SOURCE: “The Young Thomas Percy,” in Forum, Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring, 1979.

Thomas Percy is usually remembered as a man of one book, the celebrated Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, the work that Wordsworth and Coleridge were to accord the highest praise; and the Reliques itself is all too often thought of as simply a collection of folk ballads. The result is that Percy has acquired a modest fame as a purveyor of folk ballads who, unwittingly and almost by accident, provided a stimulus to the Romantic poets and helped bring about a momentous shift in literary taste.

Yet such an account oversimplifies and distorts Percy's real accomplishments as a scholar. It even badly falsifies the nature of the Reliques itself, for though the ballad content of the book is large and very important, such an estimate fails to note how much of this anthology is devoted to a general recovery of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature—and, more than that, some attempt to reclaim England's medieval heritage. Let me suggest something of the extent of Percy's range.

He was, for example, the first editor to publish one of Chaucer's short lyrics (“Youre two eyn will sle me sodenly”). He included in the Reliques a ten-page essay on “The Metre of Pierce Plowman's Vision.” He sought out and published texts of sixteen songs that are partially quoted, or alluded to, in Shakespeare's plays. He included in the Reliques a ten-page essay on “The Origin of the English Stage.” He took note of, and correctly adopted, Izaak Walton's ascription of “Come live with me, and be my love” to Christopher Marlowe, and the “Reply” to Sir Walter Raleigh. (All the editions current in Percy's time had given Marlowe's song to Shakespeare.) These several examples,—all of them taken from the first edition of the Reliques—may suggest the range and variety of matter contained in the three small volumes. They should also convey some sense of Percy's taste and responsible scholarship.

Percy's Reliques was published in 1765, yet it is only one item in a total of ten separate books that he published between 1761 and 1770. As the reader will observe, this tally amounts to a book every year. They are: Hau Kiou Choaan, the first Chinese novel to be translated into English, 1761; Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese, 1762; The Matrons, six tales sharing a common plot and theme, gathered from six different cultures, 1762; Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, 1763; The Song of Solomon, Newly Translated, with an introduction and elaborate notes, 1764; the Reliques itself, 1765; and also in 1765 A Description of the Ride to Hulne Abbey, an early example of an account of a picturesque landscape; A Key to the New Testament, 1766; the Household Book of the Earl of Northumberland in 1512, 1768; and a translation of Henry Mallet's Northern Antiquities, a translation that opened up to English readers for the first time the treasures of the Elder Edda and Norse mythology generally, 1770.

There is variety here in God's plenty as well as several pieces of pioneering work of the first importance. Percy was clearly interested in not only the older British literature but in the literature of other cultures—the Chinese, the Norse, and the Hebrew. Only one of these books, his Key to the New Testament, is specifically ecclesiastical in nature. His new translation of The Song of Solomon, as Percy tells us, was produced because of his interest in it as a fine example of ancient pastoral poetry and in its use of oriental imagery.¹

Yet I have still not sketched fully the whole story of Percy's activities in this period. For during this same remarkable decade, he was at work on a collection of the writings of George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, the author of The Rehearsal. He was also hard at work on an edition of Tottel's Miscellany. Neither the Tottel nor the Buckingham ever achieved publication, even though they were printed off in great part during the 1760's. Their completion was delayed and delayed, and both finally perished in 1808 in a warehouse fire. One copy of the Buckingham escaped the flames and is now in the British Museum, or as it is now known, the British Library.² Of the Tottel, four copies are known to have survived.³

Tonson was originally to have been the publisher of the Tottel. But with Tonson's death in 1767, printing was suspended. Through the next forty years Percy continued to postpone completing it. Later on he was to discover that Wyatt and Surrey manuscripts were extant and so he delayed still further in order to perfect his text of the Wyatt and Surrey poems and to add further materials. Thus, again, may I point out, the editing of the British folk ballad proves to have been only one of Percy's multiform literary interests. If we are to come to any proper estimate of Percy's rank as a literary scholar and of the range of his literary interests, it is important not to tag him with the label “ballad man.” He was much more. Small wonder that Dr. Johnson paid him his compliment on the width of his learning.⁴

Percy was early elected to the celebrated literary club. Johnson paid him a long summer visit at his country vicarage in 1764, and Percy is the source of some of the most charming anecdotes about Johnson's early life.⁵ As a member of the Club, Percy was associated with Goldsmith and the Wartons, Burke, and Reynolds (who, by the way, painted his portrait), and the rest of the Johnson circle.

