The essay, nevertheless, shows sufficient continuity with the earlier tradition of parody ballad criticism--for it begins by alluding to the _Spectator's_ critiques of Shakespeare, Milton, and _Chevy Chase_, and near the end of the first number slides into a remark that "one of the _Scribleri_, a descendant of the famous _Martinus_, has expressed his suspicions of the text being corrupted." A page or two of irony concerning the "plain and simple" opening of the poem seems to hark back to something more subtle in the Augustans than the Wagstaffian derision, no doubt to Pope's victory over Philips in a _Guardian_ on pastorals. "There is no task more difficult to a Poet, than that of _Rejection_. Ovid, among the ancients, and _Dryden_, among the moderns, were perhaps the most remarkable for the want of it."[12]
The interest of these little pieces is historical[13] in a fairly strict sense. Their value is indirect, half accidental, a glancing revelation of ideas concerning simplicity, feeling, genius, the primitive, the historical which run steadily beneath all the ripples during the century that moves from "classic" to "romantic." Not all of Addison's parodists taken together muster as much fun, as such whimsical charm, as Addison himself in a single paragraph such as the one on "accidental readings" which opens the _Spectator_ on the _Children in the Wood_. But this passage, as it happens, requires only a slightly sophistical application to be taken as a cue to a useful attitude in our present reading. "I once met with a Page of _Mr. Baxter_ under a Christmas Pye.... I might likewise mention a Paper-Kite, from which I have received great Improvement."
[Footnote 1: The chief authorities for the history which I am summarizing are W. L. Phelps, _The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement_, Boston, 1893, Chapter VII; E. K. Broadus, "Addison's Influence on the Development of Interest in Folk-Poetry in the Eighteenth Century," _Modern Philology_, VIII (July, 1910), 123-134; S. B. Hustvedt, _Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain During the Eighteenth Century_, New York, 1916.]
[Footnote 2: "Addison's Contribution to Criticism," in R. F. Jones _et al._, _The Seventeenth Century_ (Stanford, 1951), p. 329.]