Percy's Reliques Research Articles

Miscellaneous Spaces of Enlightenment: Dodsley, Percy, and the Midcentury Verse Miscellany

Using current scholarship on verse miscellanies to contextualize a comparison of Robert Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), this article considers how the verse miscellany was used to different purposes by editors in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. It was, variously, a space in which to preserve poetry, to test readers’ appetites for the unfamiliar, and to establish or challenge poetic taste. Most of all, however, the verse miscellany functioned as a virtual space of the Enlightenment that encouraged literary experimentation and innovation. Editors like Dodsley and Percy used paratext not only to justify their specific poetic choices, but also to establish identity of their collection. In Dodsley's case, obvious editorial interventions are absent and the typography is elegant, while for Percy, the paratext is busy and noisy, an alternative space in the miscellany through which the collection's antiquarian character is expressed. Both collections test their reader's willingness to engage with less well-known material. This article suggests that although the two poetic collections seem to have little in common, they are both concerned with ideas of literary preservation and loss, on the one hand, and cultural progress and decline, on the other, that helped to establish the poetic miscellany as a key print genre of the Enlightenment.

From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs. Terence Allan Hoagwood.

Terence Allan Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) 196 $84.00 Focusing on simulation of and role Romantic poets played in industrializing of and of those industrial products (xi), Terence Alan Hoagwood's From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs builds upon insights articulated by such scholars as William Laffan, Sean Shesgreen, and Dave Harker. In series of finely nuanced arguments, book documents Romantics' use of various poetical and commercial sleights of hand to exploit their readers' love of song, showing how resultant pseudo-songs sometimes self-reflexively make theme of their own simulative status (xii). Chapter 1 provides an overview of pseudo-song genre, beginning with commentary on Psalms and psalmic imitation in writings of John Milton, Isaac Watts, Joel Barlow and others, before discussing ways in which pastoral poets such as Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, and Spenser used the language of oral song as metaphor for written (2). The chapter identifies two types of Romantic pseudo-song: those poems ... are sold as if they were songs when they are entirely scriptorial or typographical objects; and those that refer to and use rhetorical resources to conjure imaginary mu sical effects, without pretending to be, really, music (4-5). Subsequently, chapter examines musical references in selection of Romantic poems, including Shelley's Music, when soft voices die, The Revolt of Islam, and Prometheus Unbound; Blake's Introduction to Songs of Innocence; Felicia Hemans's A Spanish Lady; several of Keats's odes and Clare's pastorals; and some miscellaneous poems by Letitia Elizabeth Landon. These close readings helpfully set stage for more focused discussions of individual authors and texts that follow. Chapter 2 demonstrates how Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of Scottish Border engages the paradox of using writing as means of ostensibly cherishing and preserving orality while replacing it (24). To illustrate this process, Hoagwood first considers Scott's primitivist claim that Scottish poetry was inseparable from song prior to the advent of literacy and ... widespread adoption of English language in Scotland (27). Just as James Macpherson's Ossian epics and Thomas Percy's Reliques exploited their audience's desire to recapture poetic glories of Scotland's savage past, so Scott invoked popular image of poet as bard in order to exploit same sense of nationalistic folkloric nostalgia (30). In series of incisive close readings of Scott's poems and their accompanying prose commentaries, Hoagwood reveals a story of increasing fictitiousness: narratives of supposedly historical fact are succeeded by supposedly authentic relics of superstitious culture followed by admittedly faux ballads, referring to neither historical realities nor historical origins (30-31). Linking this fictitiousness to contemporary British politics, he demonstrates how themes in Minstrelsy build upon conservative principles set forth in Burke's Reflections on Revolution in France. The chapter concludes by showing how Scott's Lay of Last Minstrel and The Lady of Lake achieved commercial success by self-consciously highlighting same themes of authenticity and fictitiousness that had previously made Minstrelsy such popular commodity. In Chapter 3, Hoagwood focuses perceptive critical eye on Sydney Owenson's The Lay of an Harp. Although this work seems to espouse nationalism, From Song to Print endorses view that Owenson's literary ambition and appeal were much more Anglo than Irish (45). To illustrate, Hoagwood examines Owenson's role in marketing her poetry, which included what would now be called commercial tie-ins and product placements, showing how costumes she wore and green harp she played at English aristocratic revelries entailed concerted commodification of Irishness (48-9). …

Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New CriticismBallad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism. Steve Newman . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 294.

