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It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshiped by these men, just as the reliques of Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the Crusades was revived in this quest of the Holy Grail of ancient knowledge.
Thomson's The Seasons, and Castle of Indolence, in Modern Classics; the same poems in Clarendon Press, and in Temple Classics; Selections from Thomson, in Cassell's National Library. Chatterton's poems, in Canterbury Poets. Macpherson's Ossian, in Canterbury Poets. Percy's Reliques, in Everyman's Library, Chandos Classics, Bohn's Library, etc. See Bibliography on p. 64. Defoe. The Novelists.
Johnson, after stating that some of Milton's manuscripts prove that 'in the early part of his life he wrote with much care, continues: 'Such reliques show how excellence is acquired; what we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence. Works, vii. 119.
In place of the noble repasts, however, of Achilles and Agamemnon, I beheld displayed on the grass the remains of the ham which had sustained so vigorous an attack on the preceding evening, accompanied by the reliques of the bread, cheese, and wine. We had scarcely commenced our frugal breakfast, when I heard again an Imitation of the bleating of sheep, similar to what I had heard the day before.
The same seed blossomed in both countries, only it was native there, being first sown in "Percy's Reliques," while here it was transplanted at second-hand from the pages of a new race of English poets, particularly Wordsworth. They returned to nature in literature; we, who had no literature, discovered it in nature.
I believed it to possess the power of removing pain, and often prayed to it to cure the tooth-ache, &c. Jane Ray sometimes professed to outgo us all in devotion to the Superior, and would pick up the feathers after making her bed. These she would distributed among us, saying, "When the Superior dies, reliques will begin to grow scarce, and you had better supply yourselves in season."
They would have the merit of originality, and of belonging to the country; and they would remain as reliques of the native lords of the soil, when every other vestige had disappeared. Many of these names may easily be regained, by reference to old title deeds, and to the archives of states and counties.
Instances without number occur in romance, in which a knight, by rashly granting an indefinite boon, was obliged to do or suffer something extremely to his prejudice. But it is not in romance alone that we find such singular instances of adherence to an indefinite promise. The king made him swear upon the holy reliques that he would fulfil his commands.
That M. Michelet should pretend to have forgotten this vilest of pasquinades, is more shocking to the general sense of justice than any special untruth as to Shakspeare can be to the particular nationality of an Englishman. The story which furnishes a basis to the fine ballad in Percy's Reliques, and to the Canterbury Tale of Chaucer's Lady Abbess.
The ancient languages have, generally, a magical influence on their faculties. They were "fools called into a circle by Greek invocations." The Iliad and Aeneid were to them not books but curiosities, or rather reliques. They no more admired those works for their merits than a good Catholic venerates the house of the Virgin at Loretto for its architecture. Whatever was classical was good.
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