CHAPTER III.
SCOTT'S WORK AS STUDENT AND EDITOR IN THE FIELD OF LITERARY HISTORY THE MEDIAEVAL PERIOD _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_ Scott's early interest in ballads--Casual origin of the _Minstrelsy_--Importance of the book in Scott's career--Plan of the book--Mediaeval scholarship of Scott's time--His theory as to the origin of ballads and their deterioration--His attitude toward the work of previous editors--His method of forming texts--Kinds of changes he made--His qualifications for emending old poetry--Modern imitations of the ballad included in the _Minstrelsy_--Remarks on the ballad style--Impossibility of a scientific treatment of folk-poetry in Scott's time--Real importance of the _Minstrelsy_.
We think of the _Border Minstrelsy_ as the first work which resulted from the preparation of Scott's whole youth, between the days when he insisted on shouting the lines of _Hardyknute_ into the ears of the irate clergyman making a parish call, and the time when he and his equally ardent friends gathered their ballads from the lips of old women among the hills.

But we have seen that the inspiration for his first attempts at writing poetry came only indirectly from the ballads of his own country.

We learn from the introduction to the third part of the _Minstrelsy_ that some of the young men of Scott's circle in Edinburgh were stimulated by what the novelist, Henry Mackenzie, told them of the beauties of German literature, to form a class for the study of that language.

This was when Scott was twenty-one, but it was still four years before he found himself writing those translations which mark the sufficiently modest beginning of his literary career.

His enthusiasm for German literature was not at first tempered by any critical discrimination, if we may judge from the opinions of one or two of his friends who labored to point out to him the extravagance and false sentiment which he was too ready to admire along with the real genius of some of his models.[31] Apparently their efforts were useful, for in a review written in 1806 we find Scott, in a remark on Buerger, referring to "the taste for outrageous sensibility, which disgraces most German poetry."[32] His special interest in the Germans was an early mood which seems not to have returned.