until convinced by abundant testimony that there was such a thing. It
was an age of forgeries, and Ritson was not altogether without
justification in supposing that the author of "The Hermit of Warkworth"
belonged in the same category with Chatterton, Ireland, and MacPherson.

Percy, like Warton, took an apologetic tone toward his public. "In a
polished age, like the present," he wrote, "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, have been
thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how
should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the
eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was
smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary
passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or
sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract. They were
plain English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular
mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical
artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so
dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story--not on the
style--and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth.

Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best of them are noble in
expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval
poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of
intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty:

"The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar
With his hart-blood they were wet."[42]