[In the following essay, Knapman discusses the critical evaluation, by both contemporaries and twentieth-century scholars, of Percy's editing practices in the Reliques.]

In 1765, the year when George III's Stamp Act started the great ‘No Taxation without Representation’ row with the American Colonies, Bishop Percy published a heavily edited and annotated anthology entitled Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.¹ The collection, although a rich source of folk texts, has never been popular with folklorists and Percy's significance has only been grudgingly acknowledged. When writing of the Reliques, critics have either drawn attention to the influence the collection exerted on the Romantic Poets, or alternatively, and this is particularly true of folk scholars, they have bewailed Percy's editorial methods with vehement abuse. H. B. Wheatley complained of Percy's ‘flagrant manipulation of his sources’² and Hales and Furnivall lamented that Percy had ‘puffed out … pomatumed … and powdered’ everything.³ Percy's editing is still predominantly remembered as destructive although it is precisely due to his editing that the Reliques was able to have such considerable influence, not only upon the course of English literature but also upon the ballad and folksong revival. This essay sets out to look not so much at what Percy did, which has already been extensively researched,⁴ but to use this information to see what he was trying to do. In historical perspective, Percy's editing can only be seen as a sensible, creative, and positive force.

The catalyst that sparked off the Reliques was Percy's discovery of what is now known as the Percy Folio Manuscript. Percy found it ‘lying dirty on the floor, under a bureau in y^e parlour’ in his friend Humphrey Pitt's residence at Shifnal in Shropshire, ‘being used by the maids to light the fire’.⁵ The manuscript, although somewhat mutilated, contained nearly two hundred texts: there are some seventeen romances, twenty-four metrical ‘histories’, forty-five Child ballads, and miscellaneous songs. The manuscript appears to have been compiled about 1650 from various sources, primarily written but also perhaps from memory and oral tradition. It is entitled ‘curious old ballads wch. occasionally I have met with’. Percy, already a keen antiquary, seems to have at once been fascinated by the find. The manuscript was shown to Dr Samuel Johnson, the poet Shenstone, and other close friends of Percy. Although both Johnson and Shenstone agreed it should be published, there was some disagreement on how this might best be done. Shenstone advised against publishing the manuscript as it stood and against printing any pieces that had no other merit than age. He feared such a work would arouse little interest whereas ‘All people of taste’, he prophesied, would ‘rejoice to see a correct and elegant collection of such pieces’.⁶ There is less evidence to show exactly what Dr Johnson advised, although it is clear that he was not interested in ballads as literature, only as they related to and illustrated earlier authors. He was, however, a great lover of old romances and offered to annotate selected transcripts from the manuscript.⁷ Presumably, Johnson would have liked to see the Folio in print as an antiquarian reference work; this is deducible from his contempt of the published Reliques, a literary collection with extensive ‘improvements’ and ballad imitations.

After some deliberation, it was Shenstone's proposals which Percy adopted, possibly having been lured by the more attractive role of poet/editor. Nevertheless, his decision was still both positive and calculated. How many people would have read such ballads and fragments so ‘defective’ as they were to Percy and his circle? Which of their contemporaries would have prefered the Folio ‘Sir Gawaine’ (III.3.19)⁸ which has nine stanza gaps on every page, to the completed Reliques version? Although Hales and Furnivall complain that ‘Percy puffed out the thirty-nine lines of the “Child of Elle” to two hundred’, creating ‘an objectionable mésalliance of true and false’,⁹ it is interesting to note that originally this was one of the most popular ballads in the collection. It was reprinted twice in fashionable magazines between the first and second editions of the Reliques.¹⁰ Similarly, ‘Sir Cauline’, which is considered to be far superior in the Folio manuscript, is the only ballad specifically praised by Wordsworth when acknowledging the great debt he and the new group of poets owed to the Reliques.¹¹ It is clear that Percy was completely aware of what he was doing. In 1801, Percy sent Jamieson a copy of a piece from the Folio.¹² In the accompanying letter he writes:

you will see the defective and incorrect state of the old text in the ancient folio MS., and the irresistible demand on the editor of the Reliques to attempt some of those conjectural emendations, which have been blamed by one or two rigid critics, but without which the collection would not have deserved a moment's attention.¹³

