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] The essay, nevertheless, shows sufficient continuity with the earlier tradition of parody ballad criticism--for it begins by alluding to the _Spectator's_ critiques of Shakespeare, Milton, and _Chevy Chase_, and near the end of the first number slides into a remark that "one of the _Scribleri_, a descendant of the famous _Martinus_, has expressed his suspicions of the text being corrupted." A page or two of irony concerning the "plain and simple" opening of the poem seems to hark back to something more subtle in the Augustans than the Wagstaffian derision, no doubt to Pope's victory over Philips in a _Guardian_ on pastorals. "There is no task more difficult to a Poet, than that of _Rejection_. Ovid, among the ancients, and _Dryden_, among the moderns, were perhaps the most remarkable for the want of it."[12]