The beginnings of modern literary scholarship in Britain are studied in this volume, which traces the emergence between about 1760 and 1810 in the work of Richard Hurd, Thomas Percy, Thomas Warton, Joseph Ritson, George Ellis, and Sir Walter Scott of a serious scholarly approach to the English metrical romances of the middle ages. These scholars, however, were not concerned solely with the rediscovery and editing of the original texts which two centuries of growing antiquarian research had ignored. Almost without exception men of letters themselves, they desired also to recover the ‘world of fine fabling’ in which the classical temper of the preceding age had preferred the virtues of ‘good sense’, and they consciously put their discoveries to the service of modern poetry, or urged that they should be so used. The consequences of this were far-reaching, and as he considers in detail the individual achievements of his principal subjects Dr Johnston does not neglect to bring out the nature and importance of the contributions they made to the general culture and literature of their own day and of the nineteenth century.