Having completed his editing, Percy was still slightly apologetic about the Reliques and equally unsure of its reception. In the dedication he calls the contents ‘the barbarous productions of unpolished ages’; they are to be viewed ‘not as labours of art, but as effusions of nature’. It is hardly surprising that Percy worded his dedication with such restraint as the ballad had yet to become an accepted literary genre. Johnson's dictionary explains a ballad as ‘a song’, adding that the term ‘is now applied to nothing but trifling verse’. As yet, there was no distinction between the broadside ballads that were still hawked in the streets and the older traditional ballads. A ballad was simply a ballad. Addison, in his famous ‘ballad papers’,¹⁴ was in fact praising a broadside version of ‘Chevy Chase’ (I.3.1) rather than the finer older version which is first printed in the Reliques (I.1.1). Johnson's definition does not, however, give any idea of the increasing interest in the ballad that had been mounting during the century (unless we are to understand he included all ballad imitations under the term ‘trifling verse’). The eighteenth-century cult of ‘simplicity’ made use of the ballad form in order to avoid use of complex metre. Tickell, for example, set out to write poetry that could be taken in at a glance. Settings were homely, recounting scenes of village life and events ‘recent in the neighbourhood’ (see Percy's introduction to ballads I.3.15, II.3.26 and III.3.17). Pre-Conquest Britain was a popular setting and the heroes and heroines were frequently Edgars, Harolds, Emilys, or Eleanors. Shenstone's ‘Jeremy Dawson’ (II.3.26) and Tickell's ‘Lucy and Colin’ (III.3.17) both belong to this body of writing. They were compounds of sweetness and marvellous coincidences; if one lover died under tragic circumstances, the other could be expected to die sympathetically. Ballad imitations were also popular. ‘Gentle Herdsman, tell to me’ (II.1.14) inspired Goldsmith's ‘Edwin and Angelina’; the ‘Not-Browne Mayd’ (II.1.6) inspired Matthew Prior's ‘Henry and Emma’. Perhaps the most influential of these ballads was Mallet's ‘Margaret's Ghost’ (III.3.16) which was first printed in the 1720s and continued to be popular throughout the century. It was extravagantly praised; Percy himself referred to it as ‘one of the most beautiful ballads in our own or in any language’.¹⁵

When Percy began work on the Reliques the ballad was in no way forgotten or out of currency. Shenstone was right in predicting the time had come for ‘a correct and elegant collection of such pieces’. The problem was to convert the literary élite: Warburton had sneered at Percy's earlier treatise on Chinese poetry;¹⁶ Johnson, who seemed to take a peculiar delight in parodying ballad imitations, had mercilessly censured Percy's ‘Hermit of Warkworth’.¹⁷

Percy's editing was never directly aimed at the popular market; from the beginning it was the approval of the literary intelligentsia that Percy was seeking. In the Reliques he included examples of historical and etymological interest, ballads to illustrate Shakespeare, and other early literature, each one accompanied by a learned and instructive introduction. While preparing the collection Percy was in contact with such scholars and notables as Thomas Birch the historian, Edward Lye the etymologist, Richard Farmer the Shakespearean scholar, Thomas Warton then professor of poetry at Oxford, and many others. David Garrick lent Percy a number of rare old plays from his private collection. At its most basic level, Percy's editing sets out to make his poems and ballads fit for and acceptable to the literary public. The specimens he included were all to be of literary interest and value. When introducing the ballads illustrating Shakespeare, Percy apologizes for including pieces that lack such intrinsic merit. Everything was to be clear, complete, correct, and worthy of inclusion. As Hales and Furnivall complain:

Percy looked upon his text as a young woman from the country with unkempt locks, whom he had to fit for fashionable society.¹⁸

Although later critics have called Percy's editing everything but clear, complete, and correct, it is not hard to understand why many of his contemporaries found it both pleasing and helpful. Older forms of English words and spelling were then far less common and acceptable to the reading public than they are today; words such as ‘paramour’, ‘eke’, ‘dight’, and ‘thrall’ were frequently glossed in the eighteenth century. The Reliques was in fact to play a significant role in the popularization of these words, many of which now have an established place in poetic diction. The following example from the Folio and Relique texts of ‘Sir Andrew Barton’ is a typical and seemingly trivial example of Percy's treatment of his older sources. However, when one recalls the outcry that followed Coleridge's use of archaic language in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ Percy's changes become more understandable:

goe ffeitch me downe my armour of prooffe
          for itt is guilded with gold soe cleere.

