Percy. That worthy prelate, touched by the beauty of it--he had a
soul--was unhappily moved to try his hand at its completion. A
wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo's Venus. There are
thirty-nine lines here. There are two hundred in the thing called the
'Child of Elle' in the 'Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines all
the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the whole, the union of
the genuine and the false--of the old ballad with Percy's tawdry
feebleness--makes about as objectionable a _mésalliance_ as in the story
itself is in the eyes of the father."[37] The modern ballad scholars, in
their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as
Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till
he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216--"a
fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and
tinkering in "Sir Cauline"--which Wordsworth thought exquisite--they
regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these
additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old
balladry and a considerable talent of imitation."

From the critical or scholarly point of view, these strictures are
doubtless deserved. It is an editor's duty to give his text as he finds
it, without interpolations or restorations; and it is unquestionable that
Percy's additions to fragmentary pieces are full of sentimentalism,
affectation, and the spurious poetic diction of his age. An experienced
ballad amateur can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine portions
from the insertions. But it is unfair to try Percy by modern editorial
canons. That sacredness which is now imputed to the _ipsissima verba_ of
an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to
men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and
mostly as barbarous trifles--something like wampum belts, or nose-rings,
or antique ornaments in the _goût barbare et charmant des bijoux goths_.