The interest of these little pieces is historical[13] in a fairly strict sense. Their value is indirect, half accidental, a glancing revelation of ideas concerning simplicity, feeling, genius, the primitive, the historical which run steadily beneath all the ripples during the century that moves from "classic" to "romantic." Not all of Addison's parodists taken together muster as much fun, as such whimsical charm, as Addison himself in a single paragraph such as the one on "accidental readings" which opens the _Spectator_ on the _Children in the Wood_. But this passage, as it happens, requires only a slightly sophistical application to be taken as a cue to a useful attitude in our present reading. "I once met with a Page of _Mr. Baxter_ under a Christmas Pye.... I might likewise mention a Paper-Kite, from which I have received great Improvement." William K. Wimsatt, Jr. Yale University NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION [Footnote 1: The chief authorities for the history which I am summarizing are W. L. Phelps, _The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement_, Boston, 1893, Chapter VII; E. K. Broadus, "Addison's Influence on the Development of Interest in Folk-Poetry in the Eighteenth Century," _Modern Philology_, VIII (July, 1910), 123-134; S. B. Hustvedt, _Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain During the Eighteenth Century_, New York, 1916.] [Footnote 2: "Addison's Contribution to Criticism," in R. F. Jones _et al._, _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.]