(Folio)

Goe fetch me forth my armour of proofe;
          That gilded is with gold soe cleare.

(Reliques)

Percy does not consistently modernize his spelling; the Reliques contains both ‘Scottified’ ballads and conscious archaisms. In fact, throughout the work, Percy moves from one interpretation of language to another, and there is a clear tension between his love of the archaic and desire to conform to Augustan norms. It is as if he were searching for the ideal form in which to present his ballads. His employment of archaic and Scottish terms was often aimed at bringing his subject closer to a conjectured original, while in other examples, Percy chose to write completely in a modern idiom. What has been seen as ‘flagrant manipulation’, from the evidence in Percy's letters and the ballads themselves, seems to have been sincere experimentation by Percy. Much of what he was editing had never before been offered as serious literature; Percy had to search for the most acceptable medium if his collection was to be a success. It is one of the great strengths of the Reliques that it does offer its ballads in so many forms and idioms. One should not forget that alongside Percy's sentimental pieces are poems such as ‘Richard of Almaigne’ (II.1.1) and ‘On the Death of King Edward the First’ (II.1.2); both are printed with a fidelity to early text and language which was strikingly unconventional for the time.

If earlier authors and old ballads were to be appreciated, Percy and Shenstone saw it was essential that the collection should be ‘correct and elegant’. This included pruning indelicacies of thought and language,¹⁹ regularizing metre, and improving rhyme. Even when Percy printed from popular sources, he still subjected each poem to his exacting ideals. ‘Sweet William's Ghost’ (III.2.6), which appeared in Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany (1725), and ‘The Lady turned Servingman’ (III.1.17) from A Collection of Old Ballads (1723)²⁰ were both ‘corrected’ by Percy. In Ramsay's fifth verse, given below, the a b c b rhyme lapses:

Thy faith and troth thou's never get,
Nor yet will I thee lend,
Till that thou come within my bower
And kiss my cheek and chin.

Percy prints

Thy faith and troth thou'se nevir get,
‘Of me shalt nevir win,’
Till that thou come within my bower,
And kiss my cheek and chin.

thus restoring the rhyme. Similarly, in ‘The Lady turned Servingman’ the a a b b metre is repaired. In the earlier copy the rhymes in the eighth verse run haire/attire, hat/neck: in Percy we are given haire/weare and band/land. A Collection of Old Ballads relates the tale in a confusion of the first and third persons, a practice frequently encountered in folksong; Percy uses the first person throughout.

‘The Lady turned Servingman’ also exhibits the kind of ‘elegant improvements’ that critics of the Reliques have found most objectionable. Everything is sentimentalized, intensified, and prettified. The heroine is no longer merely her ‘father's chief and only Heir’, but now becomes ‘An ancient barons only heire’. In order to heighten the poetic portrait of Elise singing her sorrows to the lute, Percy first has her change out of her servingman's attire into suitable dress,

With silken robes, and jewels rare,
I deckt me, as a ladye faire.

Elise is a typical Percy heroine straight from the eighteenth-century romance tradition; she sighs, she trembles, and blushes for shame on discovery. Such ‘improvements’, which were very much in the style of the ballad imitations of Shenstone, Tickell, and Mallet, although no longer admired, were highly popular in Percy's day. What Percy did to his sources is not so deplorable when we consider that what Percy was actually doing, was presenting his ballads in the popular guise of the times. We can regret that Percy rejected the splendid opening of the Folio ‘Sir Andrew Barton’ (II.2.12) for the inferior lines of the Pepys's copy, (see also Percy's choice of opening lines to ‘Valentine and Ursine’ (III.3.12)) but we should not condemn his editing because his poetic taste is alien to our own. When H. B. Wheatley complains of Percy's ‘flagrant manipulation’ of his sources, along with Hales and Furnivall, he is condemning Percy for failing the editorial standards of later centuries.

