ars to have
been more of an improviser than a reciter.]

+IV. Collectors and Editors.+

Now a word or two as to the collectors and editors. To take the
broadsides first, the largest collections are at Magdalene College,
Cambridge (eighteen hundred broadsides collected by Selden and Pepys),
in the Bodleian at Oxford, and in the British Museum. The Bodleian
contains collections made by Anthony-a-Wood, Douce, and Rawlinson; the
British Museum, the great Roxburghe and Bagford collections, which have
been reprinted and edited by William Chappell and the Rev. J. W.
Ebsworth for the Ballad Society, as well as other smaller volumes of
ballads.

But it is not among the broadsides that our noblest ballads are found.
The first attempt to collect popular ballads was made by the compiler of
three volumes issued in 1723 and 1725. The editor is said to have been
Ambrose Phillips, whose name and style combined to produce the word
'namby-pamby.' Next came Allan Ramsay, with 'the _Evergreen_,
a collection of Scots poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600.'--'By
the ingenious,' we note; not by the 'elegant.' The tide is already
beginning to turn; pitch-forked Nature will ever come back. Followed the
_Tea-Table Miscellany_, also compiled by Allan Ramsay, which contained
about twenty popular ballads, the rest being songs and ballads of modern
composition. The texts were, of course, chopped about and pruned to suit
contemporary taste. It was still necessary to adopt an apologetic
attitude on behalf of these barbarous and crude relics of antiquity.

These books paved the way to the great literary triumph of the century.
The first edition of Percy's _Reliques_ was issued in three volumes, in
1765. He received for it one hundred guineas, instant popularity and
patronage, and subsequently, the gratitude of succeeding centuries.

Nevertheless, Percy himself was so far under the influence of his
contemporaries that he felt it necessary to adopt the apologetic
attitude. In his preface he wrote:-- 'In a polished age like the
present, I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will
require great allowances to be made for them.' And again:-- 'To atone
for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems, each volume concludes with
a few modern attempts in the same kind of writing; and to take off from
the tediousness of the longer narratives, they are everywhere
intermingled with little elegant pieces of the lyrical kind.' In short,
he co