The article focuses on new ballads included in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry compiled to capture the public imagination and to draw their attention to the old ballads. The poets of the Enlightenment, in particular coeditor of Percy’s Reliques William Shenstone, composed their own ballads in imitation of ancient ones mostly of Celtic origin. The study concluded that the editors of Reliques aimed at reproducing the poetics of the ancient ballad highlighting the traditional poetic devices (inversion, alliteration, parallelism, etc.) prevalent in old poetry.