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...