<i>Steve Newman,</i> Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism<i>Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism</i>. Steve Newman . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 294.

When I Use a Word ... Words misheard: medical mondegreens

A girl with colitis goes by . With apologies to John Lennon and Paul McCartney I recently heard a Radio 3 announcer mention ‘Kodaly's Buttocks Pressing Song ’. Could he have been referring to the great Hungarian composer's oratorio, the Psalmus Hungarsicus ? Or was it ‘ Bartok ' s Precious Song ’, a homage to his illustrious contemporary, born in the year before him? Neither, as it turned out—it was ‘O could I but express in song’ by the Russian composer Leonid Malashkin. This kind of homophonic error is called a mondegreen. I expect that few will have heard of the American journalist Sylvia Wright. In her day, she was a well-known contributor to magazines such as Harper ' s , Harper ' s Bazaar , and The Atlantic Monthly , a sort of female James Thurber, a comparison that the title of one of her articles, ‘Whose world?—And welcome to it’, made explicit. Sylvia Wright coined the word ‘mondegreen’ in an article published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954, ‘The Death of Lady Mondegreen’.1 ‘When I was a child,’ she wrote, ‘my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques [of Ancient English Poetry] . One of my favorite poems began, as I remember: Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [ sic ] And Lady Mondegreen.’ ‘By now,’ she went on, after a digression or two, several of you more alert readers are jumping up and down in your impatience to interrupt and point out that, according …

Traveling Pleasures and Perils of Sensibility

philosophical investment in pleasures of sympathy--especially if represented as contagious--provides a continuity between traditions of Sensibility and of Romanticism. To illustrate, I pair two blockbusters of first decade of nineteenth-century, Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806) and Germaine de Stael's Corinne, or Italy (1807). Together they offer a perspective on moments of cultural encounter, on pleasures and perils of Sensibility that animate cultural polities of both works. Both novels function partly as travel books introducing intense, destabilizing pleasures of foreign locales, customs, and traditions to critique domestic political circumstances. But for these women writers (and in different ways for female protagonists at center of novels) notion of home is vexed itself. Tensions produced by distance, displacement, discomfort, and sometimes even by divided allegiance, add complexity to subtle and implicit nationalist critique their narratives enable. Owenson conveys her competing allegiances to Ireland and England after Union of 1800 both through marriage plot uniting characters and nations in conclusion to Wild Irish Girl and in her insistent equation of national with natural, especially for natives of wild western region of Connaught. De Stael's familiar homelessness, constantly displaced by Napoleon's dictates of exile, is reflected by a geographically diverse and thorough immersion in Italian landscape and culture, past and present. Both novels distrust excesses of nationalism while imagining cross-cultural love relationships animated by extreme states of sympathetic attachment to people, places, and objects that are master tropes of Sensibility. Ultimately, pleasure in both novels engenders a volatile notion of history that embraces pleasures of historical change and transcends its inevitable pains. Owenson's embrace of futurity in a revolutionary era in contrast with de Stael's fatalism distinguishes two novels. In literature of Sensibility, electric charge of human contact provides more than simple pleasure. Moments of literal contact arouse one's own physiology and sensitivity to other beings: hence, fellow-feeling. Such moments of imagined sociability follow from a heightened ethical imperative to connect with others, often at one's own peril. Typically, in a Sternean mode, touching scenes in Wild Irish Girl foreground eroticized benevolence between characters which Owenson frames with Gaelic symbolic significance. For example, when fingers of hero and heroine accidentally meet on harp Glorvina is playing, Horatio comments, The touch circulated like electricity through every vein, breeding (Owenson 66). Both trope of circulation and unaccountable emotion protagonist experiences (while assuming it is shared by both parties) express Sensibility tradition. This excitement is less than utter delirium of an earlier scene, but beyond power of words--a commonplace of eighteenth-century tradition that, would be retooled through Romantic versions of sublime. This interchange is also significant in introducing a key interruption in narrative, an extended chain of footnoted material which discusses antiquity of harp and distinctive Gaelic tradition of itinerant bard, while citing Percy's Reliques, introducing Brian Boru and Cambrensis, and drawing (as notes so often do) on author's personal experience of Ireland--the author as native informant. specific linkage of Gaelic culture with tradition of Sensibility provides a necessary corrective to critical narratives that root Sensibility within a primarily British cultural framework, while nodding to French and German influences. As several critics have noted, this reduction ignores increasing identification of Sensibility with the Celtic fringe (Eagleton; Alliston). …

