Parodies of Ballad Criticism | Page 4

The Seventeenth Century (Stanford, 1951), p. 329.]
[Footnote 3: Edward B. Reed, "Two Notes on Addison," Modern Philology, VI (October, 1908), 187. The attribution of A Comment Upon Tom Thumb and other satirical pieces to the Dr. William Wagstaffe who died in 1725 as Physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital depends entirely upon the fact that a collection of such pieces was published, with an anonymous memoir, in 1726 under the title Miscellaneous Works of Dr. William Wagstaffe. Charles Dilke, Papers of a Critic (London, 1875), I, 369-382. argues that not Wagstaffe but Swift was the author of some of the pieces in the volume. The case for Wagstaffe is put by Nicholas Moore in a letter to The Athenaeum, June 10, 1882 and in his article on Wagstaffe in the DNB. Paul V. Thompson, "Swift and the Wagstaffe Papers," Notes and Queries, 175 (1938), 79, supports the notion of Wagstaffe as an understrapper of Swift. The negative part of Dilke's thesis is perhaps the more plausible. A Comment Upon Tom Thumb, as Dilke himself confesses (Papers, p. 377), scarcely sounds very much like Swift.]
[Footnote 4: Text, p. 6. The nursery rhyme Tom Thumb, His Life and Death, 1630, and the augmented History of Tom Thumb, c. 1670, are printed with introductory remarks by W. C. Hazlitt, Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England, II (London, 1866), 166-250.]
[Footnote 5: Cf. George R. Potter, "Henry Baker, F.R.S. (1698-1774)," Modern Philology, XXIX (1932), 305. Nathan Drake, The Gleaner, I (London, 1811), 220 seems mistaken in his remark that Baker's Scriblerian commentary (upon the nursery rhyme "Once I was a Batchelor, and lived by myself") was the model for later mock-ballad-criticisms.]
[Footnote 6: For another early instance of our genre and a very pure one, see an anonymous Cambridge correspondent's critique of the burlesque broadside ballad of "Moor of Moore-Hall and the Dragon of Wantley," in Nathaniel Mist's Weekly Journal (second series), September 2, 1721, reproduced by Roger P. McCutcheon, "Another Burlesque of Addison's Ballad Criticism," Studies in Philology, XXXIII (October, 1926), 451-456.]
[Footnote 7: Diary & Letters of Madame d'Arblay (London, 1904-1905), III, 121-122, 295: November 28, 1786; July 29, 1787; William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More (London, 1834), II, 46, letter from W. W. Pepys, December 31, 1786.]
[Footnote 8: Advertisement inserted before No. I in a collected volume dated 1787 (Yale 217. 304g).]
[Footnote 9: The source of the anecdote seems to be William Jordan, National Portrait Gallery (London, 1831), II, 3, quoting a communication from Charles Knight the publisher, son of Charles Knight of Windsor.
The present reprint of Nos. XI and XII of The Microcosm is from the "Second" octavo collected edition, Windsor, 1788. The Microcosm had reappeared at least seven times by 1835.]
[Footnote 10: Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1951), are unable to find an earlier printed source for this rhyme than the European Magazine, I (April, 1782), 252.]
[Footnote 11: No. XXXVI of The Microcosm is a letter from Capel Lofft defending the "Middle Style" of Addison in contrast to the more modern Johnsonian eloquence. Robert Bell, The Life of the Rt. Hon. George Canning (London, 1846), pp. 48-54, in a helpful account of The Microcosm, stresses its general fidelity to Spectator style and themes.]
[Footnote 12: Canning's critique closes with an appendix of three and a half pages alluding to the Eton Shrovetide custom of writing Latin verses, known as the "Bacchus." See H. C. Maxwell Lyte, A History of Eton College (London, 1911), pp. 146-147.]
[Footnote 13: As late as the turn of the century the trick was still in a manner feasible. The anonymous author of Literary Leisure, or the Recreations of Solomon Saunter, Esq. (1799-1800) divides two numbers, VIII and XV, between other affairs and a Shandyesque argument about the nursery charm for the hiccup "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper." This author was most likely not Byron's assailant Hewson Clarke (born 1787, author of The Saunterer in 1804), as asserted in the Catalogue of the Hope Collection (Oxford, 1865), p. 128.
A historical interest may be not only retrospective but contemporary. The reader of the present volume will appreciate "How to Criticize a Poem (In the Manner of Certain Contemporary Poets)", a critique of the mnemonic rhyme "Thirty days hath September," in the New Republic, December 6, 1943.]
* * * * * * * * *
A
COMMENT
upon the
HISTORY
of
Tom Thumb.
----Juvat immemorata ferentem Ingenuis oculis[que] legi manibus[que] teneri. Hor.
LONDON,
Printed for J. Morphew near Stationers-Hall. 1711. Price 3 d.

A COMMENT
upon the HISTORY
of TOM THUMB.
It is a surprising thing that in an Age so Polite as this, in which we have such a Number of Poets, Criticks and Commentators, some of the best things that are extant in our Language shou'd pass unobserv'd amidst a Croud of inferiour Productions, and lie so