An anonymous satirical writer who was later identified, on somewhat uncertain authority, as the Tory Dr. William Wagstaffe was very prompt in responding. His _Comment Upon the History of Tom Thumb_ appeared in 1711 perhaps within a week or two of the third guilty _Spectator_ (June 7) and went into a second edition, "Corrected," by August 18. An advertisement in the _Post Man_ of that day referred to yet a third "sham" edition, "full of errors."[3] The writer alludes to the author of the _Spectators_ covertly ("we have had an _enterprising Genius_ of late") and quotes all three of the ballad essays repeatedly. The choice of _Tom Thumb_ as the _corpus vile_ was perhaps suggested by Swift's momentary "handling" of it in _A Tale of a Tub_.[4] The satirical method is broad and easy and scarcely requires comment. This is the attack which was supposed by Addison's editor Henry Morley (_Spectator_, 1883, I, 318) to have caused Addison to "flinch" a little in his revision of the ballad essays. It is scarcely apparent that he did so. The last paragraph of the third essay, on the _Children in the Wood_, is a retort to some other and even prompter unfriendly critics--"little conceited Wits of the Age," with their "little Images of Ridicule." 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]