SOURCE: “The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,” in Thomas Percy, Twayne, 1981, pp. 72-108.

[In the following excerpt, Davis examines Percy's Reliques, analyzing the text's sources and providing an overview of its contents and a brief survey of its various editions.]

The eighteenth-century ballad revival has been so intimately associated with the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry that it has been easy to overlook the fact that Percy's compilation marks the end of an era of ballad interest as well as a beginning.¹ Most students of the period are familiar with Joseph Addison's 1711 Spectator papers, numbers 70 and 74, which dignified “Chevy Chase” with both high praise and serious critical analysis. Fewer are aware of the published volumes of verse that Percy, assisted by William Shenstone, turned over page by page in search of the gems that would help to distinguish his collection. Without them the Reliques would not merely have been different. It might never have come into existence at all.

I THE BACKGROUND OF THE RELIQUES

Of the 175 poems in the first edition of the Reliques, only about fifty can be traced directly to the folio manuscript which was the starting point of Percy's work. For the rest Percy had to seek elsewhere, and even for those in his own manuscript he welcomed the opportunity to collate and compare which the discovery of other versions permitted. Of the poems or alternate versions not yet known to him, some could be found only in manuscripts preserved in such archives as the Bodleian Library, the British Museum, and the library of Magdalene College at Cambridge, where Percy devoted eleven days in August, 1761, to transcribing ballads from the extraordinary Pepys collection of black-letter broadsides.² Others might be tucked away in published volumes of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which brought together songs, ancient ballads, and broadsides, at times in indiscriminate profusion, but always with the possibility that even the crudest mass might yield an occasional diamond. Three of the best-known ballads, “Johnnie Armstrong,” “Little Musgrave,” and “The Miller and the King's Daughter,” had been published in Wit Restor'd as early as 1658 and reprinted in Wit and Drollery in 1682; and in Henry Bold's Latine Songs of 1685 a number of ballads, draped in the rich velvet of classical Latin, peered uncomfortably at their humbler English counterparts on facing pages. One ballad so transformed was “Chevy Chase”—“Ludus Chevinus” in its Latin finery—which, according to Bold, had been raised to its exalted state by order of the bishop of London!³ Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy, tapped by Percy for some half a dozen ballad texts, saw the old century out and the new century in with its five volumes published between 1698 and 1714, and in 1702 the publisher Jacob Tonson helped the eighteenth century off to a good start with one of his several Poetical Miscellanies, where “Chevy Chase” in both native and Roman costumes rubbed shoulders with a number of songs from the seventeenth-century “drolleries” and “garlands.” “Ludus Chevinus,” surprisingly enough, was to be reprinted another three times before the end of the decade, and, as Albert Friedman notes, Bold's Latin translation may have inspired Addison to cite a number of classical parallels in his analysis of the English ballad.⁴

The primary object of Percy's quest was what has come to be known as the traditional or popular ballad. This was the type of early English or Scottish poem that Percy, born too soon to be schooled in folk-ballad theory, looked upon as the work of the minstrels, those “genuine successors of the ancient Bards who united the arts of Poetry and Music, and sung verses to the harp, of their own composing.”⁵ The quest was his major effort in the grandiose project of recovering the ancient poetry of various nations, and that fact accounts in part for his concern to date the ballads in the Reliques and to distinguish the minstrel ballads from the printed broadsides of a later date. The single-sheet broadsides had flourished as the art of printing developed and the English reading public increased, but their partisan political bent, their frequent bawdiness and scurrility, and their sheer numbers had brought the ballad into such disrepute in fashionable circles that Percy was never quite ready to admit that his work was anything but an idle amusement—“a relaxation from graver studies,” as he described it in his 1765 preface (I, xiv).

The word “ballad” was often applied to poems that we would not consider ballads today, and Percy himself did not always discriminate. Anything that could be sung or that contained a narrative might be termed a ballad. In his Dictionary Johnson defined “ballad” as simply “A song” and quoted in illustration a deprecating comment of Isaac Watts: “Ballad once signified a solemn and sacred song, as well as trivial, when Solomon's Song was called the ballad of ballads; but now it is applied to nothing but trifling verse.” In the cheaply printed seventeenth-century collections, poems of all kinds tended to be lumped together as ballads; and in volume 1 of the Reliques the book entitled “Ballads that illustrate Shakespeare” includes lyrics like “A Song to the Lute in Musicke” and “Take Those Lips Away.” Nor could Percy always readily distinguish between the ballad of later invention—the broadside—and the minstrel ballad, since a number of the early ballads were printed in broadsides in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the origins of many were so obscure as to be quite indeterminate. Of “Chevy Chase” Percy published both a “minstrel” version printed by Thomas Hearne in 1719 from an Ashmole Library manuscript and the later broadside version praised by Addison in his Spectator papers (I, 1-17; 231-46).

In consultation with William Shenstone, Percy systematically leafed through such collections as Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany (1723) and The Evergreen (1724), Elizabeth Cooper's The Muses Library (1737), Edward Capell's Prolusions (1760), and the anonymously compiled The Hive (1721) and The Vocal Miscellany (1734).⁶ The anonymous Collection of Old Ballads (1723-1725) contained the texts of some twenty-five poems later published in the Reliques, although many of them had come to Percy's attention through other compilations as well. The format of the Collection—three volumes, with each containing early and late poems arranged in chronological order—was essentially the format that Percy adopted for the Reliques, although he gave it considerably more variety and interest by dividing each volume into three sections with separate chronological developments, and by grouping a number of poems with common themes or origins: Northumberland ballads, for example, mad songs, and ballads that illustrate Shakespeare. In the quality of its selections, the Collection of Old Ballads, which concentrated upon historical ballads, was in no way a match for the Reliques.⁷

Ballads, then, even if they lacked the stature of other kinds of poetry, were a commonplace of eighteenth-century English life long before Percy became aware of them; and, only a few years before the Reliques, James Macpherson's publication of the so-called Erse fragments had raised the interest in the poetry of ancient Britain to a new pitch. If Macpherson helped to direct Percy's attention to Scotland, from which he drew more than a dozen ballads for the Reliques, Percy's own alertness and curiosity, as well as a singular stroke of good luck, can be credited with arousing his interest in balladry in the first place. In a note which he inscribed on the flyleaf of his folio manuscript on November 7, 1769, Percy explained how the manuscript had come into his possession some years earlier:

This very curious old Manuscript in its present mutilated state, but unbound and sadly torn &c., I rescued from destruction, and begged at the hands of my worthy friend Humphrey Pitt Esq., then living at Shiffnal in Shropshire, afterwards of Priorslee, near that town; who died very lately at Bath (viz. in Summer 1769). I saw it lying dirty on the floor under a Bureau in y^e Parlour: being used by the Maids to light the fires.⁸

Pitt was the uncle of the Reverend Robert Binnel, who had assisted Percy with the Song of Solomon and joined with him in contributing to Grainger's edition of Tibullus. Probably Percy came upon the manuscript sometime during his curacies of Astley abbots and Tasley, when he would have been in frequent company with his Shropshire friends; that is, between late 1751 and early 1756. Although he had had presence enough to shield the manuscript from the searing hands of Humphrey Pitt's maids, Percy confessed that he did not at first recognize its full value. As a result he had himself torn out one or two of its pages and sent the manuscript to a binder, who trimmed the top and bottom margins so closely that some parts of the text were cut away.⁹ As for publication, it was Johnson who first impressed Percy with the manuscript's possibilities. In the opening letter of his correspondence with Shenstone, written on November 24, 1757, Percy noted that he had the manuscript in his possession and that Johnson had expressed a desire to see it printed.¹⁰ On December 20 of that year he compiled a list of the manuscript's contents, and he began the actual work of editing the following summer.¹¹

Once owned by Thomas Blount, author of the 1679 Jocular Tenures, the folio manuscript seems to have been compiled about 1650 by a Lancashire native of diverse tastes.¹² Its 500 pages included seventeen romances, twenty-four metrical histories, about a hundred miscellaneous songs, some broadside ballads, and forty-five which the great nineteenth-century ballad scholar Francis Child classified as popular ballads. Of these a number are incomplete: “The Marriage of Sir Gawaine,” for example, had six gaps of nine stanzas each. Printing such a manuscript, or selections from it, might have afforded Percy a welcome challenge; an attempt to fill in the gaps, fruitless though it might at times have proved, would alone have required the kind of search in manuscript and printed sources that he delighted in. But in conference with Shenstone, Percy steadily worked out a plan to supplement selected ballads and songs from his own manuscript with others of similar merit, and to edit them in such a way as to make them acceptable to the general reading public. The book, originally projected in two volumes but later extended to three, was thus seen as an anthology of English poetry, with emphasis upon the early ballads of the minstrels and the lyrics of such sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Suckling, Carew, and Crashaw. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric Kind.) Together with Some Few of Later Date—such was its complete title. Because of their length, the romances of Percy's manuscript were to be excluded, as were the longest of the ballads and those which offended morality and decency. The restriction to English poetry was not so rigorously enforced as to exclude Scottish ballads or even Percy's own translations of the Spanish “Rio Verde, Rio Verde” and “Alcanzor and Zayda,” the first of which was printed with its Spanish original.

