the works of Edmund Spenser, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other Elizabethan writers – Shakespeare, for example, alludes to the poem when, in Henry V, Act V, sc. i, Fluellen says "You called me yesterday mountain-squire, but I will make you to-day a squire of low degree" – but as the 17th century advanced the poem fell into neglect. In the mid-18th century Thomas Percy acquired the famous Folio Manuscript, with its version of The Squire of Low Degree, and came to the mistaken conclusion that the poem was one of the romances satirised by Chaucer in his "Tale of Sir Thopas", and must therefore have been written in the 14th century. He communicated these opinions together with an extract from The Squire of Low Degree to his friend Thomas Warton, who included them in the 1762 edition of his Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser. Percy planned to edit The Squire as part of a proposed collection of Ancient English and Scottish Poems, but this plan fell through, and it was left to the medievalist Joseph Ritson to make the Copland text available to general readers in 1802 in his Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës [sic]. Walter Scott refers to the poem in several of his novels, and it particularly influences his Quentin Durward and The Fair Maid of Perth, in each of which the hero finds himself in a situation so parallel to that of the squire that he cannot help identifying with him. Thomas Love Peacock and George Eliot both used quotations from The Squire as epigraphs – to chapter 3 of Crotchet Castle and chapter 62 of Middlemarch respectively. The bibliographer William Carew Hazlitt produced another edition of the Copland text in his Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England (1864–1866), and shortly afterwards the Folio MS text was published for the first time by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall in their edition of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript (1867–1868). James Russell Lowell wrote that the romance "Has passages that are unsurpassed in simple beauty by anything in our earlier poetry." William Edward Mead, in his standard edition of the romance, published in 1904, expressed an opinion closer to that of most modern critics when he said that We can praise The Squyr of Lowe Degre only with considerable reservations, and do not seek a place for it among the great creative poems of the