R FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago
LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton University
SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota
ERNEST C. MOSSNER, University of Texas
JAMES SUTHERLAND, University College, London
H. T. SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California, Los Angeles

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

EDNA C. DAVIS, Clark Memorial Library

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The Augustan Reprint Society regrets to announce the death
of one of its founders and editors, Edward Niles Hooker.
The editors hope, in the near future, to issue a volume
in his memory.

* * * * *

INTRODUCTION

Joseph Addison's enthusiasm for ballad poetry (_Spectators_ 70, 74, 85)
was not a sheer novelty. He had a ringing English precedent in Sidney,
whom he quotes. And he may have had one in Jonson; at least he thought
he had. He cited Dryden and Dorset as collectors and readers of ballads;
and he might have cited others. He found comfort in the fact that
Moliere's Misanthrope was on his side. The modern or broadside version
of _Chevy Chase_, the one which Addison quoted, had been printed, with a
Latin translation, in the third volume of Dryden's _Miscellany_ (1702)
and had been appreciated along with _The Nut-Brown Maid_ in an essay _Of
the Old English Poets and Poetry_ in _The Muses Mercury_ for June, 1707.
The feelings expressed in Addison's essays on the ballads were part of
the general patriotic archaism which at that time was moving in rapport
with cyclic theories of the robust and the effete, as in Temple's
essays, and was complicating the issue of the classical ancients versus
the moderns. Again, these feelings were in harmony with the new
Longinianism of boldness and bigness, cultivated in one way by Dennis
and in another by Addison himself in later _Spectators_. The tribute to
the old writers in Rowe's Prologue to _Jane Shore_ (1713) is of course
not simply the result of Addison's influence.[1]

Those venerable ancient Song-Enditers
Soar'd many a Pitch above our modern Writers.

It is true also that Addison exhibits, at least in the first of the two
essays on _Chevy Chase_, a degree of the normal Augustan condescension
to the archaic--the vision which informs the earlier couplet poem on the
English poets. Both in his quotation from Sidney ("... being so evil
apparelled in the Dust and Cobweb of that uncivil Age, what would it
work trimmed in the gorgeous Eloquence of _Pindar_?") and