Percy was in touch with Shenstone at just about every step of the way. Indeed, as more than one writer has noted, Percy always seemed happy to find someone to help him make decisions; and his reliance on Shenstone was so extensive that he tended to think of his friend as a partner rather than a consultant in his enterprise. He took very seriously the ratings which Shenstone assigned to each of the poems in the collections they perused, even though he did not always concur in them. From Shenstone came advice on the importance of alternating long and short poems, on organization, on the illustrations and the layout, and even on the desirability of an uncrowded title page.¹³ Shenstone's continuing concern, however, was that the antiquarian in Percy not select poems only for their antiquity, and that the scholar not edit the collection in such a way as to discourage readers of taste.¹⁴ Referring to the way in which corrupt and fragmentary texts might be handled, he wrote to Percy on October 1, 1760, as follows:

I believe I shall never make any objection to such Improvements as you bestow upon them; unless you were plainly to contradict Antiquity, which I am pretty sure will never be the Case.

As to alterations of a word or two, I do not esteem it a point of Conscience to particularize them on this occasion. Perhaps, where a whole Line or More is alter'd, it may be proper enough to give some Intimation of it. The Italick type may answer this purpose, if you do not employ it on other occasions. It will have the appearance of a modern Toe or Finger, which is allowably added to the best old Statues: And I think I should always let the Publick imagine, that these were owing to Gaps, rather than to faulty Passages.

(72-73)

Percy, whose initial preference was for a minimally corrected text, was to go beyond the limits contemplated by Shenstone in this letter, with consequences which will be considered later in this chapter.

II PUBLISHING THE RELIQUES

With his preliminary work behind him, the indefatigable Percy set out in 1761 to secure the keys that would open the country's remaining ballad sources to him. On April 13, 1761, more than a month before signing a contract with Robert Dodsley—“Sold Dodsley my old Ballads,” Percy recorded in his diary on May 22—he applied for admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he was to find a dozen ballad texts he later made use of in the Reliques.¹⁵ On May 28 he sent off a letter informing Thomas Warton at Oxford of his project and inquiring about materials in the Oxford libraries and the possibility of obtaining access to them. On July 21 he began a long correspondence with the Welsh scholar Evan Evans, and by May of 1762 he was exchanging friendly letters with Richard Farmer at Cambridge. On November 10, 1762, he introduced himself by letter to David Dalrymple in Edinburgh, Shenstone's efforts to gain the assistance of John McGowan having been largely unavailing, at least for the time being.¹⁶ Evans understandably lent his best assistance with works like Five Pieces of Runic Poetry and Northern Antiquities rather than with the Reliques, but Warton and Farmer proved to be indispensable contacts at the two universities, and Dalrymple, in addition to other help, supplied such treasures from Scottish balladry that Percy dislodged a number of poems from his original contents in order to accommodate them.¹⁷ At Cambridge Percy was also aided by Edward Blakeway of Magdalene College, where his eleven days in the Pepysian Library yielded some three dozen texts for his collection.

The death of Shenstone on February 11, 1763, was a heavy blow to Percy, and one of his first impulses was to dedicate the Reliques to Shenstone's memory.¹⁸ But on March 10, 1764, as the work neared completion, he wrote to Elizabeth Percy, countess of Northumberland, to ask if she would accept the dedication.¹⁹ The change was an understandable one. Whether or not the idea was Percy's own, one can imagine that he would have needed little encouragement to approach this colorful and influential Percy matriarch. She was a natural choice: descendant of ancient Percys renowned in history, song, and ballad, and, Percy noted, “In her own right Baroness Percy, Lucy, Poynings, Fitz-Payne, Bryan, and Latimer.” For Percy her acceptance of the dedication proved to be one of the happier strokes of fortune in a life generally subject to good fortune. It helped to assure his book, this parcel of old ballads that he never ceased to feel uneasy about, a ready passage into fashionable circles, and it marked the beginning of a long and intimate connection with the Northumberland family which brought an almost undreamed of fulfillment of Percy's literary, clerical, social, and financial aspirations. Percy was to retain his two Northamptonshire churches until he became bishop of Dromore in 1782, but in 1765 the modest vicarage at Easton Mauduit began the process of surrendering its occupant to Northumberland House and Alnwick Castle.

With the Northumberland stamp on his efforts assured, Percy felt impelled to revise his three volumes in order to give greater prominence to the Northumberland poems. Already in type, these were the major element of his third volume, and to accomplish his purpose he simply interchanged volumes 1 and 3. Thus the entire set of three volumes was aptly led off by “The Ancient Ballad of Chevy-Chase” and “The Battle of Otterbourne,” with “An Elegy on Henry 4th Earl of Northumberland” closing the first book of volume 1, and “The More Modern Ballad of Chevy-Chase,” “The Rising in the North,” and “Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas” dominating the third. Among the longest and most notable poems in the collection, they record the deeds and misdeeds of the house of Percy and trumpet the relentless and at times impetuous valor of Harry Hotspur and his Northumberland followers.

Percy spent most of June, 1764, on the details of interchanging the first and third volumes, and on June 25 Samuel Johnson arrived at Easton Mauduit with Mrs. Anna Williams on a long-promised visit.²⁰ During Johnson's seven-week stay, Percy sought his assistance in explicating some of the more obscure words in the glossaries—one for each volume of the Reliques—which he finally had to send off to David Dalrymple in Edinburgh with a plea for help.²¹ But Johnson's major assistance was in writing the dedication to the countess of Northumberland, a role which was not to be disclosed until 1791, when Boswell, having canceled at Percy's request a page of his Life of Johnson attributing the dedication to Johnson, neglected to delete the index reference to it.²² The dedication, Percy later acknowledged, “owed its finest strokes” to Johnson's pen.²³ It may, in fact, be said to consist largely of fine strokes in the Johnson manner, and it has long been given a place in the canon of Johnson's works.²⁴

On November 22, 1764, Percy waited on the countess of Northumberland and presented her with an advance copy of the three-volume set.²⁵ On February 11, 1765, copies were made available to the public at a cost, bound, of half a guinea.²⁶ Although the book was treated somewhat condescendingly in the April Gentleman's Magazine, it was reviewed favorably and at length in the February Critical Review and the April Monthly Review.²⁷ But perhaps the best measure of the Reliques's initial success is that James Dodsley, the sole proprietor of the publishing firm since his brother's death in 1764, contracted to pay Percy two hundred guineas, probably for a second edition, only a little more than a month after the book's publication.²⁸ “The Reliques sell far better than I could have expected,” Percy wrote to David Dalrymple a week later on March 23, 1765. “Dodsley has already had 600 sets fetched away.” And on July 2 Percy informed Thomas Warton that 1,100 copies of the total impression of 1,500 had been sold.²⁹

III THE SUCCESS OF THE RELIQUES

The countess of Northumberland may have helped to introduce the Reliques into circles which might otherwise have neglected it, but it was out of her power to assure its success. For that, Percy had to depend largely on his own abilities, although his task was eased to no small extent by the changing tastes of the times. In its Gothic focus the Reliques bore a clear relationship to Macpherson's Ossian poems (1760), Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764) and his mansion at Strawberry Hill, poems like Gray's “The Bard” (1757), and even Percy's modest runic translations; and, if such works as these had not already stimulated a general enthusiasm, they pointed clearly to that consuming public interest in the Gothic which was to characterize the following century.

The Reliques was itself disarmingly modest, at least in appearance. Its three volumes pressed lightly on the hand, and, attractively printed and illustrated as they were, they came close to being models of the bookmaker's art. To many of Percy's contemporaries, however, they must at first glance have seemed a mere collection of poems such as they were accustomed to finding occasionally in their bookstalls, with the obvious difference that these were mostly old and in language eccentric and at times obscure—“Ancient Songs and Ballads,” as the running heads proclaimed across each double page. But if they read the poems, as of course many did, they discovered very quickly that the language was not quite so perplexing as it seemed, that it had in fact a charm of its own, and that it was conveying stories and songs of extraordinary variety and interest. For Percy, together with Shenstone, had taken infinite pains in the selection and placement of individual poems, with a view to holding the reader's attention both on the poem itself and on the collection as a whole.

It helped, of course, that the three volumes did not look forbiddingly crowded: individual poems and lines of verse were well spaced; the footnotes, mostly textual, were neither numerous nor long; the page margins were substantial. But, what was more important, the poems were both related to each other and constantly varied. The two long ballads which open the first book of volume 1, for example—“The Ancient Ballad of Chevy-Chase,” thirteen pages in length exclusive of Percy's commentary, and “The Battle of Otterbourne,” ten and a half pages—are followed by “The Jew's Daughter” (2 pages), which, though allied with them in violence through its story of the Christian child murdered by the Jews, affords as striking a contrast with its predecessors in spirit as it does in length. The first book is then filled out with “Sir Cauline” (17 pages), “Edward, Edward” (2[frac12] pages), “King Estmere” (12 pages), “Sir Patrick Spence” (2 pages), “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne” (10 pages), “The Tower of Doctrine” (3 pages), “The Child of Elle” (8[frac12] pages), and “Edom o'Gordon” (6[frac12] pages). In addition to its changing lengths and themes, the first book was given added variety by its lyric poems—Stephen Hawes' “The Tower of Doctrine” and John Skelton's “Elegy on Henry 4th Earl of Northumberland,” which followed “Edom o'Gordon”—and by four ballads clearly designated as Scottish and interspersed among the six English ballads and the two lyrics.

The first book, moreover, in which the Northumberland Percys were dominant characters and valor and courage were recurring but not exclusive themes, was followed by a second book devoted to ballads that illustrate Shakespeare. Arranged in chronological order like those in the first book, the sixteen poems of book 2 begin with “Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudesly,” at thirty-one pages the longest by far in the entire collection. They continue through familiar short lyrics like “Willow, Willow, Willow” and “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and less familiar ballads like “King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid” and “The Frolicksome Duke, or the Tinker's Good Fortune,” and they conclude with Percy's own “The Friar of Orders Gray,” a ballad fashioned out of some of the numerous snatches dispersed through Shakespeare's plays.

