[In the following essay, Brooks provides an overview of Percy's correspondence with author William Shenstone, focusing particularly on Shenstone's assistance in the compilation of Percy's Reliques.]

I

The first extant letter of this correspondence is dated 24 November 1757. It is from Percy, and on it Shenstone has scribbled a note that reads: “Mr. Percy is domestic chaplain to the Earl of Sussex and has Genius and Learning, accompany'd with great Vivacity.” The note suggests that the correspondence had just begun, for it is the sort of comment that one might jot down on an early letter but not on one received long after correspondence had begun. Percy himself is quite definite that the correspondence began in 1757. When his letters to Shenstone had been returned to him after Shenstone's death, he arranged them in sequence and wrote the following note on one of the early pages:¹ “A series of Letters, written to and from William Shenstone Esq of The Leasowes, begun in 1757, soon after our first acquaintance and continued down to the time of his death in 1763.”

This note might be taken as decisive, but there is one piece of evidence, apparently contradictory, that has to be dealt with. Miss Marjorie Williams, in her Letters of William Shenstone (Oxford, Blackwell, 1939), conjectures that a certain letter, undated and without the name of the person to whom it was addressed, may have been written to Percy in 1753.² In this letter Shenstone refers to his correspondent's “polite Description of my Farm.” Now, in a letter of 7 January 1760,³ Shenstone observes that “M^r P.'s account of the Farm here must be a Little adjusted …,” and Percy has annotated this sentence as follows: “A Description of the Leasowes, which I had drawn up hastily in 1753.”

One cannot, then, simply rule out the possibility that Percy and Shenstone were acquainted and were exchanging letters as early as 1753. Nevertheless, there are difficulties in the way of accepting this date. For example, if Percy had drawn up his account of The Leasowes in 1753, he was certainly behindhand in presenting it to Shenstone for his approval. Had Percy, in 1753, at the age of twenty-four, had the good fortune to meet Shenstone, that known arbiter elegantiarum, I find it hard to believe that he would not have followed up his advantage. Yet, if he did, where are the letters that passed between the two men in the four years between 1753 and 1757? Over fifty survive for the period between 1757 and 1763.

Internal evidence is also against 1753. None of the names that occur in the conjectural 1753 letter have any association with Percy. One of the people mentioned, Dr. Turton, does have a connection with an account of The Leasowes, but not with the one written by Percy. In this account, which is preserved in the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection in Yale University Library, the unidentified author quotes a passage about The Leasowes which is attributed to Turton. Evidently a number of people tried their hands at descriptions of Shenstone's estate.

Another such description is that printed in the second volume of Shenstone's Works. The ostensible author is Shenstone's publisher, Robert Dodsley. Percy, however, disputes Dodsley's authorship, and in a note in his own copy of the Works (now in the Bodleian Library) tells us that this description was a joint production in which he himself had a hand, but the date he assigns to its composition is 1762.⁴ Internal evidence suggests that Percy's part was indeed considerable. Percy presumably incorporated his “account of the Farm” in the “Description” published in the Works in 1764.

Percy's note on Letter XV remains a puzzle. Was it a lapsus pennae or was Percy simply forgetful? I think that either of these possibilities is more likely than that Percy and Shenstone began to exchange letters in 1753.

Though we do not know through whom Percy first became acquainted with Shenstone, it is possible to make a plausible guess. The intermediary was probably one of Percy's Shropshire friends and neighbors. Percy found his celebrated Folio MS. “lying dirty on the floor under a Bureau in the Parlour” and begged it of its owner, whom he describes as “my worthy friend Humphrey Pitt, Esq., then living at Shifnal in Shropshire.”⁵ Pitt (d. 1769) was the uncle of the Reverend Robert Binnel (1716-63), rector of Shenton and Kemberton and minister of Newport, all Shropshire villages. Binnel's wife, Mary Congreve, was a distant relation of Percy's.

Pitt and Binnel are mentioned early in the Percy-Shenstone correspondence, and Shenstone had been acquainted with both men for many years. He refers to Pitt in a letter of 23 September 1741 (see Williams, p. 32) and to Binnel in a letter of 28 November 1745 (see Williams, p. 99). In Letter VI Shenstone makes direct reference not only to Pitt but to three other Shropshire gentlemen: to Charles Baldwyn, to Colonel John Cotes, and to a Mr. Slaney, who was probably either Robert (later Cotes's son-in-law) or Plowden (later Pitt's son-in-law).

