From the critical or scholarly point of view, these strictures are doubtless deserved.  It is an editor’s duty to give his text as he finds it, without interpolations or restorations; and it is unquestionable that Percy’s additions to fragmentary pieces are full of sentimentalism, affectation, and the spurious poetic diction of his age.  An experienced ballad amateur can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine portions from the insertions.  But it is unfair to try Percy by modern editorial canons.  That sacredness which is now imputed to the ipsissima verba of an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and mostly as barbarous trifles—­something like wampum belts, or nose-rings, or antique ornaments in the gout barbare et charmant des bijoux goths.  Percy’s readers did not want torsos and scraps; to present them with acephalous or bobtailed ballads—­with cetera desunt and constellations of asterisks—­like the manuscript in Prior’s poem, the conclusion of which was eaten by the rats—­would have been mere pedantry.  Percy knew his public, and he knew how to make his work attractive to it.  The readers of that generation enjoyed their ballad with a large infusion of Percy.  If the scholars of this generation prefer to take theirs without, they know where to get it.

The materials for the “Reliques” were drawn partly from the Pepys collection at Magdalen College, Cambridge; from Anthony Wood’s, made in 1676, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; from manuscript and printed ballads in the Bodleian, the British Museum, the archives of the Antiquarian Society, and private collections.  Sir David Dalrymple sent a number of Scotch ballads, and the editor acknowledged obligations to Thomas Warton and many others.  But the nucleus of the whole was a certain folio manuscript in a handwriting of Charles I.’s time, containing 191 songs and ballads, which Percy had begged, then still very young, from his friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior’s-Lee in Shropshire.  When he first saw this precious document, it was torn, unbound, and mutilated, “lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlor, being used by the maids to light the fire.”  The first and last leaves were wanting, and “of 54 pages near the beginning, half of every leaf hath been torn away."[39] Percy had it bound, but the binders trimmed off the top and bottom lines in the process.  From this manuscript he professed to have taken “the greater part” of the pieces in the “Reliques.”  In truth he took only 45 of the 176 poems in his first edition from this source.