The third book resumes the Northumberland ballads, and, having opened it with “The More Modern Ballad of Chevy-Chase” of Elizabethan origin, Percy was constrained by his chronological pattern to confine the book to poems on the whole more recent than those of other books. “Chevy-Chase” is followed by James Shirley's “Death's Final Conquest,” the Northumberland poems “The Rising in the North” and “Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas,” the anonymous “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,” and the Elizabethan William Warner's “The Patient Countess.” A series of early seventeenth-century poems by such writers as Henry Wotton, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, and Thomas Carew then concludes with the Scottish ballad “Gilderoy,” probably dating from the mid-seventeenth century, and from there Percy leaps ahead to the 1726 “Winifreda” and thence to his own time and his own circle. Shenstone is represented by “Jemmy Dawson,” “the ingenious Dr. Harrington, of Bath” by the 1756 “Witch of Wokey,” and James Grainger by a West Indian ballad. Reserving the last word for himself, Percy closes the volume with his own translations from the Spanish, “Gentle River, Gentle River” and “Alcanzor and Zayda, a Moorish Tale.”

The second volume consists largely of poems on historical and political subjects, among them “For the Victory at Agincourt,” “On Thomas Lord Cromwell,” “Queen Elizabeth's Verses, While Prisoner at Woodstock,” and “The Murder of the King of Scots.” The third, as Percy stated and many of the titles attest, is “chiefly devoted to romantic subjects”: “The Boy and the Mantle,” “The Knight, and Shepherd's Daughter,” “Sweet William's Ghost,” “The Children in the Wood,” “The Dragon of Wantley.” One of its sequences contains poems about “little foot-pages” and other young people; another focuses upon witches, hobgoblins, and fairies. Both the second and the third volumes follow the pattern of the first, with each of their three books developed chronologically, with constant variety in the themes and lengths of poems, and with lyrics spaced among the ballads and Scottish poems among the English. The third book of volume 2 contains a series of six “Mad Songs,” madness being a subject, Percy observed, treated more frequently by the English than by their neighbors, although he declined to speculate whether the English were “more liable to this calamity than other nations” (II, 343).

The puffs given to himself and his friends through the insertion in the first volume of one poem each by Shenstone, Grainger, and himself and of two of his own translations were not repeated in subsequent volumes, although Percy's version of “Valentine and Ursine” was included in the third book of volume 3. Under Percy's initial plan, of course, the poems would have closed, not the first volume but the third, where they would have served as a kind of appendix, a relaxed self-indulgence, perhaps, as Percy rested after the labors of his three volumes. They can hardly be said to raise the poetic level of the Reliques, but they do help to give it some of its pleasant personal quality. Percy is like the director who cannot resist taking a part in his own production. But contemporary readers must have felt his presence constantly: he was at hand throughout to help them understand and enjoy what they were reading. Most poems have their own, usually brief, introductions and some have postscripts. And four widely separated essays help to unify parts of the collection and to illuminate them historically and critically: “An Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels,” “On the Origin of the English Stage,” “On the [Alliterative] Metre of Pierce Plowman's Visions,” and “On the Ancient Metrical Romances.” Together these constitute a brief and selective history of early English poetry, but one much advanced for its time, and it is not surprising that James Dodsley gathered them into a single volume in 1767 and sold them apart from the Reliques.³⁰

The “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels” is the key essay as well as the first, for it sets the framework and the tone for much of what follows in the three volumes. The minstrels, as Percy perceives them, are romantic figures: poets, musicians, members of “a distinct order of men … [who] got their livelihood by singing verses to the harp, at the houses of the great.” Their verses, of course, were not necessarily their own: “From the amazing variations, which occur in different copies of these old pieces, it is evident they made no scruple to alter each other's productions, and the reciter added or omitted whole stanzas, according to his own fancy or convenience” (I, xvi). In Anglo-Saxon times, Percy notes, the minstrel's admission to royal circles was accepted as a matter of course, and even as late as the reign of Henry VIII “the Reciters of verses, or moral speeches learnt by heart, intruded without ceremony into all companies; not only in taverns, but in the houses of the nobility themselves” (I, xix). By the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, however, such men were included by statute among “rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars” (I, xxi).

As long as the minstrels subsisted, Percy observed, “they seem never to have designed their rhymes for publication, and probably never committed them to writing themselves: what copies are preserved … were doubtless taken down from their mouths.” Their ballads are “in the northern dialect, abound with antique words and phrases, are extremely incorrect, and run into the utmost licence of metre; they have also a romantic wildness, and are in the true spirit of chivalry” (I, xxii).

“I have no doubt,” wrote Percy, “but most of the old heroic ballads in this collection were produced by this order of men” (I, xvi). The latest such poems he could discover were “The Rising in the North” and “Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas,” both of the late sixteenth century. The “genuine old Minstrelsy,” by then almost extinct, had gradually been replaced by “a new race of ballad-writers …, an inferior sort of minor poets, who wrote narrative songs meerly for the press.” Their works, written in the southern dialect, are “in exacter measure, have a low or subordinate correctness, sometimes bordering on the insipid …, exhibit a more modern phraseology, and are commonly descriptive of more modern manners” (I, xxii-xxiii). Percy's preference for the older ballads was never in doubt.

“On the Origin of the English Stage” is the introductory essay for the “Ballads that Illustrate Shakespeare” in the second book of volume 1. In the essay Percy traces dramatic poetry from the solemn religious festivals of the Middle Ages through the mystery and morality plays and their sequels. Moralities like Everyman, he states, gave birth to modern tragedy, and moralities like Hick-Scorner to modern comedy. But “Moralities still kept their ground” and at length became the popular masques of the courts of James I and Charles I. Mysteries ceased to be acted after the Reformation, but seem to have given rise to historical plays, which the “old writers” considered distinct from tragedies and comedies (I, 118-28).

In the essay “On the Metre of Pierce Plowman's Visions,” which introduces the third book of volume 2, Percy describes the unrhymed alliterative verse of the Icelandic poets, gives the rules of Icelandic prosody as analyzed by Wormius in his Literatura Runica of 1636, and notes that Pierce Plowman's Visions, written, he says, by Robert Langland and published shortly after 1350, is “constructed exactly” by those rules.³¹ Langland, he observes, was neither the first nor the last English poet to use the alliterative verse; but after rhyme was superadded, it came at last to engross “the whole attention of the poet,” with the result that “the internal imbellishment of alliteration was no longer studied,” and the rules that Langland wrote by were forgotten. The cadences of alliterative verse, though not the alliteration, says Percy, may still be seen in French heroic verse (II, 260-70).

Percy's final volume opens with the last of his four essays, “On the Ancient Metrical Romances,” a subject particularly close to his heart. The romances, he asserts, may be traced back to the historical songs of the ancient Gothic scalds, who celebrated the chivalric ideas long before the Crusades or the adoption of chivalry as a military order. The earliest French romances of chivalry were metrical and date from the eleventh century, whereas the earliest English romance Percy had discovered, “Hornechild,” dates from the twelfth. By the fourteenth century metrical romances had become so popular in England that Chaucer burlesqued them in his tale of “Sir Thopas,” where he cited a number of romances still extant in manuscript in the eighteenth century. Many of these, Percy observes, illuminate the manners and opinions of their times and have substantial poetic merit; although they cannot be set in competition with Chaucer's works, “they are far more spirited and entertaining than the tedious allegories of Gower, or the dull and prolix legends of Lydgate.” He concludes his account by summarizing the nine parts of “Libius Disconius,” which he declares as “regular in its conduct, as any of the finest poems of classical antiquity” and worthy of being regarded as an epic (III, ii-xvi). He then appended to the essay a list of thirty metrical romances still extant, with the locations of manuscript and printed texts (III, xvii-xxiv).

In 1876, when Henry B. Wheatley published what continues to be the standard edition of the Reliques, he announced in the “Editor's Preface” that to treat the four essays as he had treated Percy's prefaces to individual poems—that is, by merely adding footnotes and terminal comments—“would necessitate so many notes and corrections as to cause confusion; and as the “Essays on the English Stage,” and the “Metrical Romances,” are necessarily out of date, the trouble expended would not have been repaid by the utility of the result.” He had, accordingly, “thrown them to the end of their respective volumes, where they can be read exactly as Percy left them” (I, xi). In Percy's own day, however, almost no one was aware that the essays were in want of corrective or supplementary notes and comment, or that for such a want they would in time be “thrown” to the rear of their volumes, as accumulations of bric-a-brac are sometimes stuffed into inconspicuous closets. Percy—the first of his countrymen “to inspect actual English medieval romances” or “to demonstrate that alliteration was the principle of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic verse generally”³²—had carried his readers about as far as was possible for any one person in 1765, and they had reason to be grateful for the sure hand with which he pointed out places of interest along the way. Like his essays, his introductions to the poems were written with whatever authority pioneer research would admit and, in spite of his disclaimer about a parcel of old ballads, with an infectious conviction that the poems in his collection were not simply curios but would repay serious attention with unusual delight. “This excellent old ballad,” he says of “The Wandering Prince of Troy,”

… is given from the editor's folio MS. collated with two different printed copies, both in black letter in the Pepys collection.

