When Sir Walter Scott, with his friend and publisher John Ballantyne at his shoulder, was adding his chapter-tags to the proofsheets of his third novel, The Antiquary (1816), he came to a halt at one chapter for which he wanted some lines from Beaumont and Fletcher. Ballantyne undertook the task of finding the passage. Awaiting for some time the discovery of the verses he wished, Scott at length exclaimed, “Hang it, Johnnie, I believe I can make a motto sooner than you will find one.” He did so, and thus began his habit of calling upon his invention when memory failed, producing throughout the remainder of the Waverley Novels numerous chapter-headings ascribed “Anonymous,” “Old Play,” etc., which Lockhart calls “some of the most exquisite verses that ever flowed from his pen.” Of “Old Play” captions there are 94; “Old Ballad” 26—mostly Scott's free-hand alterations; “Old Song” 12; “Anonymous” 29; and unsigned mottoes 10. One of the best of the “Old Play” fabrications occurs at the head of chapter xxix of Anne of Geierstein, describing the good king René of Provence;—in reality, it may be called Scott's own epitaph:
A mirthful man he was—the snows of age
Fell, but they did not chill him. Gaiety
Even in life's closing touched his teeming brain
With such wild visions as the setting sun
Raises in front of some hoar glacier,
Painting the bleak ice with a thousand hues.