Crossword-Solution: SURTEES 7 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 7

Now thus to fill up sham _lacunæ_ in sham ballads of his own, with lines manifestly modern, was a favourite trick of Surtees of Mainsforth.

But how low that level commonly appears to be! Think of the success of Ireland, a boy of eighteen; think of Chatterton; think of Surtees of Mainsforth, who took in the great Sir Walter himself, the father of all them that are skilled in ballad lore.

Next we come to playful frauds, or frauds in their origin playful, like (perhaps) the Shakespearian forgeries of Ireland, the _supercheries_ of Prosper Mérimée, the sham antique ballads (very spirited poems in their way) of Surtees, and many other examples.

Collier’s greasy and imperfect but unique “corrected folio.” The recency and (to a Shakespearian critic) the importance of these forgeries obscures the humble merit of Surtees, with his ballads of the ‘Slaying of Antony Featherstonhaugh,’ and of ‘Bartram’s Dirge.’ Surtees left clever _lacunæ_ in these songs, ‘collected from oral tradition,’ and furnished notes so learned that they took in Sir Walter Scott.

Surtees of Mainsforth not only palmed off on Sir Waiter Scott several ballads of his own manufacture, but also invented and pretended to have found in a document (since burned) the story of the duel with the spectre knight which occurs in Marmion.