The reader will smile to observe with what natural and affecting simplicity, our ancient ballad-maker has engrafted a Gothic conclusion on the classic story of Virgil, from whom, however, it is probable he had it not. Nor can it be denied, but he has dealt out his poetical justice with a more impartial hand, than that celebrated poet.

(III, 192)

In discussing the ballads in the same breath with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and, as in this passage, Virgil, Percy was according them a dignity they were seldom given; and in placing them side by side with poems of Ben Jonson, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, John Dryden, and others, he was providing his readers an opportunity to see that the older poems did not inevitably suffer by comparison and that the roots of the English literary genius struck as deep as English history. The Reliques was a work of national pride, and it is not surprising that a nation as proud as Britain took it to its heart.

Wheatley's relegation of the essays to the back pages tends to obscure an important aspect of the Reliques. The collection, to be sure, lacked the kind of tight organization which rendered all tampering with it dangerous. Percy spent countless hours putting together the pieces for the first edition, only to move a number of them for the second. More significantly, he found it expedient at the last moment to interchange the first and third volumes, and he accomplished this major structural change with minimum inconvenience and damage. The collection was, of course, an anthology, and like other anthologies it could be dipped into at practically any point. Inevitably that has been one of its attractions. But the Reliques also provides incentives for reading it through from beginning to end, and that is in fact the way in which it can be read most profitably. Unquestionably the “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels” belonged at the head of the book, for it is a kind of Percy manifesto and its spirit pervades the entire work. The sections of each book are units, moreover, short enough and expertly enough selected and varied to be read without tedium in one sitting. They move ahead chronologically, have themes in common, and gain added coherence through the short introductions to separate poems. Even before starting a poem the reader may be invited to read on in the next: “This little moral sonnet,” Percy says of James Shirley's “Victorious Men of Earth,” “hath such a pointed application to the heroes of the foregoing and following ballads, that I cannot help placing it here, tho' the date of its composition is of a much later period” (II, 222). The generally brief and unpedantic concern for dates, sources, backgrounds, and relationships gives the poems a special luster; Percy fusses over them just enough to make them seem wanted and important. They were largely dredged out of old books and manuscripts, for Percy preceded the era of the ballad hunter who recorded the words and music of rustic men and women singing at the plough or the spinning wheel. But his poems almost never come with the musty odor of old trunks or dank closets. Percy, moreover, although he knew little of music, was not oblivious to the possibilities of oral tradition, even if he did not pursue them assiduously. One is made aware from time to time that some of the best of the poems have been homely favorites of English and Scottish people; of “Gil Morrice,” Percy tells us, two Scottish editions were printed from a copy collected “from the mouths of old women and nurses,” and he himself is now inserting sixteen additional lines submitted in response to the Scottish editors' request for readers to help improve the text (III, 93).

Percy intrudes without being intrusive; he is informal, even chatty at times, a friend taking a friend into his confidence. He calls attention to another version of “Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor” in the Pepys collection, an attempt at modernization by reducing the poem to a different measure: “A proof of it's popularity,” he assures us (III, 82). He apologizes disarmingly for not placing “The Heir of Linne” earlier in volume 2: it was “owing to an oversight” (II, 309). Many of his introductions provide just enough information to whet his readers' appetites; he expects the poems to satisfy them. And taken all in all, there are not many among the songs and ballads of the Reliques that one would wish to replace. If Percy overlooked some of the best of the ballads, he also included many of the best: “Chevy-Chase,” “The Battle of Otterbourne,” “The Boy and the Mantle,” “Sir Patrick Spence,” “Edward, Edward,” “Child Waters,” “Barbara Allen's Cruelty,” “The Children in the Wood,” “The Bonny Earl of Murray”—the list is a long one, and it covers a broad range of human experience. No doubt it was this ability of Percy to recapture and not just to disinter the past that prompted Johnson's well known tribute to him: “Percy's attention to poetry has given grace and splendour to his studies of antiquity. A mere antiquarian is a rugged being.”³³

The difference for the Reliques, of course, was crucial, and Percy, who was well aware of it, articulated it with some feeling in one of the book's four essays. “It has happened unluckily,” he wrote of the old metrical romances,

that the antiquaries, who have revived the works of our ancient writers, have been for the most part men void of taste and genius, and therefore have always fastidiously rejected the old poetical Romances, because founded on fictitious or popular subjects, while they have been careful to grub up every petty fragment of the most dull and insipid rhimist, whose merit it was to deform morality, or obscure true history.

(III, ix)

If compiling the Reliques did not require the genius of a Johnson, it did require taste and judgment, including an ability on the editor's part to put himself constantly in the reader's position, and these were precisely the qualities that Percy, with Shenstone's encouragement and assistance, was able to bring to his task.

IV THE SECOND AND THIRD EDITIONS

Percy's success with the first edition of the Reliques established him as England's leading ballad authority, and it did not take him long to follow up his success with a second edition. It was published by James Dodsley in 1767.³⁴ With so many excellent poems excluded from the first edition, and with his new-won fame bringing him ballad transcriptions and information from correspondents all over Britain, there must have been considerable temptation for Percy to revise the second edition extensively. He did not, however, perhaps because he hesitated to risk a proven success, and perhaps because he was reserving the best of his unused poems for other projects. Almost to the end of his life, for example, he nursed the idea of a fourth volume of the Reliques, a project he contemplated turning over to his son and then, following his son's death, to his nephew. At various times he drew up plans for special collections such as ballads on English history, English romances, and ancient English and Scottish poems.³⁵

The changes in the second edition, in any event, seem minimal. Not a single poem in the first edition was deleted from the second, and only three were added. “Jephthah Judge of Israel,” called to Percy's attention by George Steevens, was inserted among the “Ballads that Illustrate Shakespeare,” where it remained through the third and fourth editions (2d ed., I, 176-79). The second addition was “Jealousy Tyrant of the Mind,” identified in the second edition (and the third) as coming from “a Manuscript copy communicated to the Editor,” and in the fourth edition as a song by Dryden from Love Triumphant (4th ed., III, 273). The third was a French translation of John Lyly's “Cupid and Campaspe” entitled “L'Amour et Glycere,” which was written expressly for the Reliques by an unnamed friend and placed by Percy at the very end of volume 3. It seems strange that in revising his collection of “Ancient English” poetry Percy should have chosen to conclude it with a poem in modern French, but presumably friendship and the connection with “Cupid and Campaspe,” printed earlier in volume 3, overcame any Percy doubts on that point, at least for the second and third editions. Percy omitted the poem in the fourth edition.

A total of eighteen poems were given new positions, although four of these were accounted for by two instances in which poems already adjacent to each other simply exchanged places. One change set up a circular chain reaction. When Percy discovered the printed text of “The Shepherd's Resolution” and thereby learned that George Wither was the author, he substituted the printed text for his fragmentary folio manuscript text and moved the poem from book 2 of volume 3 to the place occupied by “Dulcina” in book 3. “Dulcina” was moved forward seven positions to displace “The Auld Good Man,” which in turn was moved forward to the place which had been occupied by “The Shepherd's Resolution.” Percy must have gone through many such sequences when he was deciding upon the order of the poems for the first edition.

The other significant changes in the poems also resulted from Percy's use of texts previously unknown to him. The text of “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is” was revised and the poem's last four stanzas were detached from the first seven and printed separately under the title “The Golden Mean,” changes Percy based upon a 1588 publication of William Byrd's psalms, sonnets, and songs. “The Golden Mean” held its place in the third edition but was dropped from the fourth.³⁶ Punning commendatory verses attributed to King James I were replaced in the second edition by two sonnets of King James because someone had suggested to Percy that “the king only gave the quibbling commendations in prose, and that some obsequious court-rhymer put them into metre” (II, 303-4). Finally, “The Aspiring Shepherd,” printed from the folio manuscript, was discovered to be George Wither's “The Stedfast Shepherd,” and the entire seven stanzas, correctly titled, were printed in the second edition (III, 263-66) from The Mistress of Philarete, which was also Percy's source for the full text of “The Shepherd's Resolution.”

Changes in the selections were even less numerous in the third edition, which was published in 1775. Two adjacent poems in the third volume, “Lucy and Colin” and “Margaret's Ghost,” were transposed. In the same volume “The Wanton Wife of Bath,” which, as Percy noted, Addison in the Spectator [No. 247] had pronounced an excellent ballad, was replaced by “The Bride's Burial.” No doubt, in spite of Addison's assurance, the Wife of Bath, who at heaven's gate successively asserts her moral superiority to Adam, Jacob, Lot, Judith, David, Solomon, Jonas, Thomas, Mary Magdalen, Paul, and Peter, was a little too wanton for Percy's sustained comfort. The saintly virgin bride of “The Bride's Burial” could have posed no problems.

In the third edition Percy notes also that the texts of “Phillida and Corydon” and “The Shepherd's Address to His Muse,” printed in volume 3 from a small Elizabethan quarto manuscript in his possession, have been improved by reference to printed copies in England's Helicon. The most significant change of this kind, however, occurred in “The Battle of Otterbourne,” for which Percy substituted a text from a Cotton Library manuscript called to his attention by the Chaucer scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt.³⁷ The new text contained fifty-eight lines not found in the Harleian manuscript used by Percy in his first two editions.

