much he clothed it; and his ballads are now reprinted, as
Professor Child says, for much the same reason that thieves are
photographed.

Scotland continued the work with two excellent students and pioneers,
George Kinloch and William Motherwell. Next, Robert Chambers published a
collection of eighty ballads, some being spurious. This was in 1829.
Thirty years later Chambers came to the conclusion that 'the high-class
romantic ballads of Scotland ... are not older than the early part of
the eighteenth century, and are mainly, if not wholly, the production of
one mind.' And this one mind, he thinks, was probably that of Elizabeth,
Lady Wardlaw, the acknowledged forger of the ballad _Hardyknute_, which
deceived so many. Chambers, of course, was absurdly mistaken.

So the work of collecting and editing progressed through the nineteenth
century, till it culminated in the final edition of Professor Child's
_English and Scottish Popular Ballads_. But even this is scarcely his
greatest benefaction to the study of ballads. We must confess that had
it not been for the insistence of this American scholar, the Percy Folio
Manuscript would remain a sealed book. For six years Professor Child
persecuted Dr. Furnivall, who persecuted in turn the owners of the
Folio, even offering sums of money, for permission to print the MS.
Eventually they succeeded, and not only succeeded in giving to the world
an exact reprint,[10] but also once for all secured the precious
original for the British Museum, where it now remains.[11]

[Footnote 10: _Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript_, edited by J. W.
Hales and F. J. Furnivall, 4 vols., 1867-8. Printed for the Early
English Text Society and subscribers.]

[Footnote 11: Additional MS. 27, 879.]

And what is this manuscript? In brief, it is an example of the
commonplace books which abounded in the seventeenth century. But it is
unique in containing a large proportion of early romances and ballads,
as well as the lyrics of the day. Of the hundreds of commonplace books
made during that century, no other example is known which contains such
matter, for the obvious and simple reason that such matter was
despised.[12] The handwriting is put by experts at about 1650; it cannot
be much later, and one song in it contains a passage which fixes the
date of that song to the year 1643. Percy discovered the book 'lying
dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlour' of his friend Humphrey
Pitt of Shifn