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.

Percy made no secret of the fact that he filled _lacunae_ in his
originals with stanzas, and, in some cases, with nearly entire poems of
his own composition. But the extent of the liberties that he took with
the text, although suspected, was not certainly known until Mr. Furnivall
finally got leave to have the folio manuscript copied and printed.[40]