Page:Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript. Ballads and Romances.djvu/40

 away," almost to the end of his life, a sceptic as to the existence of this MS. : . . of which here ensueth a most faithful and particular description: for it is not, gentle reader, as that dexterous artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, hath represented it, in his fine portrait of the Bishop—most picturesquely curling at the corners, of a proportionate small folio—but as you shall immediately read.

The MS. in question is a narrow, half-bound book, with blue-paper sides, and brown leather back. It is 15 inches and five-eighths in length, by about 5 and six eighths in width. Every page has a margin, to the left, of about an inch and a half in width marked by a perpendicular line: the poetry uniformly occupying the right side of the margin. The book may be about an inch in thickness. We have the following introductory prefix, in an ancient hand: "Curious Old Ballads well, occasionally I have met with," &c., as on the page facing p. 1 here. Dibdin adds engravings of Percy's signatures and the writing of the headings and lines of the Ballads, and also

He starts with "Page 21, No. iii., Robine Hoode his death," and stops at " p. 200, No. Iviii., How ffayre shee be."

7. On Percy's handling of his MS. perhaps enough has been said in these volumes at i. 132-3, i. 174, i, 235, ii. xvii, xviii, xxii, xxiv, iii. 2, &e.

Before he learnt to reverence it, as he says, he scribbled notes over its margins and put brackets for suggested omissions in its texts. After be reverenced it, he tore out of it the two leaves containing its best ballad, King Estmere, which he had evidently touched up largely himself (ii. 600). As to the text, he looked on it as a young woman from the country with unkempt locks, whom he had to fit for fashionable society. She did not look like "an apple stuck on the point of a small skewer," as she ought to have done. (London Magazine, 1767, in Fairholt's Costume, 312.) Percy gave her the correct appearance. She had no "false