Shenstone, then, was evidently well known in Percy's own county. He could indeed regard himself as a Salopian, for though his estate was only seven miles from Birmingham and was completely bounded by Warwickshire, his parish of Halesowen was a detached portion of Shropshire and legally a part of that county. The great landmark for all Shropshire men was the Wrekin. This hill, though thirty miles distant, was visible from The Leasowes, and at an appropriate viewpoint in his grounds, Shenstone placed “a seat, the back of which [was] so contrived as to form a table or pedestal for a bowl … thus inscribed—‘To all friends round the Wrekin!’” So runs the account in Shenstone's Works (II, 348).

Of Percy's various Shropshire friends, Binnel was particularly close to Shenstone, not only in early associations, but in tastes and interests. He and Shenstone had long been acquainted, for they had been exact contemporaries at Pembroke College, Oxford. Binnel was a classicist and interested in belles lettres. Percy laments his death in a letter to Richard Farmer as “my great and irreparable Loss,” and evidently regarded him as a man upon whom he could call for counsel in literary and scholarly matters. My guess is that it was to Binnel that Percy appealed for an introduction to Shenstone. But for another possibility see Letter XI, n. 16.

The very first letters that pass between Percy and Shenstone are filled with literary news of all sorts and not least with the discussion of folk ballads. Indeed, in his first letter, Percy informs his new friend that he is “possess'd of a very curious old MS. Collection of ancient Ballads,” that “M^r Johnson” has seen it, and that Johnson hopes that Percy will publish it. Thus, by 1757 Percy was already at work in gathering materials for the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

Percy's next letter to Shenstone insists that it is only Johnson's “importunity” that has “extorted” from him a promise to publish his MS. But if Johnson is set forth as a main promoter of the enterprise and one who has made large promises of support, it soon becomes apparent, as we read on through the correspondence, that the other main promoter and supporter was Shenstone himself.

Confirmation of this is to be found in the tribute that Percy paid to Shenstone in the Preface to the Reliques and elsewhere. For example, writing to Richard Farmer of Shenstone's death, he calls Shenstone “one of the most elegant and amiable of men, and his tender writings were but the counterparts of his heart, which was one of the best that ever animated a human body.”⁶ In a letter of 30 August 1763 he tells Lord Hailes that he intends “to inscribe [to Shenstone's memory] the whole Collection [that is, the Reliques], as being un[der]taken at his request, and the plan of it formed under his elegant super-intendance.”⁷

When the Reliques was published, a year and a half later, it was dedicated not to Shenstone but to the Countess of Northumberland; but in the Preface Percy states that it was Shenstone, together with Samuel Johnson, who urged him to produce the work: “At length the importunity of his friends prevailed, and he could refuse nothing to such judges as the author of the Rambler and the late Mr. Shenstone.”⁸ On p. xii he specifies more precisely what he owed to Shenstone: “The plan of the work was settled in concert with the late elegant Mr. Shenstone, who was to have borne a joint share in it had not death unhappily prevented him: Most of the modern pieces were of his selection and arrangement, and the Editor hopes to be pardoned if he has retained some things out of partiality to the judgment of his friend.”

In the Preface (p. xiii) the help of Johnson is also acknowledged: “To the friendship of Mr. Johnson [the Editor] owes many valuable hints for the conduct of the work.” This is a judiciously accurate statement, for besides Johnson's initial encouragement to publish the Folio MS., Percy's testimony is that in spite of Johnson's promises to “assist [him] in selecting the most valuable pieces and in revising the Text of those he selected” and furnishing the work “with proper Notes,” “This Promise he never executed: nor except a few slight hints delivered vivâ voce, did he furnish any contributions,” etc.⁹ Johnson was a very busy man during this period, attempting to complete his edition of Shakespeare, which was not issued until six months after the Reliques itself appeared. But Percy's acknowledgment in the Preface does not take into account a “council of War with M^r Johnson, [on the basis of which he had] at length come to the following resolutions.; Imprimis,” etc.¹⁰ There was also the very important matter of the graceful dedication which Johnson substantially wrote at Percy's request, though since Percy was the editor of the work it had of course to bear his own signature.