Percy also rose rapidly in the Church, in 1778 becoming Dean of Carlisle, and in 1782, a bishop. In fact, he is always referred to as “Bishop” Percy, a circumstance that I believe has not enhanced his standing as a scholar of the first rank. We don't—at least in America—expect our bishops to be scholars. I fear that they more closely resemble junior corporation executives—at least in the Episcopal Church that seems to be so.

Percy's scholarly reputation came under sharp attack in his own lifetime. Joseph Ritson, that rather splenetic lawyer and antiquary, viciously assailed Percy's handling of his ballads and even accused him of committing forgeries. The attack was overdrawn, as Sir Walter Scott was to insist.⁶ But the stigma of having been guilty of unacceptable editorial practices has endured right on down to the present day.

In the Victorian period, Frederick J. Furnivall pressed the attack. For him, Percy was a conscienceless editor who patched and mended and polished the texts of the old ballads that he collected and edited. He did so, in Furnivall's judgement, under a wholly mistaken notion of what their real merit was. Furnivall did not accuse Percy of forgery; rather, he ridiculed him as a mealy-mouthed and over-refined parson. Percy, Furnivall remarks, was foolish enough to try to dress up the folk ballads in eighteenth-century costume, complete with false hair, powder, and pomatum.⁷

Furnivall did something else to Percy's reputation almost as damaging: he portrayed Percy as a snob, insecure about his own social position, eager to improve it, and fawning on his noble patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.

In the three-volume edition of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, which Furnivall and John W. Hales brought out in 1867-68, Furnivall taunts Percy with having been the son of a grocer. But he does not mention the matter once and let it drop. He makes the point over and over in subsequent footnotes.⁸

Furnivall also makes much of the fact that Percy was to alter the spelling of his wife's name from “Gutteridge” to the more elegant “Goodriche,” and that in his early years he spelled his own surname “Piercy” rather than “Percy.” These shifts in spelling confirm Furnivall's estimate of Percy as a social climber.⁹ One may allow that in some sense, Percy probably was. Most of us like to better our position. Like a great many literary men in the eighteenth century, he was grateful to find a patron, and like most of the eighteenth-century clergy in the Church of England, he certainly looked after his own interests in matters of benefices and preferment. So much has to be conceded, though we ought to take into account the accepted procedures of the age.

Yet if Furnivall had known as much as most of us now know about the state of spelling in the earlier centuries, he might have paid less attention to the various ways in which names were spelled and pronounced. Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, the fourteenth president of the United States, in spite of his use of an “ie” spelling, apparently pronounced his name “Purse.” So at least says Robert Frost, who ought to know. In his poem “New Hampshire,” Frost writes of that state:

She had one President (pronounce him Purse,
And make the most of it for better or worse.
He's your one chance to score against the state).

—But not because he spelled his name with an “ie.”

Percy, by the way, demolished the fanciful etymology of the name Percy which had been popularly derived from the following circumstance. One of the chieftains of this family had pierced the eye of a Scottish king in the course of his defense of Alnwick Castle. Hence he came to be known as “pierce-eye,” which designation eventually became pronounced “purse-eye” though spelled “Percy.”

Thomas Percy dismissed this bit of folk-etymology by pointing out that the Percy family, who had come over with William the Conqueror, brought with them a family name derived from the Norman village from which they came. Indeed, Percy located the village in question as the chief of the three villages named Percy, the one “situate near Villedieu, in the election of St. Lo.”¹⁰

Percy actually set down in writing an account of when and why he changed the spelling of his name. Among his genealogical papers occurs a note to the effect that his father had always spelled the family name Piercy and that so had he until 1756. In that year, however, he had discovered that “in the old Registers of Worcester [the city from which the family had originally come] it had been written Percy.” Consequently, in August, 1756, when the Earl of Sussex presented him to the Rectory of Wilbye, he took care to have his name written Percy in the “Instruments of [his] Institution, Dispensation, etc.”

