One of the first English collections of any pretensions was Dryden's Miscellany Poems, published in 1684-1708, which was shortly after followed by Tom D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, 1719-20. But the first attempt to bring together a large number of popular ballads, as distinguished from songs, was made in "A Collection of Old Ballads, corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant, with Introductions historical, critical, or humorous." London. Vols I. and II. 1723. Vol. III. 1725.
The object of most of the works referred to above was the publication of songs to be sung; the object of this one was the presentment of ballads to be read. It had a large sale, and the editor (who is said to have been Ambrose Phillips) expresses his satisfaction in the Preface to Vol. II.: "Though we printed a large edition for such a trifle, and in less than two months put it to the press again, yet could we not get our second edition out before it was really wanted." In spite, however, of its satisfactory reception, it does not appear to have taken any permanent position in literature, although it must have prepared the public mind to receive the Reliques. This collection contains one hundred and fifty-nine ballads, out of which number twenty-three are also in the Reliques.[40] Many of the others are of considerable interest, but some had better have been left unprinted, and all are of little critical value.
In the year after the first two volumes of the English collection were published, Allan Ramsay issued in Edinburgh "The Evergreen, being a collection of Scots poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600," the principal materials of which were derived from the Bannatyne MS. This was followed in the same year (1724) by "The Tea-Table Miscellany: a Collection of choice Songs, Scots and English," a work which is frequently referred to by Percy in the following pages. In neither of these works was Ramsay very particular as to the liberties he allowed himself in altering his originals. In order to make the volumes fit reading for his audience, which he hoped would consist of
"Ilka lovely British lass,
Frae ladies Charlotte, Ann, and Jean,
Down to ilk bonnie singing lass
Wha dances barefoot on the green,"
Ramsay pruned the songs of their indelicacies, and filled up the gaps thus made in his own way. The Tea-table Miscellany contains upwards of twenty presumably old songs, upwards of twelve old songs much altered, and about one hundred songs written by the editor himself, Crawford, Hamilton, and others.
In 1725, William Thomson, a teacher of music in London, brought out a collection of Scottish songs, which he had chiefly taken from the Tea-table Miscellany without acknowledgment. He called his book Orpheus Caledonius.
For some years before Percy's collection appeared, the Foulises, Glasgow's celebrated printers, issued from their press, under the superintendence of Lord Hailes, various Scottish ballads, luxuriously printed with large type, in a small quarto size.
These were the signs that might have shown the far-sighted man that a revival was at hand. At last the time came when, tired out with the dreary and leaden regularity of the verse-writers of the day, the people were ready to receive poetry fresh from nature. The man who arose to supply the want (which was none the less a want that it was an unrecognized one) was Thomas Percy, a clergyman living in a retired part of the country, but occasionally seen among the literati of the capital.
Life of Percy.
Thomas Percy was born on April 13th, 1729, at Bridgnorth in Shropshire, in a street called the Cartway. His father and grandfather were grocers, spelt their name Piercy, and knew nothing of any connection with the noble house of Northumberland.[41] His early education was received at the grammar school of Bridgnorth, and in 1746, being then in his eighteenth year, and having obtained an exhibition, he matriculated as a commoner at Christ Church, Oxford.