Accordingly such specimens of ancient poetry have been selected, as either shew the gradation of our language, exhibit the progress of popular opinions, display the peculiar manners and customs of former ages, or throw light on our earlier classical poets.
They are here distributed into volumes, each of which contains an independent series of poems, arranged chiefly according to the order of time, and shewing the gradual improvements of the English language and poetry from the earliest ages down to the present. Each volume, or series, is divided into three books, to afford so many pauses, or resting-places to the reader, and to assist him in distinguishing between the productions of the earlier, the middle, and the latter times.
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. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity, and many artless graces, which in the opinion of no mean critics[62] have been thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties, and, if they do not dazzle the imagination, are frequently found to interest the heart.
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 lyric kind. Select ballads in the old Scottish dialect, most of them of the first-rate merit, are also interspersed among those of our ancient English minstrels; and the artless productions of these old rhapsodists are occasionally confronted with specimens of the composition of contemporary poets of a higher class; of those who had all the advantages of learning in the times in which they lived, and who wrote for fame and for posterity. Yet perhaps the palm will be frequently due to the old strolling minstrels, who composed their rhymes to be sung to their harps, and who looked no farther than for present applause, and present subsistence.
The reader will find this class of men occasionally described in the following volumes, and some particulars relating to their history in an Essay subjoined. (Appendix I.)
It will be proper here to give a short account of the other collections that were consulted, and to make my acknowledgements to those gentlemen who were so kind as to impart extracts from them; for, while this selection was making, a great number of ingenious friends took a share in the work, and explored many large repositories in its favour.
The first of these that deserved notice was the Pepysian library at Magdalen College, Cambridge. Its founder, Sam. Pepys, Esq.,[63] Secretary of the Admiralty in the reigns of Charles II. and James II. had made a large collection of ancient English ballads, near 2,000 in number, which he has left pasted in five volumes in folio; besides Garlands and other smaller miscellanies. This collection he tells us was "begun by Mr. Selden; improved by the addition of many pieces elder thereto in time; and the whole continued down to the year 1700; when the form peculiar till then thereto, viz., of the black letter with pictures, seems (for cheapness sake) wholly laid aside for that of the white letter without pictures."
In the Ashmole Library at Oxford is a small collection of ballads made by Anthony Wood in the year 1676, containing somewhat more than 200. Many ancient popular poems are also preserved in the Bodleyan library.
The archives of the Antiquarian Society at London contain a multitude of curious political poems in large folio volumes, digested under the several reigns of Hen. VIII., Edw. VI., Mary, Elizabeth, James I., &c.[65]
In the British Museum is preserved a large treasure of ancient English poems in MS. besides one folio volume of printed ballads.