When Percy wrote this note some years later he may have already heard whispers about his motive for having done so. For he points out in his note that long before, in 1756, he had not had the “most distant hope of being ever known to the Duke and Duchess (then Earl and Countess) of Northumberland: The first time I had the honour to be introduced to either of them being November of 1764.”¹¹

Percy's father apparently was a grocer. But what of it? The fact never seemed to trouble Dr. Johnson, the son of a provincial bookseller, nor Oliver Goldsmith, the son of a poor Irish clergyman, nor of such of Percy's friends as were clearly gentry or of noble blood. It would seem that it is Furnivall who is the snob, aghast that Thomas Percy should dare to get above his breeding.

The fact is that Percy had no need to be ashamed of his family. His great-grandfather had in 1662 been Mayor of the city of Worcester. Percy had relatives of solid stock scattered all over Worcestershire and Shropshire. Percy's father was a burgess of his native city of Bridgnorth and before he suffered severe financial losses, owned estates in Bridgnorth and Worcester. The house in which our Thomas Percy was born is still standing, a rather elegant timbered structure dating back to 1580.

In view of his talents and the really remarkable quality and extent of his publications, Percy's rise in the world of letters and in the Church is not in the least surprising. The eighteenth-century Church of England was the great propagator of historical and literary scholarship. Even those who have chided the clergy of that rather tepid century for the lack of fervent piety and for indifference to the state of the poor, concede that the Church fostered and rewarded scholarly accomplishment. Bishop William Warburton, who edited Shakespeare and was Alexander Pope's literary executor; Bishop Richard Hurd, author of Letters on Chivalry and Romance; Thomas Warton, whose Observations on the Faerie Queene was a very significant work and who wrote the first history of English poetry; Richard Farmer, who wrote the seminal essay on Shakespeare's learning; and Edward Lye, who edited the Etymologicum Anglicanum—all of them were Church of England clergymen.

Yet, Furnivall's aspersions aside—his intimations that Percy was socially aggressive, self-seeking, and given to toadying to noblemen—it might be interesting to examine the specific steps by which Percy began his ecclesiastical and literary career. The examination may even provide some insight into the class system as it obtained in eighteenth-century England.

As a youth Percy had distinguished himself intellectually. He was elected from the Newport School to one of the newly-founded Careswell Exhibitions at Christ Church, Oxford. An “exhibition” provides less money and confers less honor than a scholarship proper; nevertheless, it was a meritorious achievement. At Oxford in 1747 Percy was elected to another exhibition, that founded by the redoubtable Dr. Fell. Percy took his A.B. in 1750; his M.A. in 1753; and was presented to a living in the disposition of Christ Church College. It was a modest preferment, the vicarage of Easton Mauduit in Northamptonshire. For some three years, however, Percy served as a curate nearer home, and did not take up residence at Easton Mauduit until 1756. The country seat of the Earl of Sussex happened to be in the village of Easton Mauduit, and Percy soon became acquainted with the Earl.

Easton Mauduit is, by the way, a pretty village with a charming fourteenth-century church. Now, in the twentieth century, the village is still very small, and it has obviously always been small. A nobleman who liked to spend at least part of the year in the country on his estates normally found it pleasant to have near at hand someone who was well-read, who would be almost invariably a graduate of one or the other of the two ancient universities, and a man who knew something of the great world outside the village. If this parish priest also happened to be of a lively mind and pleasant disposition, he could on occasion prove a welcome addition to a dinner party or useful in the nobleman's library or helpful in composing a document or drafting an important letter.

Percy's Journal¹² indicates that from the very beginning he saw a great deal of the Earl of Sussex. Witness such entries for the year 1756 as the following: May 22, “Ld Sussex treated me at Opera.” May 20, “My Lord gave me a scarf”—signifying that Sussex had accepted him as his personal chaplain. On July 19, Percy notes that he was to dinner with the Earl and other guests and after tea “Walk'd with my Lord.” On July 22, “My Lord and I went to Comb Abbey.” In London, on August 2, “Found Capt Monson with my Lord—walk'd with my Lord.” September 26, ‘Din'd with [my Lord] … Evening with [him].”

