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 according to the epic rules of Aristotle had been well enough illustrated by Addison on _Paradise Lost_ (see especially _Spectator_ 267) if not by Addison on ballads. The decline of simple respect for the "Practice and Authority" of the ancient models during the neo-classic era, the general advance of something like reasoning in criticism, finds one of its quainter testimonials in the Eton schoolboy's cleverness. He would show by definition and strict deduction that _The Knave of Hearts_ is a "_due and proper Epic Poem_," having as "good right to that title, from its adherence to prescribed rules, as any of the celebrated master-pieces of antiquity." The post-Ramblerian date of the performance and a further if incidental aim of the satire--a facetious removal from the Augustan coffeehouse conversation--can be here and there felt in a heavy roll of the periods, a doubling and redoubling of the abstractions.[11]