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-à-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 could not trust that large child, the people of England, to take its dose of powder without the conventional treacle. To vary the metaphor, his famous Folio Manuscript he regarded as a Cinderella, and in his capacity as fairy godmother refused to introduce her to the world without hiding the slut’s uncouth attire under fine raiment. To which end, besides adding ‘little elegant pieces,’ he recast and rewrote ‘the more obsolete poems,’ many of which came direct from the Folio Manuscript. Are we to blame him for yielding to the taste of his day?