Page:Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. Ballads and Romances.djvu/36



Written, as the present poem was, in the sixth Henry's time, Talbot himself may have seen it; he, "the great Alcides of the field," perchance enjoyed it with his boy, "the Sonne of Chiualrie;" and though it lacks somewhat, as well the fire as the simple pathos, of stories of an earlier day, yet there is no need to ask for it a favouring ear from those who, with M. Hippeau, know "ce n'est jamais sans profit que Ton receuille quelques-uns des nombreux anneaux de la chaine qui permet de suivre a travers les ages toutes les transformations que subissent les mots d'une langue et les idees d'un peuple." (Messire Gauvain, Preface, p. xxxiv, in A Royal Historic of the excellent Knight Generides, p. xv.)

3. The Manuscript itself is a "scrubby, shabby, paper" book,—about fifteen and a half inches long by five and a half wide, and about two inches thick,—which has lost some of its pages both at the beginning and end. Percy found it "lying dirty on the floor under a Bureau in ye Parlour" of his friend Humphrey Pitt of Shiffnal in Shropshire, "being used by the maids to light the fire." He begged it of Mr. Pitt, and kept it unbound and torn till he was going to lend it to Dr. Johnson. Then he had it bound in half-calf by a binder who pared off some of the top and bottom lines in different parts of the volume.

4. The handwriting was put by Sir F. Madden at after 1650 A.D.; by two authorities at the Record Office whom I consulted, in the reign of James I. rather than that of Charles I.; but as the volume contains, among other late pieces, one on the siege of Newark in Charles I's time (ii. 33), another on the taking of Banbury in 1642 (ii. 39), and a third, The King enioyes his rights againe, which contains a passage that (as