Brother Trouble: Incest Ballads of the British Isles

Brother Trouble: Incest Ballads of the British Isles Ruth Perry Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ballads are a great unsung body of texts that hover on the margins of eighteenth-century literary history without quite being acknowledged by modern scholars of the period. But ballads were a crucial cultural phenomenon in eighteenth-century society, a common experience of rich and poor, so embedded in the soundscape as not to be remarked, any more than the air people breathed. Joseph Addison famously wrote about ballads in three Spectator papers of 1711 (nos. 70, 74, 85), praising the beauties of "The Ballad of Chevy Chase" and "Babes in the Wood." He said: "an ordinary Song or Ballad that is the Delight of the common People, cannot fail to please all such Readers as are not unqualified for the Entertainment by their Affectation or Ignorance" (no. 70). Addison cautioned his audience not to let the ballad's simplicity of style prejudice them against its "true poetical Spirit" or its passionate and beautiful sentiments. He cites the example of the "late Lord Dorset," a man with "the greatest Wit tempered with the greatest Candour . . . one of the finest Criticks as well as the best Poets of his Age" who "had a numerous Collection of old English Ballads, and took a particular Pleasure in Reading of them" (no. 74). Ballads were many people's first literary experience in eighteenth-century England and Scotland, whether simple broadsides from which they learned to read or the earliest sung stories that moved them to tears or ignited their imaginations. Oliver Goldsmith loved ballads, and several find their way into The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He wrote in his essay "Happiness" (1759), "The music of Mattei" (the Neopolitan singer La Colonna1 ) "is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairymaid sung me into tears with 'Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night,' or the cruelty of 'Barbara Allen.'"2 When Clara Reeve wrote her radical history of the novel, The Progress of Romance (1785), tracing the novel's sources and influences, she insists that the romances—the closest proximate prior prose narrative form—came from earlier ballads. Her intellectual heroine, Euphrasia, quotes Thomas Percy's essay [End Page 289] "On the Ancient Metrical Romances," prefixed to the third volume of his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765), to the effect that romances "may be derived in a lineal descent from the ancient Historical songs of the Gothic bards and scalds" (33).3 Percy's Reliques was the first literary collection of ballads in England and deeply influenced a generation of poets, including Coleridge and Wordsworth, who, significantly, named their first collection Lyrical Ballads. Thus the rediscovery of ballads as a powerful literary form can be said to have changed the course of literary history. Ballads were more present in eighteenth-century England than literary critics and historians tend to remember. We are so used to making our way in the world with our eyes that we forget what Walter Ong calls the "lifeworld of the oral/aural past"4 —an environment, in the city at least, of street cries and rhymes, bells ringing and chants, work songs and lullabies—an environment in which rags were sought and strawberries sold to the accompaniment of words and musical phrases so familiar that the hearer did not have to understand the words to recognize which peddler was abroad exercising his or her lungs. Ballads were sung in taverns and camps, in dimly lit laborers' cottages, as well as in the blazing halls of the wealthy; they were memorized and transmitted orally by ordinary people as well as by professional singers and actors. They were printed on broadsides and in chapbooks and garlands, and often circulated from print to oral transmission and back again. A ballad might be learned by ear and then written down to save or to remember; or it might be learned from a broadside, remembered, and then passed along orally. From the earliest dawn of...

Spain and Its Literature: Essays in Memory of E. Allison Peers

Besides an Introduction, Bibliography and Centenary Reappraisal', eighteen original articles by respected Hispanists from Britain, Spain and the United States have been collected in this homage volume. A high proportion of articles reflect Peers' major interests in mysticism and the Romantic Movement. Part I, From the Middle Ages to the Siglo de Oro, includes essays that deal with Francisco de Osuna's higher memory', the Dark Night' of San Juan de la Cruz, Judaeo-Islamic traditions in Luis de Leon and Miguel de Molinos' Spiritual Guide. Part II, From the Dawn of Romanticism to the Twentieth Century, contains articles concerned with writers, works or themes as: Sanchez's Coleccion and Percy's Reliques, Rivas and tragedy, El moro exposito, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Victor Hugo and La Nonne sanglante'. An article, dealing comparatively with Goytisolo and Zorrilla, which provides A Missing Link in the Dis-affiliation of a Post-Romantic Expatriate in Revolt' aptly concludes the volume.

