Bold, rapid, wild, and void of art."

The value and hence the dignity of the minstrel's profession declined
with the progress of the printing-press in popular favor, and the
character of the gleemen suffered in consequence. This was more marked
in England than in Scotland. Indeed, the question has been raised as
to whether there ever existed a class of Englishmen who were both
ballad-singers and ballad-makers. This was one of the points at issue
between those eminent antiquarians, Bishop Percy and Mr. Ritson, in
the eighteenth century. Dr. Percy had defined the English minstrels as
an "order of men in the middle ages, who subsisted by the arts of
poetry and music, and sung to the harp the verses which they
themselves composed." The inflammable Joseph Ritson, whose love of an
honest ballad goes far to excuse him for his lack of gentle demeanor
toward the unfaithful editor of the _Reliques,_ pounced down so
fiercely upon this definition, contending that, however applicable to
Icelandic skalds or Norman trouveres or ProvenASal troubadours, it was
altogether too flattering for the vagabond fiddlers of England,
roughly trolling over to tavern audiences the ballads borrowed from
their betters, that the dismayed bishop altered his last clause to
read, "verses composed by themselves or others."

Sir Walter Scott sums up this famous quarrel with his characteristic
good-humor. "The debate," he says, "resembles the apologue of the gold
and silver shield. Dr. Percy looked on the minstrel in the palmy and
exalted state to which, no doubt, many were elevated by their talents,
like those who possess excellence in the fine arts in the present day;
and Ritson considered the reverse of the medal, when the poor and
wandering gleeman was glad to purchase his bread by singing his
ballads at the ale-house, wearing a fantastic habit, and latterly