Augustus, Yelverton, the second Earl of Sussex, was scarcely two years older than Percy. The two young men obviously hit it off well, for within a few weeks of Percy's taking up residence in Easton Mauduit, the Earl had presented Percy with the living of Wilbye. In 1758 the second Earl died suddenly and was succeeded by his brother Henry. Yet for Percy, Henry proved almost as good a friend and patron as had his elder brother. Percy, by the way, became well acquainted with the grandmother of the second and third Earls. She was Barbara, Viscountess de Longueville, who died, almost a hundred years old, in 1763. On her death, Percy remarked to a friend: “I have lost an excellent Chronicle and valuable friend.”¹³

Granted the patronage system of the time, it was perfectly natural that Percy should have dedicated his translation of the Chinese novel to the Countess of Sussex, the third Earl's wife, and his Chinese Miscellanies to the Viscountess, the third Earl's grandmother.

There is no doubt that Percy felt genuine gratitude toward the Yelvertons, just as there is no reason to doubt that the young Earls of Sussex had from the first valued Percy and enjoyed his company. Furnivall notes that it was the Earl of Sussex who introduced Percy to the Earl of Northumberland and to his Countess,¹⁴ the last descendant of the Northumberland Percys, to whom Percy dedicated his Reliques in 1765.

The fortunes of the Northumberlands were on the rise. The Earl soon became the Duke of Northumberland, and with the advocacy of this powerful friend at court to call attention to Percy's literary and scholarly achievements, Percy's road to ecclesiastical promotion became relatively easy. In 1778 he was made Dean of Carlisle and in 1782 consecrated Bishop of Dromore.

So much for how Percy became acquainted with his noble patrons. It is time to turn to what is a more interesting matter: namely, how he became acquainted with the literary scholars and distinguished men of letters of his time.

The greatest of these figures was, of course, Samuel Johnson, and Percy met him very early, indeed in 1756.¹⁵ Percy was, we ought to remind ourselves, at that time a young man, only 26 or 27. Many years later he was to tell Robert Anderson how he had become acquainted with Johnson. “It was through his intimacy with Dr. Grainger [who was] a familiar visitant in Gough-square.”¹⁶ The late David Nichol Smith has dated Percy's meeting with James Grainger in September of 1756.¹⁷ If the date is correct, Grainger had lost no time in introducing his new friend to Dr. Johnson.

In view of Johnson's subsequent laughter at some of Grainger's poetry and of his several disparaging remarks about Grainger's character,¹⁸ Percy's statement that Grainger was in 1756 “a familiar visitant in Gough-square” is interesting. Johnson did not suffer fools gladly, and he had small patience with men of no principle, into which class Boswell records he once placed Grainger. I wish we knew more about the whole Johnson-Grainger relationship.

I also wish we knew more about Grainger himself. Grainger was a north countryman, a doctor of medicine, a translator of Tibullus, author of the familiar “Ode of Solitude,” which appears in Dodsley's Collection, and of a curious didactic poem entitled “The Sugar Cane,” a work that reflects the years that he spent in the sugar islands of the West Indies.

Percy valued Grainger as a man and as a poet. He seems to have entertained for Grainger a warm affection and mourned his early death at the age of forty-five.

Whatever his own literary and other merits, Grainger evidently had a wide acquaintance in literary London, for he introduced Percy not only to Johnson but to Goldsmith—on 21 February 1759, as Percy records in his Journal.

