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stence of the famous "folio manuscript," Percy's ephew in the advertisement to the fourth edition (1794), cited "the appeal publicly made to Dr. Johnson . . . so long since as in the year 1765, and never once contradicted by him."

In spite of these amenities, the doctor had a low opinion of ballads and ballad collectors.

Rambler (No. 177) he made merry over one Cantilenus, who "turned all his thoughts upon old ballads, for he considered them as the genuine records of the natural taste. He offered to show me a copy of 'The Children in the Wood,' which he firmly believed to be of the first edition, and by the help of which the text might be freed from several corruptions, if this age of barbarity had any claim to such favors from him." "The conversation," says Boswell, "having turned on modern imitations of ancient ballads, and someone having praised their simplicity, he treated them with that ridicule which he always displayed when that subject was mentioned." Johnson wrote several stanzas in parody of the ballads; e. g.,

And again:

"The tender infant, meek and mild,

Fell down upon a stone:

The nurse took up the squealing child,
But still the child squealed on."

"I put my hat upon my head

And walked into the Strand;
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand."

This is quoted by Wordsworth,* who compares it with a stanza from "The Children in the Wood":

* Preface to second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads."

1

"Those pretty babes, with hand in hand,

Went wandering up and down;

But never more they saw the man

Approaching from the town."

He says that in both of these stanzas the language is that of familiar conversation, yet one stanza is admirable and the other contemptible, because the matter of it is contemptible. In the essay supplementary to his preface, Wordsworth asserts that the "Reliques" was "ill suited to the then existing taste of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt"; and that "Dr. Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors. . . that, though while he was. writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of Sir Cauline' and by many other pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 'The Hermit of Warkworth,' a diction scarcely distinguishable from the vague, the glossy and unfeeling language of his day." Wordsworth adds that he esteems the genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other modern writer; and that even Bürger had not Percy's fine sensibility. quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from "The Child of Elle" in the "Reliques," and contrasts them with the diluted and tricked-out version of the same in Bürger's German.

He

Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of Percy as a ballad composer. Of this same "Child of Elle" he says: "The present fragment of a version

may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, as in the Reliques' it is buried in a heap of 'polished' verses composed by Percy. That worthy prelate, touched by the beauty of it-he had a soul—was unhappily moved to try his hand at its completion. A wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo's Venus. There are thirty-nine lines here. There are two hundred in the thing called the 'Child of Elle' in the Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines all the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the whole, the union of the genuine and the false-of the old ballad with Percy's tawdry feebleness-makes about as objectionable a mésalliance as that in the story itself is in the eyes of the father."* The modern ballad scholars, in their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216-"a fine flood of ballad and water."† The result of this piecing and tinkering in "Sir Cauline"-which Wordsworth thought exquisite-they regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old balladry and a considerable talent of imitation."

From the critical or scholarly point of view, these strictures are doubtless deserved. It is an editor's duty to give his text as he finds it, without interpolations or restorations; and it is unquestionable that

*"Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript" (1867), Vol. II. Introductory Essay by J. W. Hales on “The Revival of Ballad Poetry in the Eighteenth Century."

+ Ibid.

Percy's additions to fragmentary pieces are full of sentimentalism, affectation, and the spurious poetic diction of his age. An experienced ballad amateur can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine portions from the insertions. But it is unfair to try Percy by modern editorial canons. That sacredness which is now imputed to the ipsissima verba of an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and mostly as barbarous trifles-something like wampum belts, or nose-rings, or antique ornaments in the goût barbare et charmant des bijoux goths. Percy's readers did not want torsos and scraps; to present them with acephalous or bobtailed ballads-with cetera desunt and constellations of asterisks-like the manuscript in Prior's poem, the conclusion of which was eaten by the rats-would have been mere pedantry. Percy knew his public, and he knew how to make his work attractive to it. The readers of that generation enjoyed their ballad with a large infusion of Percy. If the scholars of this generation prefer to take theirs without, they know where to get it.

The materials for the "Reliques" were drawn partly from the Pepys collection at Magdalen College, Cambridge; from Anthony Wood's, made in 1676, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; from manuscript and printed ballads in the Bodleian, the British. Museum, the archives of the Antiquarian Society, and private collections. Sir David Dalrymple sent a number of Scotch ballads, and the editor acknowledged obligations to Thomas Warton and many others. But the nucleus of the whole was a

certain folio manuscript in a handwriting of Charles I.'s time, containing 191 songs and ballads, which Percy had begged, when still very young, from his friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior's-Lee in Shropshire. When he first saw this precious document, it was torn, unbound, and mutilated, "lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlor, being used by the maids to light the fire." The first and last leaves were wanting, and "of 54 pages near the beginning, half of every leaf hath been torn away."* Percy had it bound, but the binders trimmed off the top and bottom lines in the process. From this manuscript he professed to have taken "the greater part " of the pieces in the "Reliques." In truth he took only 45 of the 176 poems in his first edition from this source.

Percy made no secret of the fact that he filled lacunæ in his originals with stanzas, and, in some cases, with nearly entire poems of his own composition. But the extent of the liberties that he took with the text, although suspected, was not certainly known until Mr. Furnivall finally got leave to have the folio manuscript copied and printed. Before this time it had been jealously guarded by the Percy family, and access to it had been denied to scholars. "Since Percy and his nephew printed their fourth edition of the Reliques' from the manuscript in 1794," writes Mr. Furnival in his "Forewords," "no one has printed any piece from it except Robert Jamieson-to whom Percy supplied a copy of Child Maurice' and 'Robin Hood and the Old Man' for his 'Popular Ballads and Songs' (1806)-and Sir Frederic Madden, *"Advertisement to the Fourth Edition." +In four volumes, 1867-68.