r "little Images of Ridicule."

But Addison is not the only target of "Wagstaffe's" _Comment_. "Sir
B------ B--------" and his "Arthurs" are another, and "Dr. B--tly"
another. One of the most eloquent moments in the _Comment_ occurs near
the end in a paragraph on what the author conceives to be the follies of
the historical method. The use of the slight vernacular poem to parody
the Bentleyan kind of classical scholarship was to be tried by Addison
himself in _Spectator_ 470 (August 29, 1712) and had a French
counterpart in the _Chef d'oeuvre d'un inconnu_, 1714. A later example
was executed by Defoe's son-in-law Henry Baker in No. XIX of his
_Universal Spectator_, February 15, 1729.[5] And that year too provided
the large-scale demonstration of the _Dunciad Variorum_. The very
"matter" of Tom Thumb reappeared under the same light in Fielding's
_Tragedy of Tragedies or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great with
the Annotations of H. Scriblerus Secundus_, 1731. Addison's criticism of
the ballads was scarcely a legitimate object for this kind of attack,
but Augustan satire and parody were free and hospitable genres, always
ready to entertain more than one kind of "bard and blockhead side by
side."[6]

No less a person than George Canning (as a schoolboy) was the author of
the second of the two parodies reproduced in the present volume. A group
of precocious Eton lads, Canning, J. Hookham Frere, John Smith, and
Robert (Bobus) Smith, during the years 1786-1787 produced forty octavo
numbers of a weekly paper called _The Microcosm_. They succeeded in
exciting some interest among the literati,[7] were coming out in a
"Second Edition" as early as the Christmas vacation of 1786,[8] and in
the end sold their copyright for fifty pounds to their publisher,
Charles Knight of Windsor.[9] Canning wrote Nos. XI and XII (February
12, 1787), a critique of the "Epic Poem" concerning "The Reformation of
the Knave of Hearts."[10] This essay in two parts, running for nearly as
many pages as Wagstaffe's archetypal pamphlet, is a much more systematic
and theoretically ambitious effort than any predecessor. _The Knave of
Hearts_ is praised for its _beginning_ (_in medias res_), its _middle_
(all "bustle and business"), and its _end_ (full of _Poetical Justice_
and superior _Moral_). The earlier writers had directly labored the
resemblance of the ballads to passages in Homer and Virgil. That method
is now hardly invoked at all. Criticism ac