The Scottish ballads - National Library of Scotland

afforded of the condition in which such poetry
exists in all the principal provinces of Scot-
land.
In the present age, when, like the precious
volumes of the Sibyl, books may be said to in-
crease in value in so far as they are abbreviated,
objection will scarcely be taken to a work which
proposes to condense the diffused merit of so
many different and expensive books. The reader
will here find, that I have not only made a care-
ful selection of what appeared to me in every
respect the best of the whole mass of published
ballads ; which has been already done, to a cer-
tain extent, by recent compilers ; but that, by
a more daring exertion of taste, I have, in a
great many instances, associated what seemed
to me the best stanzas, and the best lines, nay
even the best words, of the various copies ex-
tant ;
thus producing something considerably
different, it is true, from what is to be found in
any particular part of the country, and there-
fore not correctly a representation of the con-
dition of Scottish ballad poetry any where ; but
which, nevertheless, as it combines many other
advantages, is unquestionably better, at least
in a literary point of view, than any other sin-
gle thing either oral or printed. I am per-
fectly aware that this mode of editing ballads
la