ABSTRACT
Addison’s essays of 1711 on “Chevy Chase” and “The Children in the Wood” mark the beginning of what became the “folkloristic” study of English popular songs. Addison appreciates these ballads of the “common people” for what he terms their “naturalness,” accessibility, and universality. His attention to these songs stands against the contemporary backdrop of an intellectual debate both in Britain and on the continent between “the Ancients,” proponents of the superiority of the Greek and Latin classical inheritance, and “the Moderns,” proponents of a post-Renaissance literature, science, and worldview. To a degree, Addison’s remarks bridge the two sides of the controversy. This move in itself situates him with “the Moderns,” however, as he legitimizes these usually disparaged vernacular songs by placing them in the company of Virgil and Homer. Addison has on the one hand a preoccupation with an heroic national character as he reads in the ballads an English voice for epic heroism. At the same time, he seeks to identify a universal pathos expressing a “natural” and native-born “humanity” that he paradoxically posits as profoundly English. The opening quote in “No. 70” is from the Epistles of Horace (2.1.63): “Sometimes the public sees the right.” The translations of Virgil’s Aeneid in “No. 70” are from John Dryden’s edition of 1697. In “No. 85,” Addison quotes Horace’s Odes (3.4.9–13). Translated by Thomas Creech (1659–1700), the lines are: In lofty Vultur’s rising grounds Without my Nurse Apulia’s bounds When young, and tir’d with sport and play, And bound with pleasing sleep I lay, Doves cover’d me with myrtle boughs And with soft murmurs sweetned my repose.