The Medieval Fictions of Thomas Warton and Thomas Percy

The enthusiasm for the culture of the Middle Ages during the latter half of the eighteenth century finds various forms of expression. Yet the visitors who flocked to Walpole's Strawberry Hill instead of Glastonbury Abbey, the readers who purchased Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry instead of Joseph Ritson's scholarly editions, and the antiquarians who preferred Matthew Prior's prettified and sentimental version of 'The Nut-Brown Maid' to the original remind us that the pseudo-medieval was often more attrative than the genuine article. For the past was invested with a significance that might prove offensive to contemporary beliefs, tastes, and values: A medieval building carried an objectionable taint of Catholicism, and medieval poems wre considered to be ill-formed compositions of 'wild fancy' and 'rude meter.' These are but two of the qualities that offened an age which, as William Shenstone had repeatedly adivised Thomas Percy had little taste for 'unadulterated antiquity.' One writer expressed this predilection whe he declared that a'happy imitation is of much more value than a defective original.'

Genre and Authority: The Eighteenth-Century Creation of Chaucerian Burlesque

According to Warton, the late eighteenth-century reading of Sir Thopas is radically different from earlier readings. Although the earlier consensus Warton imagines (that Sir Thopas is a heroic narrative) is surely a fiction, Warton is essentially correct. The characterization of Sir Thopas as a form of literary criticism (discerning the improprieties in books) is not found before the work of Warton and his contemporaries Warburton, Percy, and Richard Hurd. Warton's language here actually conflates poet and critic: he has recreated the text in his own image. In sharp contrast to this now familiar reading of Sir Thopas is the eighteenth-century interpretation of the Squire's Tale, a tale many of us find equally critical of preceding works and thus equally parodic. Although Warton noted the elements in the Squire's Tale as early as 1754, neither Warton nor his contemporaries labelled it a burlesque work or a parody. The Squire's Tale was seen as the very grave heroic narrative Warton imagines Sir Thopas once to have been. In this paper, I shall consider the reasons for this double reception, and argue that Sir-Thopas-the-Burlesque is better characterized as an eighteenth-century creation than as an eighteenth-century critical discovery. Eighteenth-century scholars had recent access to the supposed targets of Chaucer's parody; they were described both in Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and in Warton's History. More importantly, they had a new critical vocabulary, borrowed largely from the

