The Compilation was, however ill suited to the then existing taste of city society, and Dr Johnson, 'mid the little senate to which he gave laws, was not sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt.

The critic triumphed, the legendary imitators were deservedly disregarded, and as undeservedly, their ill imitated models sank in this country into temporary neglect, while Burger and other able writers of Germany, were translating or imitating these Reliques, and composing, with the aid of inspiration thence derived, poems which are the delight of the German nation.

Dr Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labours from the ignorance and insensibility of the persons with whom he lived, that, though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of _Sir Cauline_ and by many other pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of the _Hermit of Warkworth_, a diction scarcely in any one of its features distinguishable from the vague, the glossy, and unfeeling language of his day.

I mention this remarkable fact[11] with regret, esteeming the genius of Dr.Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other man by whom in modern times it has been cultivated.

That even Burger (to whom Klopstock gave, in my hearing, a commendation which he denied to Goethe and Schiller, pronouncing him to be a genuine poet, and one of the few among the Germans whose works would last) had not the fine sensibility of Percy, might be shown from many passages, in which he has deserted his original only to go astray.