Note 24 — 58 SIR PATRICK SPENS

The reading in I 9, "To Noroway, wi our king's daughter," has been treated as if important. This version, says Buchan, was taken down from the recitation of "'a wight of Homer's craft,' who, as a wandering minstrel, blind from his infancy, has been travelling in the North as a mendicant for these last fifty years. He learned it in his youth from a very old person." The mendicant was, no doubt, James Rankin, "the blind beggar whom I kept travelling through Scotland, collecting ballads for me, at a heavy expense" (frontispiece to Buchan's MSS, vol. i.). A large part of Buchan's ballads have the mint-mark of this minstrel beggar and beggarly minstrel, who collected for pay. No confidence can be placed in any of his readings: his personal inspiration was too decided to make him a safe reporter.