ballad actually
composed by Surtees. That wily person immediately sent Scott a ballad on
“The Feud between the Ridleys and Featherstones,” in which Scott believed
to the day of his death. He introduced it in “Marmion.”
The whiles a Northern harper rude
Chaunted a rhyme of deadly feud,
How the fierce Thirlwalls and Ridleys all, &c.
In his note (“Border Minstrelsy,” second edition, 1808, p. xxi.) Scott
says the ballad was taken down from an old woman’s recitation at the
Alston Moor lead-mines “by the agent there,” and sent by him to Surtees.
Consequently, when Surtees saw “Marmion” in print he had to ask Scott not
to print “_the_ agent,” as he does not know even the name of Colonel
Beaumont’s chief agent there, but “an agent.” Thus he hedged himself
from a not impossible disclaimer by the agent at the mines.