Winsome Period Pieces: The Poetry of Howard Pyle

Winsome Period Pieces:The Poetry of Howard Pyle Alethea Helbig (bio) Howard Pyle stands among the most influential illustrators in the history of literature for the young in America, and he is remembered also for his retellings from oral tradition, literary fairy tales, novels, and numerous essays. Few people recall, however, that Pyle also wrote poems intended for children. Yet he produced some four dozen poems for the young and it was through a poem for children that he first broke into print. After Pyle's school years were over and he had entered the family leather business, he spent many happy hours writing and sketching for his own enjoyment. One of these products of his leisure time was a short, amusing, story poem called "The Magic Pill," which his mother, an intelligent, well-read woman, thought had possibilities for publication. To the Pyles' delight, the poem was accepted, and in July of 1876, "The Magic Pill" appeared in the "Bric-à-Brac" section of Scribner's Monthly, together with the skillful sketches that Pyle had fashioned to go along with it. No literary giant nor even a gem, "The Magic Pill" is a momentarily intriguing story in verse, with a clever twist in plot and an underlying shot at human frailty. The poem tells how Parson Cook "in New England a long time ago" attends a dying, old woman, who is rumored to be a witch. She gives him a pill that will grant one wish. That night, while sitting by the fireside with his wife, the Parson reflects on the discomforts of growing old: He fingered the pill, and he sighed, and said he, "There is something quite wrong in our poor mortal life. If I had arranged it, it surely would be, That age should not have all the bitterest strife. Ah me!" sighed the Parson; "I wish I were young;" And the little round pill glided over his tongue. (446). Since Parson Cook fails to indicate how young he chooses to become, he decreases steadily in age as the poem progresses, turning into a mischievous and disagreeable boy, and finally into an equally unlovable baby, who, mercifully for those with whom he lives, expires in a fit of colic. In spite of technical faults like padded lines, unnecessary inversions, clichés, and too deliberate archaicisms, the poem proceeds with a buoyancy and an affection for subject, audience, and life that offset its awkwardness and its underlying [End Page 28] didacticism. As a youth, Pyle had read, among others, the tales of the Brothers Grimm, the stories of King Arthur, Joseph Ritson's ballads, and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. In "The Magic Pill," he gives evidence of responding to the spirit of these old, orginally oral stories. In fact, "The Magic Pill" reveals qualities that are to appear over and over again in his subsequent poems: the reliance on old stories for ideas; the ability to tell a good story well and with clarity, the ability to paint pictures with words; careful attention to details; the use of the medieval and early American periods for settings; technical shortcomings that result in verse rather than true poetry; and the inability to resist taking advantage of the opportunity to moralize or at least give gentle advice. Already in "The Magic Pill," Pyle shows the felicitous combination of romanticism and realism that his biographers, Abbott, Nesbitt, and Pitz, find so striking in his prose work.1 Pyle's ability to create that same happy combination in his poems gives the best of them great charm, and draws attention away from their technical limitations and lack of orginality. Over the next few years, Pyle published several poems in Harper's Weekly and in Harper's New Monthly. These are mostly full-page, hand-lettered productions, upon which Pyle no doubt lavished many hours of painstaking effort. Four of them are set in the out-of-doors, drawing their inspiration from nature. The musical, static "The Sea-Gull's Song" depends upon the accompanying illustration for much of its meaning and effect. A young woman sits alone by the seashore, pensively watching a sea gull soaring overhead, and wonders...

Illustrated Dictionary of Eponymic Syndromes and Diseases and Their Synonyms.

These fascinating volumes serve as sources of lunch time and leisure time titillation, much like the habit of dipping into Willis' Borderland of Pathology and Embryology or Percy's Reliques. Their overall clinical and pedagogical value depends much upon the experience, ingenuity, and anality of the reader, as they are collector's repositories. Mr. Jablonski is not a physician, and his work is free of the dubious bias of enthusiasts for the eponym (a dubious form of one-upmanship, now limited largely to the callow and to certain university hospitals). His disclaimer, simple and direct is book does not reflect my approval or disapproval of eponyms, it merely recognizes that they exist. McKusick's collection is in the form of computer printout and this giant of erudition, long since tempered in the fires of clinical cardiology and genetics, is sufficiently human (a term at once approbative and pejorative) as to include conditions

The Study of Folklore in Finland

THE STUDY of folklore in Finland is older than the country itself and of considerable importance for its development as a nation. Though in their search for antique origins there are scholars who will point to Michael Agricola's comments about runic songs in his sixteenth-century vernacular Psalter as the genesis of Finnish folklore studies, no true scholarship of any importance existed before the last half of the eighteenth century. At that time, however, ideas conceived as a result of the influence of Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and James Macpherson's Ossianic writings were to bear immediate fruit in semiliterary works, and these, in turn, were to serve as the seed for the flowering of romantic nationalism and true folkloristic studies in the next century. Driven to chauvinism through the unwise administration of their land and its peasant population by Sweden and Russia and following the lead of equally nationalistic Englishmen and Germans, certain scholars in Turku (Abo) and later in Helsinki (Helsingfors) determined to show the genius of the Finnish people. This genius they found in the oral literature, the customs, and the beliefs of a peasantry remarkably uninfluenced by exterior forces. On the foundation of this oral literature, of these customs and beliefs, expressed as they were in a language remote from that of administrating officials and neighboring countries, patriotic scholars built so strong an idea of a nation that it was able to take advantage of the disruption of world affairs in 1917 and come into actual existence. And even as the Finnish nation was conceived of and born in folklore, so Finnish scholars, in spite of the fact that their language is little known, have from the very first exerted a significant influence upon folklore studies throughout western Europe, parts of Asia, and those portions of the world influenced in turn by Europe and eastern Asia. The history of Finnish folklore scholarship can be divided into three periods: the period before 1835 when Elias Lnnrot published the Kalevala, the period of Kalevala studies, and the post-Kalevala period. The first was an age of foreign influence and national discovery, the second was a period of romantic nationalism and introspection, and the last has been a period of expanding interest and broadening influence. The work of Elias Lonnrot, which brought the folklore of Finland to the eyes of the world, would have been far slower in development had it not been for the studies published by four scholars connected directly or indirectly with the city of Turku which until 1828 was the seat of the national university. The earliest book about any element of Finnish folklore in the Finnish language appears to have been Wanhain Suomalaisten Tawaliset ja Suloiset Sanan-lascut (Ordinary and Charming Proverbs of the Old Finns) which was published by Henricus Matthiae Florinus in 1702; but it was not until the years 1766 to 1778 that folklore achieved respectability with the appearance of Dissertationis de Poesi Fennica by Henrik Gabriel Porthan, the father of Finnish history.

