[Footnote 39:  The Magnum Opus of Robert Surtees was his History of
  Durham, published 1816-1840.]

[Footnote 40:  Douce published Illustrations of Shakespeare in 1807.  Later he edited Arnold’s Chronicle; Judicium, a Pageant; and a metrical Life of St. Robert.  The two latter, which appeared in 1822 and 1824, were done for the Roxburghe Club.  In 1824 he also wrote some notes for Warton’s History of English Poetry.]

  [Footnote 41:  Age of Wordsworth, p. 39.]

[Footnote 42:  A number of volumes containing old ballads together with modern imitations had been published both before and after the appearance of Percy’s Reliques, but Ritson’s collections were the first, except Percy’s, to treat the material in a scholarly way.]

[Footnote 43:  The discussion centered upon the social and literary position of minstrels.  The first edition of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published in 1765, contained an essay on the History of Minstrelsy, and one on the Origin of the Metrical Romances, which, taken together, says Mr. Courthope, “may be said to furnish the first generalized theory of the nature of mediaeval poetry.” (History of English Poetry, Vol.  I, p. 426.) Percy considered the minstrels as the authors of the compositions which they sang to the harp, and as holding a dignified social position similar to that of the Anglo-Saxon scop or the old Norse scald.  This theory was vigorously attacked by Joseph Ritson in the preface of his Select Collection of English Songs in 1783, and again in his Ancient English Metrical Romances in 1802, and in his essay On the Ancient English Minstrels in Ancient Songs and Ballads (1792).  Ritson contended that minstrels were musical performers of a low class, or even acrobats, and that they were not literary composers.  Scott used his knowledge of ballads and romances and the customs depicted in them to reinforce his own decision that the truth lay somewhere between the two extremes.  He pointed out that the word may have covered a wide variety of professional entertainers.  A modern comment (by E.K.  Chambers, in The Mediaeval Stage, Vol.  I, p. 66) seems like an echo of Scott:  “This general antithesis between the higher and lower minstrelsy may now, perhaps, be regarded as established.  It was the neglect of it, surely, that led to that curious and barren logomachy between Percy and Ritson, in which neither of the disputants can be said to have had hold of more than a bare half of the truth.”]

[Footnote 44:  Scott’s theory as to the authorship of ballads is even now held by Mr. Courthope.  At the end of his chapter on Minstrelsy, in The History of English Poetry, he thus sums up the matter:  “All the evidence cited in this chapter shows that, so far from the ballad being a spontaneous product of popular imagination,