And rogues by Act of Parliament."
On the other hand, it was also in England that the romantic ballad had its revival, and was introduced to an entirely new phase of existence. The publication of the Percy Reliques (1765) started the modern period in which popular ballads were not only to be accepted as literature, but were to exercise the strongest influence on lettered poets from Goethe and Scott, down to Dante Rossetti.
Not that popular poetry had ever been without its intelligent admirers, here and there, among men of culture: Montaigne had said of it, "La poësie populere et purement naturelle a des naïfvetez et graces par où elle se compare à la principale beauté de la poësie parfaicte selon l'art: comme il se voit es villanelles de Gascouigne et aus chançons qu'on nous raporte des nations qui n'ont conoissance d'acune science, ny mesme d'escripture." There were even ardent collectors, like Samuel Pepys, who is said to have acquired copies of two thousand ballads.[3] Still, till after the appearance of Bishop Percy's book (as his own many faults of omission and commission attest), the literary class at large did not take folk-songs quite seriously. The Percy Reliques was followed by Herder's Volkslieder (1782), Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), Fauriel's Chansons Populaires de la Grêce (1824), to mention only three of its more immediate successors. The "return to Nature" in poetry became an irresistible movement; the world, tired of the classical forms of the eighteenth century, listened as gladly to the fresh voice of the popular muse, as in his father's dreary palace Giacomo Leopardi listened to the voice of the peasant girl over the way, who sang as she plied the shuttle:
Sonavan le quiete
Stanze, e le vie dintorno.
Al tuo perpetuo canto,
Allor che all opre femminili intenta
Sedevi, assai contenta
Di quel vago avvenir che in mente avevi.
Era il Maggio odoroso: e tu solevi