As editor of the Reliques, Percy also included ballads which had been ‘handled’ by other poets. These throw some much needed light on the contemporary ideas concerning ballad editing and also upon the nature of the folk ballad. ‘As ye came from the Holy Land’ (II.1.16), according to Percy's introduction, ‘was communicated to the editor by the late Mr. Shenstone as corrected by him from an ancient copy, and supplied with a concluding stanza’. As Wheatley points out, the ‘ancient copy’ was certainly from the Folio and Shenstone's ending is strikingly inferior to the original.²¹ However, the important point which emerges is that Shenstone did not hesitate to admit that he had tampered with his source. To both Shenstone and Percy, such ‘corrections’ were often aimed at bringing the ballad nearer to a ‘conjectured original’, which in their opinion could only be more regular and complete than its ‘corrupted’ sources. A Collection of Old Ballads, from which Percy took twenty-three items for his Reliques claims to be ‘corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant’:²² the works of Allan Ramsay, from which Percy also drew, are equally notorious.²³ Ramsay's main source for The Ever Green was the Bannatyne manuscript (1568) and a comparison of source and work clearly validates Ritson's opinion that all Ramsay's poems are ‘altered, interpolated, forg'd and corrupted’.²⁴ Both Wheatley and Percy considered Ramsay's concluding stanzas of ‘Sweet William's Ghost’ (The Tea-Table Miscellany and Reliques III.2.6) to be modern. The last verse of Ramsay's version is given below. It is interesting to compare it with Percy's conclusion of ‘Sir Cauline’; both are in the tradition of eighteenth-century romance.

O stay, my only true love, stay,
The constant Margaret cried:
Wan grew her cheeks, she clos'd her een,
Stretched her saft limbs, and died.

‘Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament’ (II.2.13) is another interesting example of Ramsay's editing and Percy's endorsement of it. The Reliques copy is given ‘from a copy in the editor's folio MS corrected by another copy in Allan Ramsay's Miscellany’; needless to say, it is Ramsay's version which is the more corrupt. In the Folio and all sources that antedate Ramsay, ‘Balowe’ is an English song. Ramsay, working on a hint from Watson's Comic and Serious Scots Poems (1706-10) which suggested ‘Balowe’ was the lament of a Scottish noble lady, not only polished it in his usual manner but promptly scottified all the words. It is the scottified version which Percy follows in the Reliques.

‘Edom o' Gordon’ (I.1.12), ‘Young Water’ (II.2.18), and ‘Gil Morrice’ (III.1.18) were all published separately in Glasgow in 1755: ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ (I.1.7), ‘Edward’ (I.1.5), ‘The Jew's Daughter’ (I.1.3), and ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’ (III.3.4) were received by Percy in a single package sent from Edinburgh by John MacGowan in August 1763. It is not known to what extent each of these ballads had been edited before they reached Percy, although from their style and content it is clear they had been substantially reworked. Percy tells us that ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ is given ‘from two manuscript copies transmitted from Scotland’: ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’ is given ‘with some corrections from a manuscript copy transmitted from Scotland’. The latter, which Child was to call ‘one of the most beautiful of our ballads and indeed, of all ballads’, according to Percy, is probably a literary compound of ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor’ (III.1.15) and ‘Fair Margaret and Sweet William’ (III.2.4).

David Fowler examines each of these ballads in detail, but for the purposes of this essay his discussion of ‘Edom o' Gordon’ will provide excellent insight into literary recreation at work.²⁵ ‘Edom o' Gordon’, as it appeared in 1755, was edited by David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, who later became Percy's Scottish expert during the preparation of the Reliques. He may also have been MacGowan's source for the Edinburgh ballads. I note that ‘Edward’, as it appears in the Reliques, was communicated by Dalrymple. The ending of the Glasgow text of ‘Edom o' Gordon’ differs from all earlier versions including that in the Folio manuscript. The Lord arrives at the burning castle before Gordon and his men have left. A battle ensues, after which the grief-stricken Lord throws himself into the flames.

