With these freedoms, which were essentially necessary to remove obvious corruptions and fit the ballads for the press, the editor presents them to the public, under the complete assurance that they carry with them the most indisputable marks of their authenticity."[49] In the face of this fair announcement we are surprised, to say the least, at the number of lines and stanzas which scholars have discovered to be of Scott's own composition.[50] Occasionally his notes give some slight indication of his method of treatment, as for instance this, on _The Dowie Dens of Yarrow_: "The editor found it easy to collect a variety of copies; but very difficult indeed to select from them such a collated edition as might in any degree suit the taste of 'these more light and giddy-paced times.'" Notes on some others of the ballads say that "a few conjectural emendations have been found necessary," but no one of these remarks would seem really ingenuous in a modern scholar when we consider how far the "conjectural emendations" extended.

Moreover, changes were often made without the slightest clue in introduction or note.[51] The case was complicated for Scott by the poetical tastes of his assistants.

Leyden[52] was apparently quite capable of taking down a ballad from recitation in such a way as to produce a more finished poem than one would expect a traditional ballad to be.

And Hogg,[53] who supplied several ballads from the recitations of his mother and other old people, was probably still less strict.

"Sure no man," he is quoted as having said, "will think an old song the worse of being somewhat harmonious."[54] Yet it is easy to see that Scott's friends might have acted differently if his own practice had favored absolute fidelity to the texts.
A remark in Scott's review of Evans's _Old Ballads_ seems a pretty definite arraignment of his own procedure.