Scott used his knowledge of ballads and romances and the customs depicted in them to reinforce his own decision that the truth lay somewhere between the two extremes.

He pointed out that the word may have covered a wide variety of professional entertainers.
A modern comment (by E.K.Chambers, in _The Mediaeval Stage_, Vol.

I, p.

66) seems like an echo of Scott: "This general antithesis between the higher and lower minstrelsy may now, perhaps, be regarded as established.

It was the neglect of it, surely, that led to that curious and barren logomachy between Percy and Ritson, in which neither of the disputants can be said to have had hold of more than a bare half of the truth."] [Footnote 44: Scott's theory as to the authorship of ballads is even now held by Mr.Courthope.At the end of his chapter on Minstrelsy, in _The History of English Poetry_, he thus sums up the matter: "All the evidence cited in this chapter shows that, so far from the ballad being a spontaneous product of popular imagination, it was a type of poem adapted by the professors of the declining art of minstrelsy, from the romances once in favour with the educated classes.