In both the second and third editions, Percy occasionally added, deleted, or revised a note, and his changes in the introductions and postscripts to the poems were at times substantial, particularly when the discovery of a new text gave him a new view of the poem or its author. Among his more notable changes in the second edition are those in the annotations to the two “Chevy-Chase” ballads and “The Battle of Otterbourne,” where his newly acquired intimacy with Northumberland and the Northumberland family is clearly reflected. He is no longer content, for example, to refer his readers to Fuller's Worthies and Crawfurd's Peerage (his first edition authorities) for information about the Scottish and Northumberland leaders slain in the bloody battle between Douglas and Hotspur:

Thear was slayne with the lord Persè
          Sir John of Agerstone,
Sir Roger the hinde Hartly,
          Sir Wyllyam the bold Hearone.
Sir Jorg the worthè Lovele
          A knyght of great renowen,
Sir Raff the ryche Rugbè
          With dyntes wear beaten dowene.

(2d ed., I, 14)

Instead he provides, at the end of the second poem, a series of comments on each of the persons, or their families, whose names compose the rolls of honor in “The Ancient Ballad of Chevy-Chase” and “The Battle of Otterbourne”: Lovele, for example, “seems to be the ancient family of Delaval, of Seaton Delaval, in Northumberland,” and “The family of Haggerston of Haggerston, near Berwick, has been seated there for many centuries, and still remains” (2d ed., I, 32). A similar list follows “The More Modern Ballad of Chevy-Chase” (I, 266-68).³⁸

Among the family treasures that the earl and countess of Northumberland brought out for Percy during the first months of their acquaintance was the manuscript of the Northumberland Houshold Book, which, as we have seen, Percy was to edit for a private printing in 1770. He began making use of the manuscript, however, in the second edition of the Reliques. A half-page extract from it is appended to “Gentle Herdsman, Tell to Me” to show the constant tribute paid to “Our Lady of Walsingham” (II, 399-400). Another, illustrating “the fondness of our ancestors” for miracle plays, constitutes about half of a five-page addition to the essay “On the Origin of the English Stage” (I, 367-69). Percy also finds support in the manuscript for his statement in the “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels” that “Minstrels were retained in all great and noble families,” and in a footnote to the text he observes with obvious pride that the house of Northumberland, which ages ago had three minstrels attending them in their Yorkshire castles, still retain three in their service in Northumberland (I, xxxiii; xxxv-xxxvi; lxxiii-lxxv).

Percy's changes in three of his essays are comparatively minor.³⁹ To the fourth, the “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels.” he felt compelled to give major attention. In a paper read at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries on May 29, 1766, the antiquarian Samuel Pegge expressed the view that Percy in his essay had given “a false, or at best, an ill-grounded idea” of the “rank and condition” of the minstrels in Saxon times.⁴⁰ Pegge argued that the customs of ancient Britons and Danes were too different from those of the Saxons to conclude, as Percy does, that, because the Britons and Danes accorded a high place to their bards and scalds, the Saxons would have done the same with their own minstrels. He went on to cast doubt upon two stories recounted by Percy to exemplify the Saxons's esteem for their minstrels, one of King Alfred assuming the dress and character of a minstrel in order to gain admittance to the Danish camp, and the other of the Danish King Anlaff employing the same ruse to gain admittance among the Saxons. The first he thought of doubtful authority, and the second probably adapted from it.

It is a revealing commentary upon Percy that his most extensive revision for the second edition should have been undertaken as a result of a paper read before a meeting of antiquarians and written by a man scarcely known outside of antiquarian circles. Percy was not present at the Society's May 29 meeting, but was sent a copy of Pegge's paper by Sir Joseph Ayloffe, and he was clearly annoyed that Pegge had not favored him with his objections rather than forcing him to rely upon a third person to convey them to him. As a result, he wrote to Pegge on July 13, 1767, he might have remained ignorant of them and thus incapable of retracting his errors.⁴¹ Scholar that he was, Percy cared very much about his standing among fellow scholars.

Percy did not acknowledge his debt to Pegge's paper until the third edition of the Reliques in 1775, but readers of the second edition familiar with Pegge's comments could not have mistaken Percy's intentions. Percy, to be sure, does not confess to error, and when he finishes his revision for the 1767 edition his position is essentially what it was in 1765. But he is plainly acknowledging the justice of Pegge's assertion that he had given at best “an ill-grounded idea” of the rank and condition of the Saxon minstrels, for the whole intent of his effort is to establish his position on firmer ground.

The initial essay was nine pages long. The revised essay contains twenty pages. In 1765 the comments about the Anglo-Saxon minstrels, culminating in the stories of Alfred and Anlaff, fill the first three pages of the essay, with Percy stating categorically at the beginning that “Our Saxon ancestors … had been accustomed to hold men of this profession in the highest reverence” (I, xv). In 1767 he withholds any word about the Anglo-Saxons until he is midway into the second page, his introductory page and a half having been directed toward justifying a more cautious assertion: “As these honours were paid to Poetry and Song, from the earliest times, in those countries which our Anglo-Saxon ancestors inhabited before their removal into Britain, we may reasonably conclude, that they would not lay aside all their regard for men of this sort immediately on quitting their German forests” (I, xx). If, moreover, bards were revered in the countries inhabited by the Anglo-Saxons before they removed to Britain, and were “common and numerous” among descendants of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain after the Conquest, what, asks Percy, “could have become of them in the intermediate time?” He sees no alternative to concluding that the minstrels still subsisted, “though perhaps with less splendour” than in Northern Europe. “and that there never was wanting a succession of them to hand down the art” (I, xxiii). He then repeats his stories of Alfred and Anlaff, adds a third story to them, defends his authorities, and insists upon the spirit of the stories if not the letter: “they are related by authors who lived too near the Saxon times, and had before them too many recent monuments of the Anglo-Saxon nation, not to know what was conformable to the genius and manners of that people” (I, xxiii-xxvi).

The revised account, in short, was fuller and more carefully reasoned than the original, and Percy also took the opportunity to inject into it some of the history of the minstrels between the Conquest and the reign of Edward II, a period he had ignored in the first edition. But the response to Pegge was still not finished when Percy had revised the text of the essay. The original had been footnoted unobtrusively, and the revised essay is footnoted with similar restraint, with the notes indicated by the customary asterisks, daggers, and crosses of the period. There is, however, a second system of reference marks in the revised essay which begins with A and proceeds through the alphabet and into a second alphabet to Ff. The letters are placed before the first words of paragraphs, and the notes to which they refer are printed at the end of the essay. The notes fill thirty-eight pages, almost twice as many, that is, as the revised essay itself. No such notes had been attached to the 1765 essay.

What Percy collects in these notes may be considered relevant to his essay, and much of it is interesting. He draws upon a wide variety of sources, including the Anglo-Saxon language, for such purposes as suggesting the likelihood that King Alfred excelled in music, describing the roles of the minstrels, demonstrating in response to a challenge by Pegge that the Anglo-Saxons had a word for minstrelsy, and above all supporting his thesis that they held both music and musicians in high regard. But what was relevant was not necessarily essential, and what was interesting in its parts was by no means interesting in the whole. Indeed, the conclusion is inescapable that in these thirty-eight pages Percy abandoned his chosen role as an editor seeking to please a general audience and was now the scholar addressing other scholars. What Shenstone feared and had counseled Percy against had happened. Readers who had enjoyed Percy's essay, and who would go on to delight in the songs and ballads that he spread before them, could only have turned with distaste from the “Notes and Illustrations Referred to in the Foregoing Essay.” Its long, untranslated quotations in Latin, French, and Spanish stretched like roadblocks across a dozen and a half pages, while its five-page disquisition on the Anglo-Saxon language would have seemed better suited for a gathering at the Society of Antiquaries.

Percy's reaction to Pegge's criticism serves as a graphic reminder of his dilemma in editing the Reliques, as well as of Shenstone's influence in shaping the Reliques into the landmark it became. The scholar in Percy impelled him to prop up his sagging essay with notes and references which would withstand further criticism. As for Shenstone, it is hard to imagine that he could have objected to the revised essay, which was clearly superior to the original; but surely if he had lived to see the thirty-eight pages of notes he would have thrown up his hands and urged Percy to communicate them to Pegge and the scholarly world in some other form. It would have been good advice, and it would probably have been taken.

In spite of their unpromising introduction, Percy and Pegge became good friends. In occasional letters Pegge answered Percy's inquiries on antiquarian matters, and Percy presented Pegge with copies of the Ride to Hulne Abbey and the Northumberland Houshold Book. Thus both seemed distressed in 1773 when the Society of Antiquaries published Pegge's 1766 observations in the second volume of Archaeologia; and Pegge wrote to Percy promptly to say that the Council of the Society was apparently unaware that Percy had responded to his objections in the 1767 Reliques and to state formally that Percy had removed his doubts “in a very satisfactory manner.”⁴² In the 1775 Reliques Percy announced that since the first edition the essay had been “very much enlarged and improved” as a result of Pegge's objections, which Pegge, “in the most liberal and candid manner,” now acknowledged to have been removed (I, xviii).

V THE RITSON CONTROVERSY AND THE FOURTH EDITION

The controversy with Samuel Pegge, if it can be called a controversy, was settled amicably and fairly quickly, although not without Percy's going to an extraordinary effort to satisfy Pegge's objections. A controversy of a different sort, far from being settled quickly and amicably, was never settled at all, and it was much more serious in its implications and consequences.

