THOMAS PERCY: RELIQUES of ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY/ENGLAND/3 BOOKS/SCARCE 1927

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THOMAS PERCY: RELIQUES of ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY/ENGLAND/3 BOOKS/SCARCE 1927 RELIQUES OF ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY. CONSISTING OF OLD HEROIC BALLADS, SONGS AND OTHER PIECES OF OUR EARLIER POETS TOGETHER WITH SOME FEW OF LATER DATE. BY THOMAS PERCY. EDITED, WITH A GENERAL INTRODUCTION, ADDITIONAL PREFACES, NOTES, GLOSSARY, ETC. BY HENRY B. WHEATLEY. IN THREE VOLUMES. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1927 [1885]. Fifth printing. Scarce. A handsome 3-volume set of this classic work containing dozens of English ballads, songs and poems. Published more than 80 years ago, this set of books is now out of print and scarce. Such a nice 3-volume set is not likely to come up for sale again soon on ebay. According to wikipedia: " Thomas Percy (13 April 1729 – 30 September 1811) was Bishop of Dromore . Before being made bishop, he was chaplain to George III. Percy's greatest contribution is considered to be his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the first of the great ballad collections, which was the one work most responsible for the ballad revival in English poetry that was a significant part of the Romantic movement....These works are of little estimation when compared with the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). In the 1760s, he obtained a manuscript of ballads (the Percy Folio ) from a source in Northumberland . He had in mind the idea of writing a history of the Percy family of the peerage (the Dukes of Northumberland), and he had sought materials of local interest. He had sought out old tales from near Alnwick , the ancestral home of the Northumberland Percy family, and he had come across many ballad tales.In 1763, Percy, aiming for the market that Ossian had opened for "ancient poetry" (see James MacPherson ), published Five Pieces of Runic Poetry from Icelandic , which he translated and "improved."Percy was a friend of Samuel Johnson , Joseph and Thomas Warton , and James Boswell . In 1764, Dr Johnson and others encouraged Percy to preserve the poetry he was finding at home. Percy therefore took the ballad material he had from his folio and began searching for more ballads, in particular. He wanted to collect material from the border areas, near Scotland. In 1765, he published the Reliques to great success.Appointed a chaplain to the king in 1769, Percy was formally admitted to Emmanuel College, Cambridge that year, and received a doctorate of divinity from Cambridge in 1770.Still not having secured an adequate living, Thomas Percy continued with his project of commemorating the Alnwick area, and so he composed his own ballad poem on Warkworth Castle , then a ruin, which the Dukes of Northumberland controlled and which the Duchess of Northumberland favored for its sublime views. Combining the vogue for the " Churchyard Poets " and the ballad vogue that he himself had set in motion, Thomas Percy wrote The Hermit of Warkworth in 1771. Samuel Johnson famously composed three ex tempore parodies of this verse in the 1780s. When an admirer too often told Johnson of the beautiful "simplicity" of the ballad verse form, Johnson pointed out that the line between simplicity and simple mindedness is narrow: just remove the sense...The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry set the stage not only for Robert Burns , but also for Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads . The book is based on an old manuscript collection of poetry, which Percy claimed to have rescued in Humphrey Pitt's house at Shifnal, Shropshire , "from the hands of the housemaid who was about to light the fire with it." The manuscript was edited in its complete form by JW Hales and FJ Furnivall in 1867-1868. This manuscript provides the core of the work but many other ballads were found and included, some by Percy's friends Johnson, William Shenstone , Thomas Warton , and some from a similar collection made by Samuel Pepys .Percy "improved" 35 of the 46 ballads he took from the Folio. In the case of The Beggar's daughter of Bednal Green (Bethnal Green), he added the historical character of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Evesham. In this version the ... read more

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