Antiquary, born at Stockton-on-Tees, came to London in 1775, and practised as a conveyancer, but was enabled to give most of his time to antiquarian studies. He was as notorious for his vegetarianism, whimsical spelling, and irreverence as for his attacks on bigger men than himself. His first important work was an onslaught on Warton’s “History of English Poetry” (1782). He assailed (1783) Johnson and Steevens for their text of Shakespeare, and Bishop Percy in “Ancient Songs” (1790); in 1792 appeared his “Cursory Criticisms” on Malone’s Shakespeare. Other works were “English Songs” (1783); “Ancient Popular Poetry” (1791); “Scottish Songs” (1794); “Poems,” by Laurence Minot (1795); “Robin Hood Ballads” (1795); and “Ancient English Metrical Romances” (1802).

Personal

	As bitter as gall, and as sharp as a razor,
	And feeding on herbs as a Nebuchadnezzar,
	His diet too acid, his temper too sour,
	Little Ritson came out with his two volumes more.

  Coarse, caustic, clever; and, am I to suppose, not amiable.

  This narrow-minded, sour, and dogmatical little word-catcher had hated the very name of a Scotsman, and was utterably incapable of sympathizing with any of the higher views of his new correspondent. Yet the bland courtesy of Scott disarmed even this half-crazy pedant; and he communicated the stores of his really valuable learning in a manner that seems to have greatly surprised all who had hitherto held any intercourse with him on antiquarian topics.

  Whose wild temper and vegetarian crotchets have found a more permanent place in history than his collections.

  One of the most interesting spots in all London to me is Bunhill Fields cemetery, for herein are the graves of many whose memory I revere. I had heard that Joseph Ritson was buried here, and while my sister, Miss Susan, lingered at the grave of her favorite poet, I took occasion to spy around among the tombstones in the hope of discovering the last resting-place of the curious old antiquary whose labors in the field of balladry have placed me under so great a debt of gratitude to him. But after I had searched in vain for somewhat more than an hour one of the keepers of the place told me that in compliance with Ritson’s earnest desire while living, that antiquary’s grave was immediately after the interment of the body levelled down and left to the care of nature, with no stone to designate its location. So at the present time no one knows just where old Ritson’s grave is, only that within that vast enclosure where so many thousand souls sleep their last sleep the dust of the famous ballad-lover lies fast asleep in the bosom of mother earth.

  Ritson combined much pedantry with his scholarship; but he sought a far higher ideal of accuracy than is common among antiquaries, while he spared no pains in accumulating information. Sir Walter Scott wrote that “he had an honesty of principle about him which, if it went to ridiculous extremities, was still respectable from the soundness of the foundation.” But Scott did not overlook his friend’s peculiarities, and in verses written for the Bannatyne Club in 1823 he referred to “Little Ritson”

	As bitter as gall, and as sharp as a razor,
	And feeding on herbs as a Nebuchadnezzar.

Ritson’s impatience of inaccuracy led him to unduly underrate the labours of his contemporaries, and his suspicions of imposture were often unwarranted. But his irritability and eccentricity were mainly due to mental malady. He showed when in good health many generous instincts, and he cherished no personal animosity against those on whose published work he made his splenetic attacks. With Surtees, George Paton, Walter Scott, and his nephew he corresponded good-humouredly to the end. He produced his works with every typographical advantage, and employed Bewick and Stothard to illustrate many of them. It is doubtful if any of his literary ventures proved remunerative. In person, according to his friend Robert Smith, Ritson resembled a spider. A caricature of him by Gillray represents him in a tall hat and a long closely buttoned coat.

General

	In Theron’s form, mark Ritson next contend;
	Fierce, meagre, pale, no commentator’s friend.

  A man of acute observation, profound research, and great labour. These valuable attributes were unhappily combined with an eager irritability of temper, which induced him to treat antiquarian trifles with the same seriousness which men of the world reserve for matters of importance, and disposed him to drive controversies into personal quarrels, by neglecting, in literary debate, the courtesies of ordinary society. It ought to be said, however, by one who knew him well, that this irritability of disposition was a constitutional and physical infirmity, and that Ritson’s extreme attachment to the severity of truth corresponded to the vigour of his criticisms upon the labours of others.