It had its beginnings in a three-volume publication of 1783 entitled A Select Collection of English Songs, which was compiled by Joseph Ritson. Ritson, who became a solicitor of Gray's Inn, was an accomplished and brilliant scholar, but stormy and eccentric. His aggressive vegetarianism, along with his efforts to reform English spelling, provided considerable amusement for his contemporaries—a collection which he published in 1802 was entitled Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës—and his attacks upon other scholars resounded with an explosive mixture of irony, sarcasm, and invective that made him a feared and at times a hated controversialist. Alexander Chalmers, in a wry defense, noted that Ritson was “not absolutely incapable of civility.”⁴³ He was to pursue Percy, with occasional lapses into civility, until his death in 1803 at the age of fifty-one.

In A Select Collection of English Songs, Ritson praised Percy's translation of “Rio Verde, Rio Verde” and printed “O Nancy, Wilt Thou Go with Me” among the large group of love songs in his first volume; a “most beautiful song,” he called it.⁴⁴ But Ritson's attention, like Pegge's before him, was drawn primarily to Percy's “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels,” which he considered in his own “Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Song.” While not attempting to controvert “the slightest fact laid down by the learned prelate,” Ritson wrote, he thought that he might be permitted “to question the propriety of his inferences, and, indeed, his general hypothesis.” It does not follow, he argues, that because the French honored the minstrels the English must have done so also; nor is there any proof that the English minstrels were “a respectable society” or that they deserved to be called a society at all:

That there were men in those times, as there are in the present, who gained a livelihood by going about from place to place, singing and playing to the illiterate vulgar, is doubtless true; but that they were received into the castles of the nobility, sung at their tables, and were rewarded like the French minstrels, does not any where appear, nor is it at all credible.

(I, li-lii)

The reason, says Ritson, is evident. At least till the time of Henry VIII only the French language was spoken at court and in the households of the Norman barons, who despised the Saxon manners and language. Percy's essay should properly have been called an “Essay on the Ancient French Minstrels,” for all that is known of the English is that by a law of Queen Elizabeth's time they were branded as “rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars.” Such characters could “sing and play; but it was none of their business to read or write”; thus their songs have perished along with them, and only “The Ancient Ballad of Chevy-Chase” and “The Battle of Otterbourne” can be ascribed with any plausibility to them (I, liii).

Ritson returned to this subject in Ancient Songs, from the Time of King Henry the Third, to the Revolution, which was published in 1790. In his 26-page “Observations on the Ancient English Minstrels,” he attacks Percy's definition of the minstrel. This order of men who, he says (mocking Percy's words), “united the arts of poetry and music, and sung verses to the harp of their own composing,” had in fact little more standing than the whores and lechers “for whose diversion … [they] were most miserably twanging and scraping in the booths of Chester fair” (vi-vii). Before Percy, he asserts, the word “minstrel” was never used by an English writer for anyone but an instrumental performer, “generally a fiddler, or such like base musician.” No English minstrel “was ever famous for his composition or his performance; nor is the name of a single one preserved” (xiii, xvi).

Ritson then moved to his more significant attack upon Percy—one which he had begun in A Select Collection of English Songs—by noting that, of the black-letter ballads he had himself collated, not one had been printed faithfully or correctly by Percy. Percy's editorial practices now became his essential focus, and he was to return to them again and again during the remaining years of his life.

He begins by doubting the very existence of Percy's folio manuscript: since the minstrels never committed their own rhymes to writing, it is extraordinary that this “multifarious collection” could have been compiled as late as 1650. And, to increase the manuscript's singularity, “no other writer has ever pretended to have seen [it]. The late Mr. Tyrwhitt … never saw it. … And it is remarkable, that scarcely any thing is published from it, not being to be found elsewhere, without our being told of the defects and mutilation of the MS” (xix). He then cites seven poems printed by Percy from the folio manuscript—“Sir Cauline,” “Sir Aldingar,” “Gentle Herdsman,” “The Heir of Linne,” “The Beggar's Daughter of Bednall-Green,” “The Marriage of Sir Gawaine,” and “King Arthur's Death”—in which Percy acknowledged his emendations largely in general terms, and he states that many “other instances might be noticed, where the learned collector has preferred his ingenuity to his fidelity, without the least intimation to the reader.” It follows, asserts Ritson, that one can have no confidence in any of the Reliques's “old Minstrel ballads” which cannot be found elsewhere (xx-xxi).

The minstrels, Ritson notes, lost favor to the ballad singers, who, without instruments, sung printed pieces to fine and simple melodies, possibly of their own invention,” and whose verses, smoother in language than the minstrel poems and more accurate in measure and rhyme, were thought to be more poetical; and in fact (a view which Percy and later ballad scholars did not share with Ritson) they may “defy all the Minstrel songs extant, nay even those in the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, for simplicity, nature, interest, and pathos.” The minstrel songs are “curious and valuable,” nonetheless, and if further light could be thrown on the people by or for whom they were “invented,” a collection of all the available poems would be entertaining and interesting. But, he adds, with a final thrust at Percy, “if such a publication should ever appear, it is to be hoped that it will come from an Editor who prefers truth to hypothesis, and the genuine remains of the Minstrel Poets, however mutilated or rude, to the indulgence of his own poetical vein, however fluent or refined” (xxvi).

As early as the spring of 1784, James Dodsley inquired if Percy wished to supply copy for a fourth edition of the Reliques.⁴⁵ By then, of course, Percy was in Northern Ireland serving as bishop of Dromore, and, however he may have responded in 1784, he apparently wrote to Dodsley on November 19, 1785, to say that it was a matter of “perfect Indifference” to him whether the Reliques was ever republished or not. He would be glad to have it forgotten “among the other Levities & Vanities” of his youth, as he had concluded from an earlier Dodsley letter would be its fate. He was thus unprepared to send corrected copy immediately, and he left it to Dodsley either to consign the book to oblivion or to give him more time.⁴⁶

As might have been expected, Dodsley chose the second of these alternatives, but no record of further negotiations remains. In its issue of July 8-10, 1794, the St. James's Chronicle announced that the fourth edition would “Speedily” be published, and though the three volumes bear the date 1794 a full year seems to have passed before they were actually made available to the public.⁴⁷ They were printed by Percy's friend and kinsman John Nichols and published by J. and C. Rivington rather than by Dodsley, who had retired from business.

In the “Advertisement” at the front of the fourth edition, which is signed by Percy's nephew Thomas Percy of St. John's College, Oxford, it is stated that the book would have remained unpublished had “the original Editor … not yielded to the importunity of his friends, and accepted the humble offer of an Editor in a Nephew” (I, ix). It is doubtful if anyone who has studied the Reliques has given much credence to that statement. Well paid though Percy's nephew was for whatever services he rendered,⁴⁸ his designation as editor of the fourth edition was almost certainly a polite fiction intended to mask the fact that the bishop of Dromore was publicly exposing the “Levities and Vanities” of his youth. Percy was later to take his nephew to task for revealing to George Steevens (of all people!) that he was only an “umbra” in the edition, a choice bit of news that the mischievous Steevens did not scruple to pass on to Ritson.⁴⁹ It seems a safe assumption also that Percy would not have entrusted the writing of a rather sensitive “Advertisement” to a nephew whose “Tastes & Persuits,” as Percy wrote to his wife on September 17, 1799, “are so different from mine.”⁵⁰ It is hard to think of anything else in the three volumes that might be claimed for the younger Thomas Percy.

Friends may have urged a new edition upon Percy, but in all likelihood the chief incentive for revising the third edition was to respond to Ritson's attack in Ancient Songs upon his integrity and method. Probably he could have passed over Ritson's strictures on the “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels” in A Select Collection of English Songs, if only from the sheer weariness of having revised the essay once before. But Percy was not one to receive with equanimity the suggestion that his folio manuscript was a fabrication, like Chatterton's Rowley or Macpherson's Ossian poems. And one may suppose that, once he had decided upon the task of revision, the scholar in him would simply not permit him to ignore what Ritson had to say about the minstrels and leave his essay untouched. The result of this two-fold approach to the fourth edition was that the changes in it, if not numerous, were significant, and that nearly all of them can be traced to one or the other of the two Ritson works.

The opening “Advertisement” is itself a key part of Percy's response: “The appeal publicly made to Dr. Johnson … [in the 1765 preface], and never once contradicted by him during so large a portion of his life, ought to have precluded every doubt concerning the existence of the MS. in question.” But because a doubt was expressed, the manuscript was left for a year at the home of John Nichols, where it was examined “by many Gentlemen of eminence in literature” (I, x). Much of the rest of the “Advertisement” describes the manuscript, with emphasis upon its missing leaves and parts of leaves and its faulty transcriptions often made from defective copies, with the result that “a considerable portion of the song or narrative is sometimes omitted; and miserable trash or nonsense not unfrequently introduced into pieces of considerable merit” (I, xii). In a few paragraphs, in short, Ritson's intolerable implication is disposed of and a basis for Percy's editorial practice established.

The “Advertisement” was new to the fourth edition. Of the continuing parts of the text, Percy once again undertook a major revision of the “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels.” Already doubled in size to meet Samuel Pegge's objections, it was now increased by another two thirds, and its unsightly supplementary notes were swollen from thirty-eight pages to fifty-two. Percy's purpose is to make clear, first, that such a person as the English minstrel did in fact survive the Conquest and, second, that he was welcomed in the houses of leading English families. Drawing upon the histories of music published by Sir John Hawkins and Charles Burney in 1776, he progresses from the reign of Henry I to the reign of Elizabeth, filling in some of the gaps in the royal succession he had left in earlier editions and citing, when he can, both the names of minstrels and the honors accorded them. He acknowledges that “in the first ages after the Conquest no other songs would be listened to by the great nobility” than those composed in the Norman French (I, xxix-xxx). But the Anglo-Saxons, although they now occupied inferior positions, were not “extirpated,” and they could understand only their own gleemen or minstrels—bards, harpers, even dancers and mimics—who were readily admitted into the households of the English gentry (I, xxx).