The date is worth noting, for it shows that Percy met Goldsmith over two years before Johnson met Goldsmith. In fact, it would seem to have been Percy who made the formal introduction of Goldsmith to Johnson. In the Memoir of Goldsmith, published in Volume I of the Collected Works of Goldsmith, 1801, nearly all of which was from Percy's own pen, Percy tells us of a supper that Goldsmith gave on 31 May 1761 to which Goldsmith had invited Johnson and other literary friends.¹⁹

He writes: “One of the company then invited [it was Percy himself], being intimate with our great Lexicographer, was desired to call upon him and take him with him. As they went together, the former [that is, Percy] was much struck with the studied neatness of Johnson's dress: he had on a new suit of cloaths, a new wig nicely powdered and every thing about him so perfectly dissimilar from his usual habits and appearance, that [he] could not help inquiring the cause of this singular transformation. ‘Why sir,’ said Johnson, ‘I hear that Goldsmith, who is a very great sloven, justifies his disregard of cleanliness and decency, by quoting my practice, and I am desirous this night to show him a better example.’” In his Journal (for 31 May 1761) however, Percy was more laconic. He refers to the incident only as follows: “Evening at Goldsmith's with much company.”²⁰

The story of this memorable meeting is familiar to all Johnsonians, but I am concerned here to connect it with Percy. So also with another well-known story about Goldsmith having been found by a visitor lodged “in a wretched dirty room, in which there was but one chair, and when he, from civility, offered it to his visitant, himself was obliged to sit in the window.”²¹ Then follows, as many readers will remember, the entry into the room of “a poor ragged little girl of very decent behaviour … who, dropping a curtsie, said, ‘My mamma sends her compliments, and begs the favour of you to lend her a chamber-pot full of coals.” The visitant was Percy himself, and it is to his Memoir of Goldsmith that we owe the story.

If the young Percy was at this time of his life already on occasion dining at Lord Sussex's table, he evidently did not shrink from contact with the squalid life of Grub Street. What is left of his Journal for such years as 1756-7-8-9 shows that he was frequently with Johnson and Grainger. For one whose visits to London could be only occasional, he managed to see a great deal of both of them.

Johnson's encouragement was a powerful motive to Percy to undertake the Reliques. But it was William Shenstone who actually supplied much specific help in making the selection of songs and ballads and, as Percy acknowledges in his Preface, settling “the plan of the work.” Shenstone indeed turned out to be for his younger friend both his good and his bad angel—his bad angel only in that he encouraged Percy to mend and patch the often mutilated ballad texts with which Percy was presented in his Folio Manuscript. Though Percy's love for the older literature was perfectly genuine, he nevertheless valued—I should say overvalued—both Shenstone's poetry and Shenstone's taste.

I think that there can be no doubt, however, that Shenstone also had a genuine love for the ballads as poetry, even though his own verse is too consciously elegant in the conventional eighteenth-century manner. For better or worse, then, Shenstone had much to do with both the virtues and the defects of the 1765 Reliques.

Percy seems to have become acquainted with Shenstone about a year after his first meeting with Johnson. The earliest letter in the Percy-Shenstone correspondence is dated 24 November 1757 and a note written on it by Shenstone reads: “Mr Percy is domestic Chaplain to the Earl of Sussex; and has Genius and Learning accompany'd with great vivacity.”²² This note suggests that their acquaintance had not been of any long standing.

It is worth inquiring into how Percy came to meet Shenstone, primarily because of Shenstone's powerful influence on the selection and arrangement of the separate songs and ballads which make up the Reliques. Had Percy not met with Shenstone just when he did, the Reliques might have become a rather different sort of book, both as to content and as to editorial method. But to trace the way in which Percy got to know his principal advisor yields a special dividend. It provides an insight into an aspect of eighteenth-century English life that modern Americans are likely to overlook. I refer to the extended family and the way in which any young man in the period would naturally, and quite without self-consciousness, make use of his widely ramified family connections and interconnections. Moreover, it will lead me back to where I began this paper: the matter of Thomas Percy's origins and his position in society. I make these secondary points because I think that it is highly likely that Percy's acquaintance with Shenstone came about through the perfectly natural channels provided by what the sociologists nowadays call “a kinship society.”