And mony were the mudie men
Lay gasping on the grien,
And mony were the fair ladys
Lay lemanless at heme.
And round and round the waes he went,
Their ashes for to view;
At last into the flames he flew,
And bad the world adieu.

The ending is Dalrymple's. It was criticized in a letter from Percy to Dalrymple in 1764.²⁶ Percy felt the ending to be ‘unnatural’ and suggested the ballad would end very well at

And mony were the weiping dames
Lay lemanless at hame.

Percy had apparently suggested two stanzas which had in turn been rejected by Dalrymple. Percy now wished that some such line as

Ein wood wi' fel despair

might be inserted if the husband's catastrophe is retained. The revised ending contributed by Dalrymple survives in Percy's own copy of the Reliques, but Percy finally rejected it in favour of one of his own. This is based on the Folio version. The Lord tears his hair, wrings his hands, and rides off to avenge the death of his family.

And after the Gordon he is gane,
Sa fast as he might drie;
And soon i' the Gordon's foul hartis bluid,
He's wroken his dear ladie.

These examples of eighteenth century ballad editing put Percy's editing firmly into context. This is of particular importance to Percy treatment of what we now call ‘folk’ ballads. Although an invaluable source for early versions of folk ballads, Percy cannot be condemned for reworking texts which the world had not yet learned to revere. Percy was, in fact, the first to differentiate between the ballad types, referring to ‘literary imitations’, ‘broadsides’, and ‘minstrel ballads’. His ‘Essay on the Ancient Minstrels in England’,²⁷ in which these terms are discussed, provided the foundation of the literature on the subject. Ironically, it was out of the interest inspired by the Reliques that both the concept of a folk ballad and the new standards of editing were born. The Reliques had to come before Ritson's criticism of Percy's methods. Before the Reliques no-one was sufficiently interested in ballads to care how they were edited. It is with this in mind that we should turn to the pieces for which Percy has been repeatedly condemned.

‘Sir Cauline’ (I.1.4), ‘Sir Aldingar’ (II.1.9), and ‘The Child of Elle’ (I.1.11) are all from the Folio manuscript. The Folio version of ‘Sir Aldingar’ is complete but, as with ‘Sir Cauline’, there are enough lost lines, defects, and ambiguities to validate Percy's opinion that ‘without some corrections, this [‘Sir Aldingar’] will not do for my Reliques’.²⁸ What, for example, was one to make of lines 124-29 of the Folio ‘Sir Cauline’?

ffirst he presented to the Kings daughter
          they hand, & then they sword.
‘but a serrett buffett you haue him giuen
          the King & the crowne!’ she sayd.
‘I, but 34 stripes
          comen beside the rood.’

Or indeed, what was one to make of the ‘Child of Elle’ itself? In Percy's manuscript ‘The Child of Elle’ is a thirty-nine line fragment without beginning or end. ‘Sir Cauline’, ‘Sir Aldingar’, and ‘The Child of Elle’ all have incomplete verses. Lines 147-50 of the Folio ‘Sir Aldingar’ are to be found as follow;

with a Mu … [line cut Away]
a louelie child was hee:
when he came to that fier,
he light the Queene full nigh.

Five other verses in the same ballad consist of only two lines, while ‘Sir Cauline’ and ‘The Child of Elle’ both have the occasional six-line verses as well as the common a b c b ballad metre. Such features may be considered points of interest in a manuscript ballad, but as Percy fully appreciated, they would be seen as defects in a literary collection. He did, however, recognize the literary merit of these ballads and, as he tells us when introducing ‘The Child of Elle’, it was this that prompted him to work on them.

‘The Child of Elle’ Is given from a fragment in the Editor's folio MS. which tho' extremely defective and mutilated, appeared to have so much merit, that it excited a strong desire to attempt a completion of the story.

Percy then goes on to regret that the reader will be able to identify his supplementary stanzas by their inferiority. ‘It is also significant that Percy asks for his additions to be considered in the light of how difficult it is to imitate ‘the affecting simplicity and artless beauties of the original’. Had he, one wonders, tried to complete the ‘Child of Elle’ in the manner of the original, but found he was best suited to do this in his own poetic idiom? One may not appreciate Percy's sentimental style, but it cannot be denied that he was very good at producing this kind of poetry. It is possible that Percy would have liked to complete his ballads in verse of ‘affecting simplicity and artless beauty’, but knew only too well that this was not the kind of writing which came most naturally to him.