As his letters to Shenstone make abundantly clear, Percy relied heavily on Shenstone's taste, not merely in his choice of what poems to print, but with reference to the design and format of the book. Shenstone had evidently given his friend instruction in avoiding “busy” title pages, in the choice of typefaces, and in the selection of pleasing and appropriate illustrations. Shenstone, as his letters show, was concerned that Percy should provide a proper variety in choosing and arranging his texts. The reader, for instance, must not be wearied by a succession of long poems. The plan of dividing each volume of the Reliques into three series of poems was, by the way, suggested by Shenstone.

Percy took very seriously Shenstone's judgment of literature, especially his taste in songs, as Appendix I will show. Once the reader comes to realize that the Reliques is much more than a collection of folk ballads, that it was a songbook as well, and that Percy must be credited with bringing to the attention of the reading public of his day the importance of its heritage of English lyric poetry, he can better understand why Percy valued and relied greatly on Shenstone's judgment. He will also regard in a new light such matters as Shenstone's attempt to state the difference between a song and a ballad, his attempt to provide a definition of the ballad,¹¹ and the very considerable labor that he gave himself in sifting collections of songs for Percy's use in the Reliques.

This is not to say that Percy always followed his mentor's advice, but clearly he took it very seriously. One must not minimize, however, Shenstone's interest in the folk ballad. In his first letter to Percy he discusses ballads, remarking that “nothing gives me greater Pleasure than the simplicity of style and sentiment that is observable in old English ballads.”¹² A modern reader may well question Shenstone's conception of what constituted “simplicity.” To that matter we shall recur. But we might note that it was through the help of Shenstone that Percy actually obtained some of the finest ballads in the Reliques—“Sir Patrick Spence” and “Edward, Edward,” are examples. (They do not occur in the Folio MS. but were sent from Scotland through Shenstone's helpful intervention.) If antiquarians like Richard Farmer, Thomas Warton, and Lord Hailes were Percy's great black-letter authorities, Shenstone, for better or worse, was his special authority on literary taste.

The pages of Shenstone's Miscellany¹³ throw a good deal of light on his taste in poetry and therefore on the nature of Shenstone's influence on Percy during the period in which the Reliques was being prepared for publication. Shenstone's Miscellany is a collection of poems, most of them written by Shenstone's friends and neighbors. As Ian Gordon shows, the collection was more than a mere commonplace-book assemblage. Shenstone had evidently intended it for publication at the press of his near “neighbor Baskerville” though it did not, in fact, appear in print until nearly two centuries after Shenstone's death.

The notebook into which Shenstone had copied the poems that make up his Miscellany was sent to Percy a few months after Shenstone's death by Shenstone's neighbor and friend, John Scott Hylton (1726-93), of Lapal House, Halesowen, collector and dabbler in letters. Whether Shenstone had instructed Hylton to do so, we do not know. At any rate, though Percy apparently made no effort to publish the collection, he did annotate it with considerable care. After his death it passed through a succession of hands before it became part of the Alexander Turnbull Library at Wellington, New Zealand.

Percy is among the poets included, and is represented by no fewer than eight poems, one of them in two versions. The collection therefore provides some evidence of his taste in poetry as well as Shenstone's. Though the Miscellany includes seven old ballads, many epigrams, and some light satire, it is primarily a collection of songs. They range all the way from sentimental effusions to rather brittle vers de société. Seven of the poems included in the Miscellany came to be printed in the first edition of the Reliques.

The Percy whom we see reflected in Shenstone's Miscellany and who is even more directly expressed in his letters to Shenstone in the present volume is neither Percy the bishop-to-be nor the incompetent antiquary who signally failed to be the Ritson that Professor Furnivall thought he should have been. For two whole centuries it has been all but impossible to deliver from these two stereotypes the young man in his early thirties who actually edited the Reliques—the scholar who, in spite of his conventional neoclassical education, had become much interested in the older ballads of the folk and equally interested in the songs of Tudor and Elizabethan courtiers and playwrights. Percy would have been extraordinary indeed if, when it came to contemporary verse, he had escaped the prevailing taste of his own day. Percy, of course, did not know that he was somehow proving a traitor to the Romantic Revolt, for it had not yet occurred; nor did he think of himself as an austere and strait-laced antiquary. To him, antiquarianism was exciting. Besides, he was not interested in some of the older verse simply because it was old. He thought that there were better reasons for admiring it.

