spelling and language but even the handwriting of the original.  Soon after the “Ossian” forgeries appeared, Chatterton began to produce documents, apparently very old, containing mediaeval poems, legends, and family histories, centering around two characters,—­Thomas Rowley, priest and poet, and William Canynge, merchant of Bristol in the days of Henry VI.  It seems incredible that the whole design of these mediaeval romances should have been worked out by a child of eleven, and that he could reproduce the style and the writing of Caxton’s day so well that the printers were deceived; but such is the fact.  More and more Rowley Papers, as they were called, were produced by Chatterton,—­apparently from the archives of the old church; in reality from his own imagination,—­delighting a large circle of readers, and deceiving all but Gray and a few scholars who recognized the occasional misuse of fifteenth-century English words.  All this work was carefully finished, and bore the unmistakable stamp of literary genius.  Reading now his “AElla,” or the “Ballad of Charite,” or the long poem in ballad style called “Bristowe Tragedie,” it is hard to realize that it is a boy’s work.  At seventeen years of age Chatterton went for a literary career to London, where he soon afterwards took poison and killed himself in a fit of childish despondency, brought on by poverty and hunger.

THOMAS PERCY (1729-1811).  To Percy, bishop of the Irish church, in Dromore, we are indebted for the first attempt at a systematic collection of the folk songs and ballads which are counted among the treasures of a nation’s literature.[210] In 1765 he published, in three volumes, his famous Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.  The most valuable part of this work is the remarkable collection of old English and Scottish Ballads, such as “Chevy Chase,” the “Nut Brown Mayde,” “Children of the Wood,” “Battle of Otterburn,” and many more, which but for his labor might easily have perished.  We have now much better and more reliable editions of these same ballads; for Percy garbled his materials, adding and subtracting freely, and even inventing a few ballads of his own.  Two motives probably influenced him in this.  First, the different versions of the same ballad varied greatly; and Percy, in changing them to suit himself, took the same liberty as had many other writers in dealing with the same material.  Second; Percy was under the influence of Johnson and his school, and thought it necessary to add a few elegant ballads “to atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems.”  That sounds queer now, used as we are to exactness in dealing with historical and literary material; but it expresses the general spirit of the age in which he lived.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Percy’s Reliques marks an epoch in the history of Romanticism, and it is difficult to measure its influence on the whole romantic movement.  Scott says of it, “The first time I could scrape a few shillings together, I bought myself a copy of these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm.”  Scott’s own poetry is strongly modeled upon these early ballads, and his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is due chiefly to the influence of Percy’s work.