Percy's style has already been glanced at in ‘The Lady turned Servingman’, but it is in ‘The Child of Elle’ and ‘Sir Cauline’ that it is found at its most blatant. Rhyme and metre, as expected, are carefully corrected and the stories completed with such thoroughness that no motive is left unexplained. We are told explicitly why Sir Cauline cannot openly love Fair Christabelle and why Emmeline is betrayed by her serving-maid. The unnamed ballad ladies become ‘Fair Christabelle’ and ‘Fair Emmeline’, heroines who suffer intensely but delicately. In ‘The Child of Elle’ Emmeline continually ‘sighs’ and ‘weeps’, while in ‘Sir Cauline’ Christabelle expires sweetly and sentimentally:

Then fayntinge in a deadly swoune,
And with a deepe-fette sighe,
That burst her gentle hearte in twayne
Fayre Christabelle did dye.

It is amusing to note that in the Folio version, both Sir Cauline and his lady survive, the latter to bear fifteen sons;

then he did marry this Kings daughter
with gold & siluer bright,
& 15 sonnes this Ladye beere
to Sir Cawline the Knight.

The scene, however, is not that of the typical ‘simplicity’ ballad. Instead of the domestic tragedy of pre-Conquest Britain, we are offered a Gothic world of pageantry and nobility. To some extent, this may have been inspired by the medieval minstrel idiom of Percy's Folio manuscript, but reflections of the Gothic are to be found abundantly in the literature and architecture of the time. Percy's evocation of the medieval world in his Reliques, together with his focus on the minstrels, for some years after firmly established the ballad as a medieval phenomenon. This fusion of the ballad form and medieval setting can be seen reflected in the work of many of our major poets, Coleridge, for example, who was to use it to full effect in ‘The Ancient Mariner’.

What therefore was taking place as Percy worked through his ballads, was completion or recreation in the editor's own idiom. His aim was to produce pleasing ballads of the highest possible literary merit and when working from fragmentary sources, Percy found the most effective way to achieve this was to rework them in his own style. We have already noticed Wordsworth's love of Percy's ‘Sir Cauline’; other notable contemporaries such as Scott and Coleridge were equally appreciative. When the influence of the Reliques was studied on Coleridge's ‘Christabel’ by Lowes,²⁹ it was discovered that the three ballads which had been especially suggestive to Coleridge were ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawaine’ (III.1.2), ‘The Child of Elle’, and ‘Sir Cauline’, all of them ballads substantially reworked by Percy. Scott, recognizing Percy's hand in ‘Sir Cauline’, firmly believed that the ballad had derived all its beauties from ‘Dr Percy's poetic powers’. Both Scott and Wheatley have drawn attention to the effectiveness of the following lines from the ‘Child of Elle’:

The baron he stroakt his dark-brown cheeke,
And turned his heade asyde
To whipe awaye the starting teare,
He proudly strave to hyde.

Nor can Percy's editing be dismissed lightly today; several of his ballad workings remain poetically among the best or, indeed, are the best versions known. In ‘Sir Aldingar’, as Wheatley complains, Percy's rewriting contains ‘much of the stock prettiness of the polite ballad-monger, some of the most vivid bits of the old ballad being passed over’;³⁰ Percy's relating of the queen's dream, a feature found only in the Folio and Reliques versions, is certainly inferior to the earlier copy, but still Percy's ‘Sir Aldingar’ remains a notable ballad in its own right. A. B. Friedman, having considered the defective state of the original with its ‘abruptnesses, loose ends, ineffective repetitions and lost line’, realistically pronounced Percy's to be the better ballad.³¹ Similarly, Percy's ‘The Heir of Linne’ (II.2.5), a collation of the Folio text with a broadside, is an improvement on both sources. Percy used the plot of the broadside (which is of no literary merit) to the full compliment of the other. As Professor Child said, ‘Percy made a new ballad, and a very good one.’³² This is high praise indeed, when one considers how unsympathetic Child was to most ballad reworkings. Child is also full of praise for Percy's ‘King John and the Abbot of Canterbury’ (II.3.6) which again is a collated version. Percy reworked the ‘King John and Bishoppe’ of the Folio with two black-letter broadsides, and as Child says ‘thus making undeniably a very good ballad out of a very poor one’.³³ For once Percy refrained from sentimentalizing and, as he suggests in his introduction, reworked existing words and phrases into greater order and effect. In the Reliques there can be no doubt that Percy was offering a far better version of the ballad than had hitherto been known.