  Hear how this puny worm lifts its feeble cry, to arraign the orders of nature, and scoff at the Omniscience, which, for wise purposes, though quite unknown to us, suffers it to crawl upon the earth…. Before taking leave of this nauseous performance, a few words remain to be added upon the style, in which so many absurdities are delivered. We do not mean to go farther than the external qualities,—the matchless ludicrousness of the orthography and typography…. We now most joyfully leave the “Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food” to that oblivion which awaits it; and from which its singularities, however gross and wicked, are of too dull a cast to save it.

  Ritson is the oddest, but most honest of all our antiquarians.

  Mr. Joseph Ritson, unilluminated by a particle of taste or fancy, and remarkable only for the increasing drudgery with which he dedicated his life to one of the humblest departments of literary antiquities, and for the bitter insolence and foul abuse with which he communicated his dull acquisitions to the public…. Whoever is acquainted with that strange, but not totally useless, book [“Bibliographia Poetica”], will wonder how it was possible for a man, with such a fund of materials before him, to compile a work so utterly lifeless and stupid, so uncheared by one single ray of light, or one solitary flower admitted even by chance from the numerous and varied gardens of poetry over which he had been travelling! But, poor unhappy spirit, thou art gone! Perhaps thy restless temper was diseased: and mayst thou find peace in the grave!

  SYCORAX was this demon; and a cunning and clever demon was he! I will cease speaking metaphorically, but SYCORAX was a man of ability in his way. He taught literary men, in some measure, the value of careful research and faithful quotation; in other words, he taught them to speak the truth as they found her; and doubtless for this he merits not the name of demon, unless you allow me the privilege of a Grecian. That SYCORAX loved the truth must be admitted; but that he loved no one else so much as himself to speak the truth, must also be admitted.

  Ritson, the late antiquary of poetry (not to call him poetical) amazed the world by his vituperative railing at two authors of the finest taste in poetry, Warton and Percy; he carried criticism, as the discerning few had first surmised, to insanity itself; the character before us only approached it.

  As to the rabid Ritson, who can describe his vagaries? What great arithmetician can furnish an index to his absurdities, or what great decipherer furnish a key to the principles of these absurdities? In his very title-pages,—nay, in the most obstinate of ancient technicalities,—he showed his cloven foot to the astonished reader. Some of his many works were printed in Pail-Mall; now, as the world is pleased to pronounce that word Pel-Mel, thus and no otherwise (said Ritson) it shall be spelled for ever. Whereas, on the contrary, some men would have said: The spelling is well enough, it is the public pronunciation which is wrong…. Volumes would not suffice to exhaust the madness of Ritson upon this subject. And there was this peculiarity in his madness, over and above its clamorous ferocity,—that, being no classical scholar (a meagre self-taught Latinist and no Grecian at all), though profound as a black-letter scholar, he cared not one straw for ethnographic relations of words, nor for unity of analogy, which are the principles that generally have governed reformers of spelling. He was an attorney and moved constantly under the monomaniac idea that an action lay on behalf of misused letters, mutes, liquids, vowels, and diphthongs, against somebody or other (John Doe, was it, or Richard Roe?) for trespass on any rights of theirs which an attorney, might trace, and of course for any direct outrage upon their persons. Yet no man was more systematically an offender in both ways than himself,—tying up one leg of a quadruped word and forcing it to run upon three, cutting off noses and ears if he fancied that equity required it, and living in eternal hot water with a language which he pretended eternally to protect.

  A man of ample reading and excellent taste in selection, and who, real scholar as he was, always drew from original sources.

  Neither Percy nor Warton escaped the strictures of Ritson, that “black-letter dog,” a tame and affected pedant of no critical importance, but far more careful as an editor than either of them.

  I do not wonder that Ritson and Percy quarrelled. It was his misfortune that Ritson quarrelled with everybody. Yet Ritson was a scrupulously honest man; he was so vulgarly sturdy in his honesty that he would make all folk tell the truth even though the truth were of such a character as to bring the blush of shame to the devil’s hardened cheek.

  Joseph Ritson possessed all the enthusiasm, and even more than the share of eccentricity, which so often accompanies the genius of the antiquary…. Violent in all his notions,—religious, moral, and political, as well as critical,—he was always ready to fall upon others whose opinions were at variance with truth, or at least with his own view of it. As his learning was large and strictly accurate, and his style incisive, he was respected and disliked; and at different times Warburton, Johnson, Warton, and Steevens all felt the edge of his criticism. It will readily be supposed that Percy’s ideas of the duties of an editor did not commend themselves to Ritson.