Ritson was a painstaking, accurate, irritable, and exceptionally quarrelsome scholar, whose editions of metrical romances and ballads still have value. His eccentricities, which increased with age, culminated in mental derangement, and he died insane. One of his more reputable eccentricities was vegetarianism, which led him to write An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (1802).
Note from Joseph Ritson, from Literary Anecdotes