Before returning to Percy's first letter to Shenstone, written in November 1757, I want to call attention to the early pages of Percy's Journal, especially for the years 1753-59—or rather, I should say, call attention to the extant entries for those years, for, I must repeat, the Journal has been heavily edited, not to say mutilated. No entries at all are preserved for some years and rarely more than a few weeks for any given year. Yet the fragmentary entries that remain provide eloquent testimony to the young Percy's close relations with such members of his family as had migrated from the counties of Shropshire and Worcestershire to London. But concrete examples will make my point much more vividly than any mere generalization can.

Sunday, 25 November 1753: “Breakfast at coffee house [;] at St. Clements—Mr Oldbrook Prayers, Mr Jones preach'd—All [Cousin] P[errin's] Family at Mr John Perins [.] At St. Clements Church Mr Oldbrook preach'd without Notes—Sup[per] and evening at Mr John Perin's.”²³

Now John Perrins was a London distiller. He married Mary Percy, the daughter of Thomas Percy's great-uncle. “Cuz Perrins,” as Percy refers to him, was Frank Perrins, John Perrins's son. The Perrins family, it turns out, had originally come from Worchestershire, and when today we read the label on a bottle of Lea and Perrins Worchestershire Sauce, we probably receive an echo of that family name.

Next day, on Monday, November 26, Percy records that he dined at “Cuz Perrins” and found T. Woodington there, and thenceforward spent his nights at Woodington's until he left London on December 13. Now Thomas Woodington was another relative of Percy's. Both were descendants of Mary Taylor. By her first marriage to Dr. John Percy, she was Percy's great-great-grandmother; by her second marriage to a Mr. Meysey, she was Woodington's great-grandmother.²⁴

The next day, November 27, Percy dined at Mr. Perrins's and treated his cousin, Frank Perrins, to the theater to see The Beaux Stratagem. Two days later, on Thursday, November 29, he called on Mr. Nott. This was Anthony Nott, the eldest son of Anthony Nott, a plumber and a glazier. The younger Nott was a first cousin of Percy's mother, Jane Nott Percy. Percy was to write of him in his “Account of the Percy Family” that he lived “at Boswell Court near Carey Street London” and that he had “a country seat and good Estate at Horsted in Sussex.”²⁵

Yet it ought to be noted that some others of Percy's kin had not been so successful. Nevertheless, though they had not been, Percy duly records their status. For example, he mentions one of his relatives, another Thomas Percy, as “a cabinet maker in London living in 1756 (still living in 1775).”²⁶ The last phrase indicates that Percy had evidently looked him up personally long after he had become chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland. He mentions another relative, Mary Percy Taylor, who “being left a widow with several children, kept a boarding School for young ladies: I remember to have been at her house in the year 1736 or 7.”²⁷

Percy mentions also another relative, one Edward Percy who died in 1735. Percy notes that this Edward was “a Clothier and latterly lived in London: but having been very unprosperous in his fortune retired a year or two before his death to his brother Arthur Percy at Bridgnorth [Percy's home town], who very cordially received him, and in whose house he died.”²⁸

These genealogical notes are by the same man who was proud that one of his great-grandfathers was the father of John Cleveland, the Cavalier poet, and who, to the shock and horror of Professor Funivall, dared to explore the possibility that the Worcestershire Percys, from whom he was descended, might have sprung from a cadet branch of the proud Northumberland Percys.

Yet, as I have just noted, in the elaborate genealogies that Thomas Percy worked out and on which I have been drawing for the matter of this paper, his obscure relatives appear, and Percy seems perfectly willing to record the circumstances of those who were “in trade” as clothiers, cabinet makers, and distillers. Though he destroyed perhaps eighty percent of his daily Journal, he did not destroy the genealogical tables he had searched out so carefully. Fie! For shame, Professor Funivall. It is you who have raised the issue of snobbery. The evidence would indicate that it recoils upon your own head.

Does not, however, the very existence of these elaborate genealogical charts indicate that Percy had an unhealthy interest in his family's antecedents? Not, I should say, in the context of times. A kinship society is always interested in these matters, even when they are not searched out and written down in detailed genealogical charts. It is clear that the young Percy in 1753, just twenty-three or twenty-four years old, knew very well, long before he had set down the exact birth and death dates and written down the family pedigrees, who his London relatives were—even those who were by our standards very remote cousins indeed. A kinship society has long memories and a lively oral tradition.

