He was an ill-tempered and eccentric man: a vegetarian, a free-thinker, a spelling reformer,[41] and latterly a Jacobin. He attacked Warton as well as Percy, and used to describe any clerical antagonist as a "stinking priest." He died insane in 1803. Ritson took issue with the theory maintained in Percy's introductory "Essay on the Ancient Minstrels," viz.: that the minstrels were not only the singers, but likewise the authors of the ballads. But Ritson went so far in his rage against Percy as to deny the existence of the sacred Folio Manuscript, until convinced by abundant testimony that there was such a thing. It was an age of forgeries, and Ritson was not altogether without justification in supposing that the author of "The Hermit of Warkworth" belonged in the same category with Chatterton, Ireland, and MacPherson. Percy, like Warton, took an apologetic tone toward his public. "In a polished age, like the present," he wrote, "I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity and many artless graces, which, in the opinion of no mean critics, have been thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract. They were plain English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story--not on the style--and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth. Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best of them are noble in expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty: "The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar With his hart-blood they were wet."[42] "O cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf, A wat the wild fule boded day; The salms of Heaven will be sung, And ere now I'll be missed away."[43] "If my love were an earthly knight, As he's an elfin gray, A wad na gie my sin true love For no lord that ye hae."[44] "She hang ae napkin at the door, Another in the ha, And a' to wipe the trickling tears, Sae fast as they did fa."[45] "And all is with one chyld of yours, I feel stir at my side: My gowne of green, it is too strait: Before it was too wide."[46]