His letters to Shenstone breathe such a spirit. The writer is thoroughly human. He has enthusiasm. He has a sense of humor and high spirits. Though we may find in the tobacco-stopper plot¹⁴ a schoolboy's prank rather than an exercise of genuine wit, it may be useful to be forced to associate the young Percy with a practical joke. Moreover, his list of preposterous curios¹⁵ may serve to counterbalance the prevailing conception of him as always rather stiff, formal, and fearful of compromising his respectability.

II

PERCY'S METHOD OF EDITING THE FOLK BALLADS

One of the problems Percy faced in printing poems from his Folio MS. was the state of his texts. The Folio MS. ballads were often not only corrupt but imperfect and even fragmentary. What was to be done? To such questions as these, Shenstone had ready and positive answers. In his letter of 1 October 1760 he writes:

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 Status. …¹⁶

Shenstone also warns his friend not to include too many poems of little literary merit simply because they have historical interest, and not to encumber his book with too many notes, historical or philological.¹⁷ The material in the Folio MS. ought to be considered “as an hoard of gold, somewhat defac'd by Time; from which however you may be able to draw supplies upon occasion, and with which you may enrich the world hereafter under more current Impressions”;¹⁸ that is to say, the gold ought to be reminted where necessary.

Though there is no question Shenstone had a taste for the old ballads, he nevertheless insisted that they had to measure up to universal standards. We may not agree with Shenstone's conception of what those standards were—I, for one, do not—yet we ought to give Shenstone credit for not adopting a double standard—that of “good” poetry and another, applicable to merely quaint and historically interesting verse.

Percy was persuaded to add new toes and fingers to his antique treasures, and, on a few occasions, whole arms and legs. He also tried to clear up obscurities and infelicities. But, in doing so, he was to incur Joseph Ritson's righteous wrath some years later and even to be accused of deceit and forgery.

Sir Walter Scott's defense of Percy's honesty and scholarship scarcely availed to clear his reputation, and when in 1867-68 Hales and Furnivall published Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, the pummeling that Percy received was merciless. I believe that it is not unreasonable to say that to this day Percy's name has remained a byword for bad editing—even dishonest editing.

The reader of the letters in this volume will probably be inclined to lay most of the blame for this state of affairs on William Shenstone. Certainly, Shenstone did urge Percy to provide a readable and even elegant presentation of these texts “somewhat defac'd by Time.” But one must concede that, presented with the problems set by the Folio MS., Percy might have been driven to adopt some such method had he never made Shenstone's acquaintance. Even if Samuel Johnson had had time to advise Percy—and we must not take it for granted that his counsel would have been to print selections from the Folio MS. literatim—it seems to me unlikely that the texts in the Reliques would have passed muster with Ritson.

The best defense that I know of the editorial method that Shenstone advised and Percy employed has been presented in Chapter 7 (entitled “Percy's ‘Reliques’”) of Albert B. Friedman's The Ballad Revival.¹⁹ The student interested in this problem should read this chapter in full. Yet it may be useful to indicate here, however briefly, the basic points that Professor Friedman makes, and even to give a few of his illustrations.

In the first place, Friedman indicates that the method Percy adopted was necessary. The texts of ballads like “The Marriage of Sir Gawaine,” “The Child of Elle,” and “Sir Cauline” were so defective that Percy's problem “was not whether to print them faithfully or to remodel them, but whether to remodel them or to leave them in MS unused.” “The Marriage of Sir Gawaine,” for example, has “six gaps of nine stanzas each—this in a ballad that was composed originally of about one hundred stanzas.”²⁰

Friedman points out furthermore that the method adopted by Percy worked. “Success justified Percy's attitude toward the letter of his ballads. As the saner critics from Scott to Oliver Elton have always realized, ‘the ballads would have been less read if [Percy] had been faithful to his texts.’”²¹

Percy should have indicated what he had done. But he fell back too trustfully on Shenstone's advice that he should “not esteem it a point of Conscience to particularize” such alterations as he made in the text, and as a result he has been consigned “to the special hell reserved for bad editors.”²²

