Meanwhile, however, there occurred a revivifying contact with one
department, at least, of early verse literature, which did much to clear
the way for Scott and Coleridge and Keats. The decade from 1760 to 1770
is important in the history of English romanticism, and its most
important title is Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:
Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier
Poets," published in three volumes in 1765. It made a less immediate and
exciting impression upon contemporary Europe than MacPherson's "Poems of
Ossian," but it was more fruitful in enduring results. The Germans make
a convenient classification of poetry into _Kunstpoesie_ and
_Volkspoesie_, terms which may be imperfectly translated as literary
poetry and popular poetry. The English _Kunstpoesie_ of the Middle Ages
lay buried under many superincumbent layers of literary fashion.
Oblivion had overtaken Gower and Occleve, and Lydgate and Stephen Hawes,
and Skelton, and Henryson and James I. of Scotland, and well-nigh Chaucer
himself--all the mediaeval poetry of the schools, in short. But it was
known to the curious that there was still extant a large body of popular
poetry in the shape of narrative ballads, which had been handed down
chiefly by oral transmission, and still lived in the memories and upon
the lips of the common people. Many of these went back in their original
shapes to the Middle Ages, or to an even remoter antiquity, and belonged
to that great store of folk-lore which was the common inheritance of the
Aryan race. Analogues and variants of favorite English and Scottish
ballads have been traced through almost all the tongues of modern Europe.
Danish literature is especially rich in ballads and affords valuable
illustrations of our native ministrelsy.[1] It was, perhaps, due in part
to the Danish settlements in Northumbria and to the large Scandinavian
admixture in the Northumbrian blood and dialect, that "the north
countrie" became _par excellence_ the ballad land: Lowland