"Those pretty babes, with hand in hand,
Went wandering up and down;
But never more they saw the man
Approaching from the town."

He says that in both of these stanzas the language is that of familiar
conversation, yet one stanza is admirable and the other contemptible,
because the _matter_ of it is contemptible. In the essay supplementary
to his preface, Wordsworth asserts that the "Reliques" was "ill suited to
the then existing taste of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not
sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt": and that "Dr.
Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors . . . that,
though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to
follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos
(as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of 'Sir Cauline' and by many other
pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a
poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 'The Hermit of Warkworth,'
a diction scarcely distinguishable from the vague, the glossy and
unfeeling language of his day." Wordsworth adds that he esteems the
genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other
modern writer; and that even Bürger had not Percy's fine sensibility. He
quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from "The Child of Elle"
in the "Reliques," and contrasts them with the diluted and tricked-out
version of the same in Bürger's German.

Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of Percy as a ballad
composer. Of this same "Child of Elle" he says: "The present fragment of
a version may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, as in
the 'Reliques' it is buried in a heap of 'polished' verses composed by