A quite incidental remark may be worth making here: it is interesting to note how many of Percy's relatives whose roots go back to Worcestershire or Shropshire had rather recently removed to London. I suspect that these represent only particular instances of a general movement from the provinces to the metropolis that was going on at this period.

In this paper I shall not try to note all Percy's relatives that are mentioned in his Journal—the Haslewoods and the Smiths and the Congreves, for example. In this matter of cousins, Percy, like Sir Joseph Porter in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, H.M.S. Pinafore, had enough cousins to number them by dozens. But it is high time to return to the matter I broached earlier: how Percy came to make his acquaintance with William Shenstone. I have already adumbrated the answer: through his relatives and his county connections.

I make mention of his “county connections” because they were important for Percy and it would appear that they were also important to Shenstone. Though living on the fringes of the great city of Birmingham, Shenstone considered himself to be a Salopian—a Shropshire man. And with good reason, for Halesowen, where he lived, was at this time still a detached portion of the County of Shropshire. There is plenty of evidence that Shenstone valued the Shropshire connection. The Wrekin, that great landmark for all Shropshire men—one recalls references to it in A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad—the Wrekin, though thirty miles distant, was clearly visible from The Leasowes, Shenstone's estate. Moreover, in his grounds Shenstone had placed a seat from which to view it. On the back of this seat, which was “so contrived as to form a table or pedestal for a bowl,” he had inscribed the legend: “To all friends round the Wrekin.”²⁹

One need not, of course, take this gesture too seriously. Much more important for my argument is the fact that Shenstone had a large number of Shropshire friends, with whom he kept in touch. In one of his early letters to Percy, Shenstone mentions having recently had a visit from Charles Baldwyn, an M.P. for Shropshire, and Col. John Cotes of Woodcote in Shropshire. Later, in the same letter, he mentions having been recently visited by a Mr. Slaney, who was probably either Plowden or Robert Slaney, both of Hatton Grange, Shropshire.³⁰ Robert Slaney was later to marry the daughter of Col. Cotes. His brother Plowden was, in 1761, to marry Martha Pitt, the daughter and co-heiress of Humphrey Pitt, of Shifnall, in Shropshire.³¹

In this same letter, Shenstone tells us that Slaney was accompanied by Humphrey Pitt who, Shenstone writes, “says he gave you those old Ballads.” The collection referred to was, of course, the celebrated Folio MS. which Percy had found “lying dirty on the floor under a Bureau in the Parlour,” the leaves of which were being used by the maids to light the fire.³²

With this mention of Pitt's name we obviously get close to Thomas Percy himself. Pitt was, by the way, the uncle of the Rev. Robert Binnel, rector of Shenton and Kimberton, and minister of Newport, all Shropshire villages.³³ Binnel had been an exact contemporary of Shenstone's at Pembroke College, Oxford. Binnel's wife was, indeed, a distant relation of Percy. The Mary Taylor mentioned on an earlier page, was by her first marriage a great-great-grandmother of Thomas Percy, and by her second marriage, the great-grandmother of Mary Congreve, the wife of Robert Binnel.³⁴ The relation may seem remote to us; but not to Percy, who valued his relation to the Congreve family.

Since Binnel had been acquainted with Shenstone at Oxford, the two men had known each other for many years. Shenstone had also known Humphrey Pitt, Binnel's uncle and patron, for many years. One of Shenstone's letters to Pitt is dated as early as September 1741 and a letter of his to Binnel as early as 1745.

Thus, it was not Percy who introduced Pitt and Binnel to Shenstone. It must have been the other way around. Just which of these two friends of Shenstone actually made the introduction, I cannot say; but it seems plain that the young Percy probably met Shenstone through the mediation of one or the other of these two friends. In fact, the remarkable thing is that Percy and Shenstone had not been brought together earlier.

It was Percy, by the way, who introduced Grainger to Shenstone,³⁵ and it was Percy who tried very hard to introduce Shenstone to Johnson. Because of the natural inertia of both men and perhaps because of Shenstone's timidity, Percy did not succeed. This circumstance must have galled Percy when he read years later Johnson's rather grudging and unsympathetic life of Shenstone. Yet it is hard to believe that had the two men met, Johnson would have made a really different estimate of the master of The Leasowes.