Thus, accepting Ritson's conclusions in part, Percy relegates the English minstrels to a position below that of the French but reputable nonetheless; and he follows the two lines of their histories as they are gradually drawn together while the French and English cultures in Britain blend into one. The result is both a fuller essay and a more discriminating one. It is not likely, of course, that Percy hoped to satisfy Ritson's doubts as he had satisfied Samuel Pegge's in 1767. Percy and Pegge were much closer in spirit, apostles of a politer form of scholarly controversy than Ritson ever pretended to. It was not impossible, on the other hand, that, satisfied or not, Ritson would call off his pursuit of Percy's essay. That he would cease his attacks upon Percy's editorial practices was hardly to be expected. Percy trusted Ritson so little, in fact, that he gave express orders that he was not to be shown the folio manuscript while it was on display at the home of John Nichols.⁵¹ From other scholars Percy had reason to expect a sympathetic response. To grant Ritson access to the manuscript was to place a battery of cannon at his disposal with the likelihood that he would discharge it triumphantly in Percy's face at the first opportunity.

For Percy was well aware that editorially in the Reliques he and Ritson were in opposing and irreconcilable camps. The difficulty of Percy's position was that, being a scholar himself, he could appreciate Ritson's concern for accurate texts of the poems, whereas he saw not the slightest chance that Ritson would appreciate his decision to subordinate textual accuracy to the desire to appeal to a broad spectrum of readers. It had been Shenstone's view that there were a good many encumbrances to the old poems which had to be shaken loose if the collection was to be a success, and Percy had agreed, although not without that lingering regret that scholars are likely to feel when they yield to the impulse to popularize. His hope, of course, was to have the best of both the scholarly and popular worlds. Scholars, including Ritson, were unfailingly impressed by the imagination and erudition that went into the Reliques, but in this instance Percy's sheer abilities had the consequence, at least with a fellow scholar of Ritson's caliber and temperament, of throwing his unscholarly editorial practices into sharp relief. A lesser man than Percy might have been ignored or at least more readily forgiven. If he was not, he might simply have charged Ritson with pedantry and counted upon his nonscholar readers to support him. But that course was not open to Percy. Ultimately the “improvements” that he subjected many of the poems to could be justified only on the ground of the book's success, and that was the ground that Percy chose.

The public, concludes the fourth edition “Advertisement” ostensibly written by Percy's nephew,

may judge how much they are indebted to the composer of this collection; who, at an early period of life, with such materials and such subjects, formed a work which hath been admitted into the most elegant libraries; and with which the judicious Antiquary hath just reason to be satisfied, while refined entertainment hath been provided for every Reader of taste and genius.

(I, xii)

Few of Percy's contemporaries would have thought the claim extravagant. The sale of three good-sized editions, the first and third of 1,500 copies⁵² and probably the second also, was an achievement for a three-volume work of collected poetry in the late eighteenth century. For a collection largely of old ballads it was phenomenal, and until the publication of Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802 no other collection began to approach the Reliques in popularity. Ritson's collections of accurately printed texts seem not to have captured the public's fancy at all.

A significant part of Percy's defense was the need to repair the damage suffered by many of the poems, some of which were missing whole sections. To have printed them as they were would have satisfied the desire for scholarly accuracy; but Shenstone and Percy were persuaded that it would turn away many of the very readers they were hoping to attract. The alternatives were not to print them at all or to print them with such interpolations or additions as Percy thought appropriate. He chose the second alternative.

Had he confined his efforts to those poems which, as he viewed them, could benefit from minor repairs, he would doubtless have been spared the full fury of later scholars when the folio manuscript was finally published by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall in 1867 and 1868. Smoothing the meter of the old verses and modifying the diction or the rhyme, along with such changes in punctuation, capitalization, and spelling as were commonplace among editors, might at times have been justified by the need to clarify the poems for eighteenth-century readers, whose knowledge of the old poetic vocabulary was minuscule. And even in a more extensively amended poem like “Gentle Herdsman, Tell to Me,” Percy's additions were not likely to seem a serious disturbance, filling in conjecturally as they do a series of gaps in this unique copy of the poem. They appear in a sequence of thirteen lines toward the middle of the poem's sixty lines, with Percy's interpolations designated by his own italics:

I am a woman, woe is me!
          Born to greeffe and irksome care.
For my beloved, and well-beloved,
          My wayward cruelty could kill:
And though my teares will nought avail,
          Most dearely I bewail him still.
He was the flower of noble wights,
          None ever more sincere colde bee;
Of comely mien and shape he was,
          And tenderlye hee loved mee.
When thus I saw he loved me well,
          I grewe so proud his paine to see,
That I, who did not know myselfe,
          Thought scorne of such a youth as hee.

(II, 73-74)

It cannot be said that Percy's invention rose to the challenge of these ragged verses. Most of his lines are banal at best, and sincere was an utter stranger to the ballad vocabulary. But Furnivall's comment in Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript seems rather too harsh for the offense: “We are not quite sure that the hand of time was always more to be dreaded than the hand of the Bishop” (III, 526). Even Ritson did not object to Percy's practice with “Gentle Herdsman,” although he was unable to resist commenting that the poem “has not the least appearance of being a Minstrel Song” (Ancient Songs, p. xx).

In the various prefaces to the poems cited by Ritson, Percy noted that his texts included “conjectural emendations” and even wholly rewritten or additional stanzas and sections. What he failed to do was to follow his practice in “Gentle Herdsman” and point out precisely the extent and location of his alterations. With “The Beggar's Daughter of Bednall-Green,” for example, he stated that “the concluding stanzas, which contain the old Beggar's discovery of himself,” are “a modern attempt to remove the absurdities and inconsistencies … of the song, as it stood before” (4th ed., II, 162), but that information still left the reader with some doubt as to which stanzas he had altered. As for “The Marriage of Sir Gawaine,” to cite another example from the seven poems, Percy had stated from the beginning that half of each manuscript leaf had been torn away and that he would in time print the truncated original text so that readers might compare it with his own interpolated version. With all these poems, of course, one could wish that Percy had found a convenient way to call attention both to his specific changes and to the originals, but it would be incorrect to conclude that he failed to inform his readers that he had taken liberties with his texts.

Considering the extent of Percy's changes, one can imagine the cry that Ritson would have sent up if he had been granted access to the folio manuscript. For some of Percy's “conjectural emendations” virtually obscured the manuscripts they were emendating. “The Child of Elle,” for example, a mere thirty-nine lines in Percy's folio, grew to a strapping two hundred in the Reliques, while “Sir Cauline” nearly doubled its size from 201 to 392. “The Child of Elle” was an unprintable if unique fragment, however, without beginning or end but with enough apparent merit to stir the poet in Percy to “a strong desire to attempt a completion of the story” (I, 90). Indeed, Percy's only real offense in this instance was in not proving a better poet. With regard to “Sir Cauline” and some of the other poems, the controversy has been more substantial. Percy found his manuscript copy of “Sir Cauline” “so very defective and mutilated” that he added “several stanzas in the first part, and still more in the second, to connect and compleat the story in the manner which appeared to him most interesting and affecting” (4th ed., I, 41). Hales, letting Percy off comparatively lightly, remarked that Percy's version abounds in affectations and expressed a preference for the folio copy, “with all its roughness and imperfections.”⁵³ Wheatley, less forgiving, saw “no necessity for this perversion of the original, because the story is … complete” (I, 62). Hales's indictment is of the poet; Wheatley's, of the editor. But sometimes with Percy the two roles merge, as they do in “Sir Cauline.” If Percy found the temptation to experiment with his poems simply overwhelming at times, he also found support for that activity in one of his guiding principles: considerable license might be permitted an editor whose texts were not to be trusted—“copied from the faulty recitation of some illiterate minstrell,” as he wrote of “Sir Cauline” in the fourth edition (I, 41).

This was not an easy position to carry in debate, however, and no doubt Percy was aware that he had stretched the principle pretty far in a few of the poems. Perhaps those facts account for his not replying to Ritson's criticisms with a detailed defense of specific alterations. On the other hand, he did not ignore them. He printed the folio manuscript fragment of “The Marriage of Sir Gawaine” at the end of the fourth edition and thus belatedly fulfilled a first edition promise (I, 11). He did not modify his texts of the seven poems cited by Ritson or provide any precise index of his revisions, but he placed three asterisks at the end of the forty-eight poems in which “any considerable liberties were taken with the old copies” (4th ed., I, xvii). Except for the “Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels,” his changes in the fourth edition are, in fact, comparatively few, and, like those in the essay, most of them were obviously stimulated by Ritson's criticism. A good many relate to his use of the folio manuscript. They include a number of additional footnotes citing divergences from the manuscript, some additional introductory acknowledgments of Percy's changes in the poems, a reversion in the title of “The Wandering Prince of Troy” to the folio manuscript title “Queen Dido,” and a note appended to “The Heir of Linne” indicating that “several ancient readings are restored from the folio MS.” In the introduction to “Old Robin of Portingale,” Percy announces that he is now dropping Robin's title of “Sir” because he is called only Robin in the manuscript; and in “A Lover of Late” he quietly corrects his only significant departure from the text by replacing “fond” in line seventeen with the manuscript's word “kind”: “I was as kind as she was faire.”⁵⁴