In the third place, Friedman points out that sometimes, as in “The Heire of Lynne,” Percy's “improvements are actually improvements, as Saintsbury, and even so inveterate an enemy of ballad-tampering as Child, grudgingly admit. … [In “Sir Aldingar”] Percy has dropped one or two characteristic folk touches and added a few incongruous elements, but by belletristic, if not by scholarly standards, his is the better version; and of course there can be no doubt that Percy's contemporaries would have considered it infinitely preferable to the text as given.”²³

The contrast that Friedman makes between scholarly standards and belletristic standards really fixes the point at issue. There seems no doubt that Percy would have said (with Shenstone's concurrence) that in presenting poems “defac'd by Time,” his primary purpose was to preserve a sense of their literary qualities rather than to preserve the literal detail of the texts. Any first-year graduate student knows, of course, how unscholarly such a procedure is. But that is hardly the issue here. One grants that many of the ballads in the Reliques are presented in “bad” texts. Our concern here is with how it came about that Percy chose to use a method which scholarship has long condemned. (That Percy himself was acquainted with more scrupulous methods, we shall discuss on a later page.)

Finally,²⁴ Friedman points out that some of the greatest poets and critics of the succeeding generation cited ballads extensively reworked by Percy as representing what authentic ballads ought to be. What I have in mind here is more than a restatement of Friedman's contention that Percy's “improvements” are really improvements. Rather, what Friedman implies is that, on the testimony of the greater Romantic poets, Percy's remodeling of the ballads had been done in the spirit of the old ballad makers. Thus, Friedman points out that when Wordsworth acknowledges the great debt that he and his fellow poets owed to the Reliques, the only ballad that he names specifically is “Sir Cauline,” which H. B. Wheatley cites as “the most flagrant example of Percy's manipulation.” Furthermore, the three ballads which apparently had most influence on Coleridge's Christabel were all ballads reworked by Percy: “The Marriage of Sir Gawaine,” “The Child of Elle,” and “Sir Cauline.”²⁵

Most striking of all of Friedman's citations is a paragraph that he quotes from Wordsworth which sharply contrasts poems such as “The Hermit of Warkworth,” written by Percy “in his own person and character as a poetical writer,” and poems written by Percy “under a mask,” that is, written after Percy had assumed the persona of the ancient ballad maker. In the former case, the diction of the poem is scarcely “distinguishable from the vague, the glossy, and unfeeling language of the day.” But, writes Wordsworth, when “writing under a mask,” Percy had not lacked the “resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of Sir Cauline and by many other pieces. …”²⁶ A parallel case, I would suggest, is Chatterton's needing to assume the mask of Rowley, an imaginary monk of the fifteenth century, in order to find his own poetic voice. Other such examples from the eighteenth century could be cited if one cared to elaborate Wordsworth's point.

Though I believe that Friedman has clearly shown that one can make out a better case for Percy “than has ever yet been pleaded for him,”²⁷ nevertheless Friedman himself provides the best evidence of how indelibly Percy's character as a scholar has been blackened. For Friedman sometimes seems grudging in his concessions that Percy was actually right in what he did, and Friedman is often oversuspicious of Percy's motives.²⁸ Percy, to be sure, was thin-skinned, and increasingly concerned with what kind of figure he might cut in the public view. But he was not deceitful or devious. Friedman's occasional intimations that Percy kept closer to a printed text because his deviations from it might more easily be detected can be dismissed. So can the suspicion that he sat on MSS. and denied information to fellow scholars. He was happy to aid brother scholars, as is testified by the many notes he supplied for Warton's History of English Literature and by the notes he provided for several of the great eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare.

Perhaps, however, the best testimony to Percy's competence as a textual editor and his scrupulous faithfulness even to the minute details of a text is to consider his edition of Tottel's Miscellany,²⁹ which was destroyed in a fire. This work contained poems that had not been “defac'd by Time,” and in preparing his edition Percy used a proper method. He tried to locate the first edition to serve as his copy text and then sought to reproduce it in the original spelling as faithfully as possible. The first and second editions of Tottel's Miscellany were published in 1557, and the second edition is represented by two different settings of the text. Percy used for his copy text the second setting of the second edition, which Hyder Rollins designates C.³⁰

I have compared 211 lines of Percy's edition with his copy text, Rollins' C. The lines collated fall into two blocks, the first composed of 137 consecutive lines (folios 10^v—12^r of C) and the second, of 74 consecutive lines (folios 85^v—86^r). Percy felt free to alter punctuation, adding or omitting commas, converting colons into full stops, etc., in order to bring the punctuation into some conformity with eighteenth-century standards.