Percy's Reliques, above all else, was an experiment. It sought to offer the ballad as serious literature and this in turn necessitated an exploration of ballad language, form, and idiom. Percy's work was brilliant and blundering, inspiring both the interest and standards which were later to condemn it. It was, however, a noble experiment and one as remarkable for its failures as for its triumphs.

Notes

1. Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (London: for J. Dodsley, 1765, 1767, 1775); (nominally) edited by his nephew T. Percy (really by Percy himself) (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1794, 1812); edited by Revd R. A. Willmott (London: Routledge's British Poets, 1857); edited by G. Gilfillan, 3 vols (Edinburgh: James Nichols, 1858); edited by Henry B. Wheatley, 3 vols (London: Bickers, 1876-77, 1891); edited by M. M. Arnold Schröer, 2 vols (Berlin: Felber, 1893); reprinted edition edited by Henry B. Wheatley (New York: Dover, 1966). Each edition published during Percy's lifetime contains revisions and alterations, but since the fourth edition of 1794 no substantial changes have been made. Willmott's edition cleared away Percy's essays and prefaces, and added shorter notes of his own.

2. Wheatley (1966), I, 62.

3. Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances edited by John W. Hales and Frederick Furnivall, 3 vols (London: Trübner, 1867-68), I, xvii.

4. Ibid.

5. Hales and Furnivall, I, lxiv.

6. Percy and William Shenstone, edited by Hans Hecht (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner, 1909), p. 46.

7. Hect, p. 53.

8. All examples from the Reliques are followed by their series, book, and ballad number. This will not restrict the reader to the use of any one edition.

9. Hales and Furnivall, I, 133.

10. The London Chronicle, 28 (1765), 405; The Scots Magazine, 27 (1765), 209-10.

11. William Wordsworth, Poems Including Lyrical Ballads, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), I, 361-62.

12. Robert Jamieson (1780?-1844), Scottish antiquary and ballad collector, a worthy preserver of oral tradition who annotated his work with scholarship and taste.

13. Wheatley, I, lxxxviii (my italics).

14. The Spectator, numbers 70, 74, and 85, 1711.

15. Wheatley, III, 309.

16. Wheatley, I, xc.

17. The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume VI, Poems edited by E. L. McAdam, Jr, with George Milne (New Haven: Yale University Press 1964), p. 268.

18. Hales and Furnivall, I, xvi.

19. The Folio manuscript contained many bawdy songs which were passed over by Percy and only published a century later: Loose and Humorous Songs from Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, edited by F. J. Furnivall (London: 1868), reprinted edition (London: Jenkins, 1963). It is interesting to note that the other editors, Child and Hales, withdrew their names from the work when Furnivall refused to expurgate the songs.

20. Attributed to Ambrose Philips.

21. Wheatley, II, 102.

22. A Collection of Old Ballads, attributed to Ambrose Philips 3 vols (London: printed for F. or J. Roberts 1723-25), preface.

23. The Ever Green, edited by Allan Ramsay, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Thomas Ruddiman for the editor, 1724-27); The Tea-Table Miscellany, edited by Allan Ramsay, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Thomas Ruddiman for the editor, 1725-40).

24. A. B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 137.

25. David Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1968).

26. Percy-Hailes Correspondence, edited by A. F. Falconer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954), Percy to Hailes, 28 February 1764.

27. Wheatley, I, appendix.

28. Hales and Furnivall, I, 165 note.

29. Friedman, p. 278.

30. Wheatley, II, 54.

31. Friedman, p. 207.

32. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by Francis James Child, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company 1882-98), reprinted edition, 5 vols (New York: Dover, 1965), V, 12.

33. Child, I, 404.