Percy and Ritson were never reconciled either personally or professionally, and it cannot be said that their hostility brought out the best in either. In 1802 Ritson attacked Percy with particular fury in Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës, where he accused him of practicing “every kind of forgery and imposture” (cxliii, n.). As for Percy, he provided his friend Robert Nares with three paragraphs supplementary to Nares's review of Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës in the December, 1804, British Critic, of which Nares was editor, and Nares printed them separately in the January, 1805, issue as a “Supplemental Article” submitted by a “friend” of Percy.⁵⁵ Percy also secured an account of an incident shortly before Ritson's death in September, 1803, in which Ritson set fire to his manuscripts in his chambers in Gray's Inn and, when challenged respecting his behavior, replied that he was writing a pamphlet proving Christ to have been an impostor. Robert Anderson, to whom Percy sent a copy of the account, informed him in a letter of June 22, 1811, that it had been published in Cromek's Select Scotish Songs.⁵⁶

If not already of that opinion, Percy—“the worthy and venerable Bishop of Dromore,” as the British Critic called him—must have been convinced by the Gray's Inn incident that Ritson was quite insane, and perhaps it is not surprising that he took some pains to have the strange conduct of his severest critic made known. It would have been better, of course, for him to ignore Ritson's continuing attacks upon him. His reputation was secure, at least for his own time, and in his final edition of the Reliques he had put forth the best defense of his practices that he knew and had again shown himself ready to acknowledge criticism with careful self-examination. The excellent fourth edition of the Reliques was the high point of an extraordinary scholarly career, and it was itself the most persuasive argument in support of Percy's case.

Notes

1. The best discussion of the background of the Reliques is contained in Albert B. Friedman's The Ballad Revival (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), to which this chapter is much indebted.

2. Diary, August 19-30, 1761.

3. Henry Bold, Latine Songs, with Their English: and Poems (London, 1685), p. 80.

4. Friedman, p. 129. Addison also devoted number 85 of the Spectator to a discussion of “The Children in the Wood.”

5. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1765), I, xv.

6. [The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and William Shenstone, ed. Cleanth Brooks, VII of The Percy Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)], 175-93.

7. Percy's use of the Collection of Old Ballads has been carefully analyzed by Stephen Vartin in Thomas Percy's Reliques: Its Structure and Organization (Ph.D diss., New York University, 1972).

8. The folio manuscript is British Library Add. MS. 27,879. It was edited in three volumes by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall and published as Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript (London, 1867-1868); Percy's flyleaf inscription is printed at I, lxxiv, from which the extract is taken.

9. Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, I, lxxiv.

10. Percy Letters, VII, 3-4.

11. L. F. Powell, “Percy's Reliques,” The Library, September, 1928, pp. 114-16.

12. Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, I, xiii.

13. Percy Letters, VII, 130, 134.

14. Ibid, p. 119.

15. British Library Add. MS. 45,867, A28, B40. Percy was granted admission to the Reading Room on April 24, 1761.

16. Like the Shenstone correspondence, all four of these correspondences have been published in separate volumes of The Percy Letters.

17. Percy's changes are discussed in Albert B. Friedman, “The First Draft of Percy's Reliques,” PMLA, 69 (December, 1954), 1233-49; and The Ballad Revival, pp. 224-25. For discussions of Dalrymple's assistance see the introduction to the Percy Letters (vol. 4) and P. G. Thomas, “Bishop Percy and the Scottish Ballad,” TLS [(London) Times Literary Supplement], July 4, 1929, p. 538. David C. Fowler argues persuasively that some of the best-known Scottish ballads (“Sir Patrick Spence” and “Edward, Edward” among them) were revised before they were sent to Percy (A Literary History of the Popular Ballad [Durham: Duke University Press, 1968], pp. 239-70).

18. Percy Letters, IV, 49.

19. British Library Add. MS. 32,334, f. 2.

20. Percy's diary entries related to Johnson's visit have been published in Boswell's Life of Johnson, I, 553-54.

21. Percy Letters, IV, 1.

22. Allen T. Hazen, Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), pp. 161-62.

23. Robert Anderson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 3d ed. (Edinburgh, 1815), p. 309.

24. Hazen, pp. 158-68.

25. Diary, November 22, 1764.

26. Public Advertiser, February 11, 1765.

27. Critical Review, February, 1765, pp. 119-30; Monthly Review, April, 1765, pp. 241-53; Gentleman's Magazine, April, 1765, pp. 179-83.

28. Diary, March 16, 1765.

29. Percy Letters, IV, 94; III, 119.

30. Four Essays, as Improved and Enlarged in the Second Edition of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1767). René Wellek said of the essays that they “represent, in many ways, the best and most learned collection of essays on older English literary history that appeared before Warton” (The Rise of English Literary History [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941], p. 144).

31. The earliest manuscript of Piers Plowman is thought to date from about 1372. The attribution to William Langland, whom Percy mistakenly calls Robert, remains uncertain.

32. Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History, pp. 154, 158.

33. Boswell, Life of Johnson, III, 278.

34. The earliest advertisements I have found for the second edition are those in the London Chronicle and London Evening-Post for December 1-3, 1767. On June 25, 1767, however, Percy wrote to John Bowle to ask how he could convey a copy of the new edition to him, and on July 13 he wrote to express the hope that “the Books” had reached Bowle in accordance with his directions [University of Cape Town: BC 188, Bowle-Evans Collection, Correspondence between the Reverend Thomas Percy and the Reverend John Bowle, (4) and (5)].

35. Vincent H. Ogburn, “Thomas Percy's Unfinished Collection, Ancient English and Scottish Poems,” ELH, 3 (1936), 183-89; E. K. A. Mackenzie, “Percy's Great Schemes,” Modern Language Review, 43 (1948), 34-38.

36. In the first edition “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is” is at I, 268-71 (11 stanzas). In the second edition it is at I, 292-94 (7 stanzas), and “The Golden Mean” is at I, 303-4 (4 stanzas).

37. Letter Thomas Tyrwhitt to Percy, August 30, 1768, Bodleian MS. Eng. Lett. d. 59, ff. 17-18.

38. In new footnotes to the Northumberland poems, Percy also writes familiarly of the county and the people. The “shyars thre” in line 14 of “The Ancient Ballad of Chevy-Chase” he identifies in the second edition as the Northumberland districts of Island-shire, Norehamshire, and Bamboroughshire. He notes that “winn their haye” in line 2 of “The Battle of Otterbourne” is “the Northumberland phrase to this day” for “getting in their hay,” and two stanzas later he identifies Ottercap Hill, Rodeliffe Cragge, and Green Leyton as “well-known places in Northumberland.” In annotating “The More Modern Ballad of Chevy-Chase” he notes that “The Chiviot Hills and circumjacent Wastes are at present void both of Deer and Woods: but formerly they had enough of both to justify the Descriptions attempted here and in the Ancient Ballad” (I, 256).

39. It can be noted that Percy's continuing search permitted him to add seven items in the second edition to his list of thirty romances supplementary to the essay “On the Ancient Metrical Romances.”

40. “Observations on Dr. Percy's Account of Minstrels among the Saxons,” Archaeologia (London, 1773), II, 100-106.

41. Bodleian Mss. Percy c.11, f.17; Eng. Lett. d. 46, ff. 653-56.

42. Lit. Illus., VIII, 164. The letter was published in Archaeologia (London, 1775), III, 310.

43. The General Biographical Dictionary (London, 1812-1816), “Joseph Ritson.”

44. A Select Collection of English Songs (London, 1783), I, lxviii. Thomas Carter's music for Percy's song was printed in the third volume of the collection, pp. 219-20.

45. Bodleian MS. Percy c. 1, f. 122.

46. Harvard bMS Eng 891 (3), quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. Percy's letter of November 19, 1785, is unsigned and appears to be either a draft or a copy.

47. In his copy (at Yale-Beinecke), Joseph Haslewood tipped in a newspaper announcement of the edition (“This Day is published”) marked in pen “July, 1795.” This date is consistent with the first discussion of the edition in Percy's correspondence and elsewhere.

48. Percy recalled his nephew's receiving £160 for his part in the fourth edition (Bodleian MS. Percy c. 3, f. 200).

49. Ibid., f. 59; Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës (London, 1802), pp. cvii-cviii, n.

50. British Library Add. MS. 32,335, f. 197.

51. Lit. Illus., VIII, 145; Bertrand H. Bronson, Joseph Ritson Scholar-at-Arms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), I, 295.

52. The Percy Letters, III, 119; Willis's Current Notes, November, 1854, p. 91. In “Percy's Reliques” (p. 136), L. F. Powell cited a June 21, 1774, receipt signed by Percy for twenty guineas paid to him by James Dodsley “for correcting and improving the third edition …, which is to consist of a thousand Copies.” Willis's Current Notes, however, cites a later agreement (March 7, 1775) whereby Dodsley, in consideration of being able to print 1500 copies, relinquished to Percy, as his future property, all the copperplates used in the Reliques. Dodsley also agreed to pay Percy forty guineas five years after the presswork on the third edition was completed, and Percy was not to republish the Reliques until all 1500 copies were sold.

53. Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, III, 2.

54. References in the paragraph are to the fourth edition: II, 137; III, 48, 178, 193.

55. British Critic, January, 1805, pp. 88-89. Nares had succeeded Percy as vicar of Easton Mauduit.

56. Lit. Illus., VII, 215; Robert Burns, Select Scotish Songs, Ancient and Modern, ed. R. H. Cromek (London, 1810), I, 224-30.