Besides the changes in punctuation, I have counted twenty-three instances in which Percy's edition varies from C. Nineteen of these variations involve minute changes in spelling, capitalization, or the consolidation or separation of word elements: iewell for iewel, driue for drive, Loue for loue, Whoso for Who so, Against for Agaynst, etc.

Two of his alterations of spelling seem to be not errors made by the typesetter but deliberate. Thus, Percy does not follow his copy text in reading “When in her grace thou held the most, she bare,” etc. He alters “held the most” to “held thee most,” lest the reader misinterpret—at least momentarily—the sense. Four lines further on, where the context makes it plain that “thee” is meant, Percy preserves C's spelling: viz., “that promised was to the.”

Another possible instance of such deliberate alteration is his substitution of “frinde” for the text's “frend.” Surrey rhymes “frend” with “minde” and Percy's change of the spelling may have been calculated to alert the reader to the fact that a rhyme was intended.

Percy's alterations that have any substantive significance amount to corrections of the text. Thus, in changing “you ferse” to “your ferse,” he removes an error in C and restores the reading found in the first edition (Rollins' A). So also (in line 7 of “A warning to the louer how he is abused by his loue”) he brings the line back to metrical regularity by dropping a needless adverb (“well”) first introduced by B and followed by C.

In “To the ladie that scorned her louer,” Percy makes line 26 read “Me checke in your degre” rather than “Me checke in such degre,” thus giving rhetorical point to the passage. But this alteration rests on more than Percy's subjective judgment: he here followed the reading of the third (D) and subsequent editions. (He himself owned a copy of D.)

Percy has gone out of his way to preserve Tottel's parentheses, line indentations, etc., and in general to give his reader some notion of how the sixteenth-century text looked on the page, though he has wisely substituted a roman typeface for Tottel's black-letter. In view of the pains that Percy obviously took to produce a literatim text, it is a pity that a more careful job of proofreading was not done. Even so, Percy shows himself to be a cautious and highly conservative editor, who respects his text and only rarely and for substantial reasons makes deliberate departures from it.

III

THE MANUSCRIPTS

The bulk of the Percy-Shenstone correspondence is preserved in the British Library as Additional Manuscript 28221. The following note in Percy's hand appears on f. 4^r of the MS.:

N. B.

Of my Correspondence with M^r Shenstone I have here preserved almost all his Letters and Billets, however inconsiderable: But of my Own (tho' all were returned me after his Death) I have kept only a few, chiefly such as tended to explain his Letters, or were some way or other referred to in them.

T. Percy. Easton Maud^t

April 24 1765

In a note on f. 1^r Percy has written, “26 Letters from W^m Shenstone to the Rev^d T. Percy—19 Letters from The Rev^d T. Percy to W. Shenstone Esq.” In this volume, however, five additional letters from Shenstone to Percy are printed: one from the library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, one from the Bodleian Library, and three from the Pruden Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale. Presumably, these letters—and perhaps still others—were never returned to Percy since, one assumes, all that were returned to him except those that he did not think worth preserving are now included in British Library Add. MS. 28221. The Table of Letters shows that at least six more letters from Shenstone have to be regarded as missing.

The “Billets” having to do with Shenstone's choice of songs for the Reliques constitute a special case. They apparently never were a part of Add. MS. 28221. They are now preserved in the Harvard College Library.

In the present volume there are twenty-one letters from Percy to Shenstone, not the nineteen specified in the note on f. 1^r. I assume that Percy twice took two letters to be one, or perhaps simply miscounted. In any case, he is speaking very loosely and inaccurately when he writes on f. 4^r that he preserved “only a few” of his own letters. Using his own count, he has preserved nearly as many of his own letters as he has of Shenstone's.

Percy clearly did attach a great deal of importance to his correspondence with Shenstone. One such indication is the fact that, so far as I know, this correspondence is the only one that he attempted to annotate with any thoroughness. In a preliminary note on f. 3^r he tells the reader that “M^r Shenstone died before the Reliques had only been printed to the beginning of Book III^d of what is now the III^d Volume but was then the 1^st.”³¹ As the reader of this correspondence will see, he sets down from time to time various other explanatory notes.

