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

In the following essay, Brooks offers an account of Percy's writings, noting that the preponderance of negative critical attention given to the Reliques diminishes Percy's reputation as a scholar.

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...