Lockhart gives him precisely the kind of praise he would have desired, in saying, "From among a hundred corruptions he seized with instinctive tact the primitive diction and imagery."[63] It is evident that Scott's public did not wish him to be more careful than he was in discriminating between new and old matter.

One of his moments of strict veracity seems even to have occasioned some annoyance to the writer of the _Edinburgh_ article, who apparently preferred to believe in the antiquity of _The Flowers of the Forest_ rather than to learn that "the most positive evidence" proved its modern origin.

The editor's introduction to the poem seems perfectly clear; he names his authority and quotes two verses which are ancient;[64] but the reviewer says with a perverse irritability: "Mr.Scott would have done well to tell us how much he deems ancient, and to give us the 'positive evidence' that convinced him _the whole_ was not so."[65] This review was, however, for the most part favorable.
The fact that Scott included modern imitations of the ballad in his book is another indication that his attitude was like that of his predecessors.[66] Doubtless these helped the _Minstrelsy_ to sell, but a more modern taste would choose to put them in a place by themselves, not in a collection of old ballads.

An essay on _Imitations of the Ancient Ballad_ was written, as were the _Remarks on Popular Poetry_, for the 1833 edition.

It is chiefly interesting for its autobiographical matter, though it also contains criticisms of Burns and other writers of ballad poetry--"a species of literary labour which the author has himself pursued with some success."[67] Scott's statement that the ballad style was very popular at the time he began to write, and that he followed the prevailing fashion, was one of many examples of his modesty, taken in connection with the remark in another part of the essay to the effect that this style "had much to recommend it, especially as it presented considerable facilities to those who wished at as little exertion or trouble as possible to attain for themselves a certain degree of literary reputation." To complete the comparison, however, we need an observation found in one of Scott's reviews, on the spurious ballad poetry, full of false sentiment, sometimes written in the eighteenth century.