His editing of the correspondence also involved excisions of parts of the letters. Some dozen of the Add. MS. 28221 letters lack a salutation and presumably the opening paragraphs as well, or they break off without a proper conclusion. I find nothing like this proportion of fragmented letters in the other Percy correspondences. Presumably the cuts were made by Percy after the letters had come back into his possession. But whoever it was that cut away sections of the letters, it was certainly Percy who was responsible for the heavy cross-outs and deletions.

There is no need to suspect that Percy's motive was the removal of scandalous matter. The reader's inspection of what I have been able to read under the heaviest inking will readily allay all but the most stubborn suspicions. I suspect that in making his cuts and deletions, Percy simply had in mind the thought of publication. The idea of publication would account for the excisions and deletions, just as it would account for Percy's supplying of notes. His motive would be to remove unimportant personal references and references to trivial matters generally, as well as to cut out references to living people who might resent certain frank comments on their lives and works. (See, for example, Letter XXVIII below.)

It is easy to suppose that Percy thought of submitting the correspondence for publication. Shenstone had already made a name as an elegant letter writer. In 1769 Dodsley was to publish a volume of his letters, and Thomas Hull was to publish a Select Letters in two volumes in 1778. One can easily imagine Percy's spending an afternoon in 1765 in putting his packet of letters into what he would have regarded as decent shape to show to a publisher, though, as it turned out, none of these letters was published before the twentieth century.

Yet, whatever the reason, Percy's editing of his correspondence indicates his special relation to Shenstone as a literary guide and as a friend. Only in his letters to Farmer does he unbend from his customary formality as he does in his letters to Shenstone. How concerned he was to preserve his friend's memory and to promote his literary reputation appears in the notes and comments he made in his copy of Shenstone's Works (see Appendix III). It is also seen in his efforts to preserve an earlier and, to his mind, more attractive version of Shenstone's “Pastoral Ballad” (see Appendix V).

.....

Notes

1. See British Library, Add. MS., 28221, f. 3^r.

2. See pp. 390-91. This work is hereafter cited as Williams.

3. See Letter XV infra.

4. This note is quoted in full in Appendix III, marginal note II, 331. In 1764 Dodsley published two volumes of The Works in Verse and Prose of William Shenstone, Esq.; Most of which were never before printed. A third volume was added in 1769.

5. Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, ed. by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, London, 1867-68, 3 vols., I, lxxiv; and see also Letter VI infra.

6. The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Richard Farmer, ed. Cleanth Brooks, Baton Rouge, 1946, p. 37.

7. The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, ed. A. F. Falconer, Baton Rouge, 1954, p. 49.

8. Edition of 1765, p. ix.

9. See Letter III infra.

10. See Letter XXXV infra. The plan represented a final crystallization of ideas that had been in solution for at least a year or more. The reader will recognize some of them as having emanated from Shenstone. Evidently Johnson's primary function had been to help Percy to clarify his ideas and organize them into a coherent editorial pattern.

11. See Letter XXXIV infra.

12. See Letter II infra.

13. Edited by Ian A. Gordon, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1952.

14. See Appendix II.

15. See Letters X and XX infra.

16. See Letter XXV infra.

17. See Letter XXVII infra.

18. See Letter II infra.

19. Chicago, 1961.

20. Friedman, p. 208.

21. Ibid., p. 204.

22. Ibid., p. 205.

23. Ibid., pp. 207-208.

24. I should make clear that I am responsible for setting up these four categories and the order in which I place them, not Professor Friedman.

25. Ibid., p. 210.

26. Ibid., p. 212.

27. Ibid., p. 206.

28. See, for example, p. 206.

29. In his letters Percy usually refers to it as “Surrey's Poems.” For a detailed account of this edition, see Percy-Farmer Correspondence, pp. 175-200.

30. Tottel's Miscellany, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, Harvard University Press, 1928-29, 2 vols., II, 7-36. If Percy knew of the unique copy of A in the Bodleian Library, which is also dated 1557, he presumably assumed that it was identical with C.

31. See L. F. Powell's “Percy's Reliques,” The Library, Fourth Series, IX, 121.