heart,
And strength and nature made amends for art."

Ballad forgery had begun early. To say nothing of appropriations, like
Mallet's, of "William and Margaret," Lady Wardlaw put forth her
"Hardyknut" in 1719 as a genuine old ballad, and it was reprinted as such
in Ramsay's "Evergreen." Gray wrote to Walpole in 1760, "I have been
often told that the poem called 'Hardicanute' (which I always admired and
still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a few years ago. This
I do not at all believe, though it has evidently been retouched by some
modern hand." Before Percy no concerted or intelligent effort had been
made toward collecting, preserving, and editing the _corpus poetarum_ of
English minstrelsy. The great mass of ancient ballads, so far as they
were in print at all, existed in "stall copies," _i.e._, single sheets of
broadsides, struck off for sale by balladmongers and the keepers of
book-stalls.

Thomas Percy, the compiler of the "Reliques," was a parish clergyman,
settled at the retired hamlet of Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire. For
years he had amused his leisure by collecting ballads. He numbered among
his acquaintances men of letters like Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick,
Grainger, Farmer, and Shenstone. It was the last who suggested the plan
of the "Reliques" and who was to have helped in its execution, had not
his illness and death prevented. Johnson spent a part of the summer of
1764 on a visit to the vicarage of Easton Maudit, on which occasion Percy
reports that his guest "chose for his regular reading the old Spanish
romance of 'Felixmarte of Hircania,' in folio, which he read quite
through." He adds, what one would not readily suspect, that the doctor,
when a boy, "was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and
he retained his fondness for them through life. . . I have heard him
attribute to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which
prevented his ever fixing in any profession." Percy talked over his
project with Johnson, who would seem to have given his approval, and even
to have added his persuasions to Shenstone's. For in the preface to the
first edition of the "Reliques," the editor declared that "he could
refuse nothing to such judges as the author of the _Rambler_ and the late
Mr. Shenstone"; and that "to the friendship of Mr. Johnson he owes many
valuable hints for the conduct of his work." And after Ritson had
questioned the existence of the famous