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 in his own apology for the "Simplicity of the Stile" there is sufficient prescription for all those improvements that either a Ramsay or a Percy were soon actually to undertake. And some of the Virgilian passages in _Chevy Chase_ which Addison picked out for admiration were not what Sidney had known but the literary invention of the more modern broadside writer.
Nevertheless, the two _Spectators_ on _Chevy Chase_ and the sequel on the _Children in the Wood_ were startling enough. The general announcement was ample, unabashed, soaring--unmistakable evidence of a new polite taste for the universally valid utterances of the primitive heart. The accompanying measurement according to the epic rules and models was not a qualification of the taste, but only a somewhat awkward theoretical dimension and justification.
It is impossible that any thing should be universally tasted and approved by a Multitude, tho' they are only the Rabble of a Nation, which hath not in it some peculiar Aptness to please and gratify the Mind of Man.... an ordinary Song or Ballad that is the Delight of the common People, cannot fail to please all such Readers as are not unqualified for the Entertainment by their Affectation or Ignorance.
Professor Clarence D. Thorpe is surely correct in his view of Addison as a "grandfather" of such that would come in romantic aesthetics for the next hundred years.[2] Not that Addison invents anything; but he catches every current whisper and swells it to the journalistic audibility. Here, if we take Addison at his word, are the key ideas for Wordsworth's Preface on the language of rustic life, for Tolstoy's ruthless reduction of taste to the peasant norm. Addison went on to urge what was perfectly just, that the old popular ballads ought to be read and liked; at the same time he pushed his praise to a rather wild extreme, and he made some comic comparisons between _Chevy Chase_ and Virgil and Homer.