In temperament and personality Johnson and Shenstone seem to represent polar extremes. Yet Percy genuinely admired both men, and that fact says something about Percy's own width of sympathies and his disposition to do a bit of hero-worshipping. Percy complained to Shenstone that Johnson never fulfilled his promises to help with the editing of the Reliques, though the dedication, as Percy confessed later, was largely Johnson's contribution. Shenstone, on the other hand, helped rather too much—at least according to modern editorial standards. But that is another story.

Notes

1. The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Richard Farmer, ed. Cleanth Brooks (Baton Rouge: L.S.U. Press, 1946), pp. 40-41 and footnotes 9 and 11.

2. For a history of the Buckingham edition, see The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, ed. M. G. Robinson and Leah Dennis (Baton Rouge: L.S.U. Press, 1951), pp. 148-67.

3. For a history of the Tottel edition, see The Percy-Farmer Correspondence, pp. 175-200.

4. See Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934-50), III, 278.

5. Robert Anderson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1815), passim.

6. See his “Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry” (1830) in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T. F. Henderson, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, London, and New York, 1902), I, 1-54.

7. Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, ed. John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, 3 vols. (London: Trübner, 1867-68), I, xvi-xxiii.

8. Percy's Folio MS, I xx, xxvii and n. 2, xxix, n. 1, and lix and n. 1.

9. Percy's Folio MS, I, xxxii, n. 1 and xxvii, n. 1 and n. 2.

10. See Arthur Collins, The Peerage of England, 5th ed., 8 vols. (London, 1779), II, 280. In a letter to Edmond Malone, Percy wrote that he had “made innumerable corrections and additions to [the account] of the Northumb^d Family” as printed in Collins' fifth edition.

11. This note in Percy's hand is written on one of some dozen pages of genealogical (and other) notes associated (mistakenly, perhaps?) with British Library, Add. MS. 32, 336.

12. British Library, Add. MS. 32, 336-37. The quotations that follow in this article are all taken from Add. MS. 32, 336.

13. Percy-Farmer Correspondence, p. 33.

14. Percy's Folio MS, I, xxxix, n. 2.

15. Boswells' Life of Johnson, I, 48, n. 2.

16. Anderson, p. 285.

17. From a MS note by Nichol Smith, now in my possession.

18. The Correspondence of James Boswell with Certain Members of the Club, ed. Charles N. Fifer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 327-31, and notes.

19. The Collected Works of Goldsmith was published in London in 4 vols. The quotation from it which follows occurs on pp. 62-63.

20. British Library, Add. MS. 32, 336: entry for 31 May 1761.

21. Collected Works of Goldsmith, I, 61.

22. The Correspondence of Thomas Percy and William Shenstone, ed. Cleanth Brooks (New Haven: Yale, 1977), p. 3, n. 14.

23. See Percy's “Account of the Private Family of Percy, formerly of Worcester, afterwards of Bridgnorth Shropshire,” British Library, Add. MS. 32, 326, f. 9^v.

24. British Library, Add. MS. 32, 326, f. 12^v.

25. British Library, Add. MS. 32, 326, f. 19^v and f. 20^v.

26. British Library, Add. MS. 32, 326, f. 5^v, 6^v, and 7^r.

27. British Library, Add. MS. 32, 326, f. 8^r.

28. British Library, Add. MS. 32, 326, f. 9^r and 10^r.

29. The Works of William Shenstone, Esq., 2 vols. (London: Dodsley, 1764, (a third volume was added in 1769), II, 348.

30. Percy-Shenstone Correspondence, pp. 17 and 19.

31. Percy-Shenstone Correspondence, p. 19, n. 18.

32. Percy-Shenstone Correspondence, I, lxxi^v.

33. Percy-Shenstone Correspondence, p. vii.

34. British Library, Add. MS. 32, 326, f. 25^v.

35. Percy-Shenstone Correspondence, p. 17.