andrew elfenbein a cover for the real Chatterton’s relation to Pope, the Latinate paragon of standard English in poetry This etymological battle had a political edge because the Latinity of poets like Pope represented for outsiders like Chatterton the entrenched power of a poetic establishment nurtured on the classics and on an elite educational system (though, interestingly, Pope himself had had an oblique relation to this system because, as a Catholic, he could not attend Oxford or Cambridge) It also challenged the tendency on the part of eighteenth-century standardizers to use Latin models for English grammar The aggressive Englishness of Chatterton’s vocabulary created the fantasy of a more pure, original mode of English Hence, John Keats would later write that Chatterton “is the purest writer in the English Language He has no French idiom, or particles like Chaucer – ’tis genuine English Idiom in English words.”14 For Keats, who, like Chatterton, was rebelling against the class implications of the standardizers’ cosmopolitan English, Chatterton, far more than Chaucer, was the well of English undefiled, even though Chatterton’s English was a forgery Another challenge to the standardizers’ English came from the ballads that Thomas Percy published in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) This collection was a hodgepodge of actual ballads, original compositions of Percy’s, and hybrid works in which Percy altered or rewrote existing ballads Ballads in the eighteenth century occupied the lowest rung of literature They were sensational, often bawdy works associated with illiterate or barely literate classes; many of them were hundreds of years old.15 Percy cleaned up his ballads by excluding their characteristic bawdry, omitting occasional notes of political protest, and presenting his collection as a work of antiquarian scholarship into the authentic roots of English literature As in Chatterton, this connection with true Englishness pitted the local against transnational Britishness; Percy particularly favored ballads about Northumberland because he dedicated the collection to Elizabeth, Countess Percy, wife of the Earl of Northumberland, who subsequently became his patron Through Percy’s collection, “bad” English could be revalued as a mark of vigor, originality, and a true English spirit, rather than mere illiteracy Another influential form of localism was the move away from England altogether to the Celtic fringe Before English was spoken in the British Isles, the chief language was Celtic James Macpherson, a Scottish writer, wrote a series of supposed “translations” from the works of the ancient bard Ossian (1760–3) He had researched Ossian in the Scottish Highlands, but his texts were less strict translations than imaginative elaborations upon some themes and motifs from Ossianic ballads Strikingly, Macpherson rendered Ossian’s supposed poetry as prose, but prose that shared few characteristics of the English approved by the standardizers The ideal English prose promoted by 82 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008