But perhaps the best example appears in connection with _The Fortunes of Nigel_.

He first designed the material of that book for a series of "private letters" purporting to have been written in the reign of James I., but when he had finally complied with the advice of his friends and used it for a novel, he said to Lockhart, "You were all quite right: if the letters had passed for genuine, they would have found favour only with a few musty antiquaries."[56] This suggests comparison with the conduct of his friend Robert Surtees, who palmed off upon him three whole ballads of his own and got them inserted in the _Minstrelsy_ as ancient, with a plausible tale concerning the circumstances of their recovery.

Surtees, one is interested to observe, never dared tell Scott the truth, and Scott always accepted the ballads as genuine--a lack of discernment rather compromising in an editor, though one may perhaps excuse him on the ground of his confidence in his brother antiquary.[57] In one direction Scott seems to have been more conscientious than we might be inclined to suppose after seeing the discrepancy between the standard of exactness that his own statements lead us to expect and the results that actually appear.

I believe that he intended to preserve the manuscript texts just as he received them, and that he would have wished to have them given to the public when the public was prepared to want them.

To support this theory we have first the fact that most of his own emendations have been traced by means of the manuscripts which he used.[58] It is significant that in speaking of a poet who had altered a manuscript to suit a revised reading he grew indignant over that fault far more than over the mere change in the published version.