He says that in both of these stanzas the language is that of familiar conversation, yet one stanza is admirable and the other contemptible, because the matter of it is contemptible.  In the essay supplementary to his preface, Wordsworth asserts that the “Reliques” was “ill suited to the then existing taste of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt”:  and that “Dr. Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors . . . that, though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of ‘Sir Cauline’ and by many other pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of ‘The Hermit of Warkworth,’ a diction scarcely distinguishable from the vague, the glossy and unfeeling language of his day.”  Wordsworth adds that he esteems the genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other modern writer; and that even Buerger had not Percy’s fine sensibility.  He quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from “The Child of Elle” in the “Reliques,” and contrasts them with the diluted and tricked-out version of the same in Buerger’s German.

Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of Percy as a ballad composer.  Of this same “Child of Elle” he says:  “The present fragment of a version may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, as in the ‘Reliques’ it is buried in a heap of ‘polished’ verses composed by Percy.  That worthy prelate, touched by the beauty of it—­he had a soul—­was unhappily moved to try his hand at its completion.  A wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo’s Venus.  There are thirty-nine lines here.  There are two hundred in the thing called the ‘Child of Elle’ in the ‘Reliques.’  But in those two hundred lines all the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . .  On the whole, the union of the genuine and the false—­of the old ballad with Percy’s tawdry feebleness—­makes about as objectionable a mesalliance as in the story itself is in the eyes of the father."[37] The modern ballad scholars, in their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as Ritson himself was.  They say that he polished “The Heir of Linne” till he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216—­“a fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and tinkering in “Sir Cauline”—­which Wordsworth thought exquisite—­they regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that “these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old balladry and a considerable talent of imitation.”