Mr.Herford calls this period a day of "Specimens" and extracts: "Mediaeval romance was studied in Ellis's _Specimens_," he says, "the Elizabethan drama in Lamb's, literary history at large in D'Israeli's gently garrulous compilations of its 'quarrels,' 'amenities,' 'calamities,' and 'curiosities.'"[41] But the scholarship of the time on the whole is worthy of respect.

In the case of ballads and romances notable work had been done before Scott entered the field,[42] and he and his contemporaries were carrying out the promise of the half century before them--continuing the work that Percy and Warton had begun.
Among the problems connected with ballad study, that which arises first is naturally the question of origins.

Scott made no attempt to formulate a theory different in any main element from that which was held by his predecessors.

He agreed with Percy that ballads were composed and sung by minstrels, and based his discussion on the materials brought forward by Percy and Ritson for use in their great controversy.[43] Ritson himself never doubted that ballads were composed and sung by individual authors, though he might refuse to call them minstrels.

The idea of communal authorship, which Jacob Grimm was to suggest only half a dozen years after the first edition of the _Minstrelsy_, would doubtless have been rejected by Scott, even if he had considered it.