In 1719 there was published in Edinburgh, in a tract of twelve folio pages, a small poem, 27 stanzas or 216 lines long, entitled _Hardyknute, a Fragment_. It was printed in old spelling, to look like a piece of old Scottish poetry that had somehow been recovered; and it seems to have been accepted as such by those into whose hands the copy had come, and who were concerned in having it published. Among these were Duncan Forbes of Culloden, afterwards Lord President of the Court of Session, and Sir Gilbert Elliott of Minto, afterwards Lord Justice-Clerk; but there is something like proof that it had come into their hands indirectly from Sir John Hope Bruce of Kinross, baronet, who died as late as 1766 at a great age, in the rank of lieutenant-general, and who, some time before 1719, had sent a manuscript copy of it to Lord Binning, with a fantastic story to the effect that the original, in a much defaced vellum, had been found, a few weeks before, in a vault at Dunfermline. The little thing, having become popular in its first published form, was reproduced in 1724 by Allan Ramsay in his _Evergreen_, which professed to be “a collection of Scots Poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600”; but it there appeared with corrections and some additional stanzas. In 1740 it had the honour of a new appearance in London, under anonymous editorship, and with the title “Hardyknute, a Fragment; being the first Canto of an Epick Poem: with general remarks and notes.” The anonymous editor, still treating it as a genuine old poem, of not later than the sixteenth century, praises it very highly. “There is a grandeur, a majesty of sentiment,” he says, “diffused through the whole: a true sublime, which nothing can surpass.” It was but natural that a piece of which this could be said should be included by Percy in his _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_, published in 1765. It appeared, accordingly, in the first edition of that famous book, still as an old poem and in antique spelling; and it was reprinted in the subsequent editions issued by Percy himself in 1767, 1775, and 1794, though then with some added explanations and queries.