Publisher's Synopsis
Joseph Addison's enthusiasm for ballad poetry (Spectators 70, 74, 85) was not a sheer novelty. He had a ringing English precedent in Sidney, whom he quotes. And he may have had one in Jonson; at least he thought he had. He cited Dryden and Dorset as collectors and readers of ballads; and he might have cited others. He found comfort in the fact that Molière's Misanthrope was on his side. The modern or broadside version of Chevy Chase, the one which Addison quoted, had been printed, with a Latin translation, in the third volume of Dryden's Miscellany (1702) and had been appreciated along with The Nut-Brown Maid in an essay Of the Old English Poets and Poetry in The Muses Mercury for June, 1707. The feelings expressed in Addison's essays on the ballads were part of the general patriotic archaism which at that time was moving in rapport with cyclic theories of the robust and the effete, as in Temple's essays, and was complicating the issue of the classical ancients versus the moderns. Again, these feelings were in harmony with the new Longinianism of boldness and bigness, cultivated in one way by Dennis and in another by Addison himself in later Spectators. The tribute to the old writers in Rowe's Prologue to Jane Shore (1713) is of course not simply the result of Addison's influence.
