Parodies of Ballad Criticism

m>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,