have had a taste for the wild graces of folk-song.  He was severely ridiculed by his contemporaries for these concessions.  “He descended now and then to lower disquisitions,” wrote Dr. Johnson,” and by a serious display of the beauties of ‘Chevy Chase,’ exposed himself to the ridicule of Wagstaff, who bestowed a like pompous character on ’Tom Thumb’; and to the contempt of Dennis, who, considering the fundamental position of his criticism, that ‘Chevy Chase’ pleases and ought to please because it is natural, observes that ’there is a way of deviating from nature . . . by imbecility, which degrades nature by faintness and diminution’. . .  In ‘Chevy Chase’ . . . there is a chill and lifeless imbecility.  The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall make less impression on the mind."[35]

Nicholas Rowe, the dramatist and Shakspere editor, had said a good word for ballads in the prologue to “Jane Shore” (1713): 

    “Let no nice taste despise the hapless dame
    Because recording ballads chant her name. 
    Those venerable ancient song enditers
    Soared many a pitch above our modern writers. . . 
    Our numbers may be more refined than those,
    But what we’ve gained in verse, we’ve lost in prose. 
    Their words no shuffling double meaning knew: 
    Their speech was homely, but their hearts were true. . . 
    With rough, majestic force they moved the heart,
    And strength and nature made amends for art.”

Ballad forgery had begun early.  To say nothing of appropriations, like Mallet’s, of “William and Margaret,” Lady Wardlaw put forth her “Hardyknut” in 1719 as a genuine old ballad, and it was reprinted as such in Ramsay’s “Evergreen.”  Gray wrote to Walpole in 1760, “I have been often told that the poem called ‘Hardicanute’ (which I always admired and still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a few years ago.  This I do not at all believe, though it has evidently been retouched by some modern hand.”  Before Percy no concerted or intelligent effort had been made toward collecting, preserving, and editing the corpus poetarum of English minstrelsy.  The great mass of ancient ballads, so far as they were in print at all, existed in “stall copies,” i.e., single sheets of broadsides, struck off for sale by balladmongers and the keepers of book-stalls.

Thomas Percy, the compiler of the “Reliques,” was a parish clergyman, settled at the retired hamlet of Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire.  For years he had amused his leisure by collecting ballads.  He numbered among his acquaintances men of letters like Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Grainger, Farmer, and Shenstone.  It was the last who suggested the plan of the “Reliques” and who was to have helped in its execution, had not his illness and death prevented.  Johnson spent a part of the summer of 1764 on a visit to the vicarage of Easton Maudit, on which occasion Percy reports that his guest