Addison's Ballad Papers and the Reaction to Metaphysical Wit

IN THREE NUMBERS of the Spectator, Addison laid the foundations of English ballad criticism. Papers Nos. 70 and 74 demonstrated the extreme natural and poetical sentiment, the majestic simplicity, of the old song of Chevy Chase to all readers that were not unqualified for such entertainment by their affectation or their ignorance. Two weeks later (No. 85) Addison recommended in more restrained language Two Children in the Wood, one of the darling songs of the common people, to the same special audiencethe restraint was induced by the facetious squibs that had appeared in the interval, ridiculing his championing of such vulgar stuff. These three papers, coming in 1711 and from Addison, have been regarded as something of an anomaly. Unlike his volatile collaborator Steele, long a Romantic before Romanticism,l Addison is invariably placed well on the neoclassic side of the critical spectrum, indeed a classic of the classics.2 The date of the papers, the year of the Essay on Criticism and a half century before Percy's Reliques, lies distressingly deep in neoclassic territory, and it is an axiom of literary history that a serious interest in popular poetry was not consonant with the dominant standards of the early eighteenth century. Yet, when these papers are carefully examined and placed in their correct context, it appears that Addison was not torturing strange

Blake and Percy's Reliques

Blake and Percy's Reliques

The First Draft of Percy's Reliques

Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was early recognized as a prime mover of the revolution in literary taste that occurred in the later eighteenth century. The compilation had stimulated, according to Jeffrey, the “first revulsion” to the older literature. Wordsworth did not think there was “an able writer in verse of the present day” who would not willingly acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques. It had “absolutely redeemed” English poetry. Of Percy's enormous contribution to ballad scholarship proper, one need hardly quote testimony. It is no wonder, then, that literary scholars have gone to such inordinate pains to unravel the complicated editorial history of this (for its time) ambitious work. Since the publication in 1867-68 of Percy's principal source, the precious Folio MS., almost too much has been written about Percy's textual manipulations. Curiosity has been no less lively as to Percy's criteria for admitting ballads and songs to his collection, the guiding purpose behind his arrangement, and the sources of the scholarly data that went into his able headnotes and essays. Excellent hints on these matters abound in Percy's correspondence with the syndicate of scholars that assisted him during the years he was putting together his ballad book—Edward Lye, Thomas Astle, James Grainger, William Shenstone, Dr. Johnson, Richard Farmer, Thomas Warton, Sir David Dalrymple; and though otherwise undistinguished, these letters have been making their way into print for over a hundred years, until they now constitute a shelf of sober volumes. “Shenstone's billets,” the slips on which Percy's most influential mentor rated the contents of earlier poetical miscellanies, were edited twice in two years; no less than five recent studies have been devoted to the cancels and late alterations in the first edition of the Reliques.

