158 Second Romantic Period of English Literature. 



dazzled by the glint of polished armour; we see gay knights and 

 noble dames flitting through his stately castles ; we hear the clash 

 and clang of arms on the well-stricken field. 



His ballads are simple and unaffected. The Balade of 

 Charitie is characterised by Mr T. W. Dunton as the most purely 

 artistic work, perhaps, of its time. 



The hapless pilgrim who, moaning did abide. 

 Beneath a holm fast by a pathway side, 

 Which did unto St. Godwin's convent lead, 



is, of course, the descendant of the certain man who went down 

 to Jericho seventeen hundred years before. Chatterton's influ- 

 ence on the movement worked primarily on Coleridge, and 

 through Coleridge by poetic generation it passed to Shelley and 

 Keats and Tennyson and O'Shaughnessy and Rossetti and Swin- 

 burne. 



The resurrection of the Ballad was going on during nearly 

 the whole of the first half of the 18th century. Thus about 1710 

 James Watson, the King's printer in Scotland, published his 

 Choice Collection, a book beginning with Christ's Kirk on the 

 Green. This gave the hint, I think, to Allan Ramsay, for his 

 "Evergreen" and Tea Table Miscellany. In 1719 Tom 

 D'Urfey published his Pills to purge Melancholy, and there was 

 an anonymous collection of Old Ballads printed in 1723. Others 

 might be mentioned, but enough has been said, perhaps, to show 

 that the Ballad was in the air. The way was being paved for the 

 good Bishop and his Reliques. The glamour that the Reliques 

 threw over the lame boy is known to every student of Sir Walter. 

 He has put it on record that he never read a book half so fre- 

 quently or with half the enthusiasm. Their influence is writ large 

 over much of his own literary production ; they are directly 

 responsible for the "Border Minstrelsy," which appeared in 

 1802 — a book second only to the Reliques in its effect upon the 

 form and matter of subsequent poetry. 



I do not think Wordsworth overstated the case when he 

 wrote of the Reliques : — " For our own country its poetry has 

 been absolutely redeemed by it. I do not think that there is an 

 able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proiiii 

 to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques : I know that it is 

 so with my friends ; and, for myself, I am happy in this occa- 