The First Draft of Percy's Reliques

The First Draft of Percy's Reliques

Herder, Percy, and the Song of Songs

In view of the long-recognized influence of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry upon Johann Gottfried Herder's literary theory, especially upon his “Sturm und Drang” essays and Volkslieder, it comes as a surprise to note that Herder's Lieder der Liebe (1778), containing his German translation of the Biblical Song of Songs as well as his commentary thereon, omits all reference to Percy's earlier English translation and commentary, The Song of Solomon, Newly Translated from the Original Hebrew (1764). To be sure, Percy's work (like Herder's own) appeared anonymously. But in the eighteenth century there were ways of discovering the identity of anonymous writers, as both Percy and Herder knew to their chagrin. Yet in none of Herder's works is there any reference to Percy's Song of Solomon, and in none of his published letters is there any mention of the little book. When one considers Herder's usual scholarly habit of documentation and his willingness to acknowledge sources, one must conclude that he was ignorant of Percy's work. One can speak, naturally, of a permeating influence of the Reliques on this work of Herder's, as one can speak of such an influence on any of his writings. In fact, the thesis of the following pages is that this very influence, fused with a few others having the common denominator of folk-poetry, led Herder to a conception of the Song of Songs quite different from that reached by Percy himself and strikingly similar to Percy's theory in one point only: a negative attitude toward the theory of J. D. Michaelis, which was known to both. The contrast between Herder's and Percy's views of the supposedly Solomonic Song of Songs throws an interesting light upon the critical approach of Herder to a document that could fit perfectly into his definition of poetry as “eine Welt- und Völkergabe” and illustrates the peculiar use he made of the Reliques (along with some other, later works) in the support of his original theory of poetry, which differed so remarkably from that of Percy.

William Shenstone's Share in the Preparation of Percy's Reliques

That William Shenstone has some share in the preparation of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry has been recognized ever since Percy made an acknowledgment of his indebtedness in the preface to the first edition. But Percy's account of their collaboration as given in the preface is inadequate and misleading; and a misinterpretation of two of Shenstone's letters to his friends has resulted in an entirely false impression on one significant point, as to who was instrumental in getting Percy started on a collection of ballads for publication. The purpose of this article is to correct the misconception and to develop in some detail the story of their collaboration. It is based in part on unpublished Manuscripts in the Harvard College Library.

Percy's Essay “On the Ancient Metrical Romances”

The essay “On the Ancient Metrical Romances,” introduced into the third volume of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), is an important landmark in the modern revival of interest in the medieval romances. Through the earlier part of the eighteenth century the infrequent comments on the romances had been incidental to something else (chivalry, for a conspicuous example) or had been concerned with theories, chiefly of origin, based on very little evidence. Of the romances themselves, little was known, but they were generally considered barbarous, uncultivated, and infantile. But in Percy's essay the subject is treated with some attempt at completeness, and includes not merely theories about their origin (though these are present) but a discussion of the romances themselves. Upon scrutiny, Percy's knowledge of the subject is found to be large, much larger than has been generally suspected, and toward the material he is seen to display a hesitating and diffident enthusiasm manifestly held in check by the disapproval of the current taste. A summary of his essay follows:The purpose of primitive poetry (according to Percy) was at first to record the valiant deeds and the genealogies of the race heroes; but as letters began to prevail, the bards gave over their historical function and devoted themselves to entertainment. From these songs of the Gothic bards are derived the romances of chivalry, which existed in their elements among the Teutonic peoples long before the days of the Crusades. Though romances first developed in France, the English had a native taste for this type of fiction, and there is reason to believe that they had romances of their own without French originals. These old romances throw light on the manners of the time and often have poetic merit. The publication of a judicious collection of them would thus be desirable. Our classical poets—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser—abound in allusions that are understood only by a knowledge of romances. To illustrate these points Percy quotes a passage from Richard Cure de Lyon that explains an allusion in King John, and gives a detailed abstract of Libius Disconius, one of the romances found in his manuscript. A catalogue of such romances as he knows to be extant closes the essay.

The Text of The Percy-Warton Letters

The revival of interest in the picturesque past made the decade following 1760 a period of notable importance. The Ossianic poems, from 1760 to 1763, Evans's Specimens, 1764, Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 1762, the second edition of Warton's Observations, 1762, the Castle of Otranto, 1764, and Percy's Reliques, 1765, form a rather imposing array as documents of the romantic revival. Anything, therefore, which casts light on this movement during these years may be not without value, and it is to serve this purpose that the group of Percy-Warton letters is here offered to the reader. Some extracts from them were included in footnotes in Dr. Rinaker's study of Thomas Warton, but the correspondence has never been printed entire. The three Percy letters in the Huntington library, which are here added, have not previously appeared in print.