Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/470

 466 Hughes buted to Swift. 4 Such uses of the name "Wagstaff" as a nom de plume appropriate to a satiric author, one used perhaps three times by Swift himself, might easily suggest a literary hoax consisting of the use, or misuse, of a real person of that name after he was safely dead as a peg on which to hang unclaimed and unsavory satires of greater men. The Memoir, generally accepted as authentic, which was prefixed to the supposedly posthumous volume of Dr. William Wagstaffe's Miscellaneous Works (1725) Mr. James Crossley has attributed to Arbuthnot. 5 Others have attributed to Arbuthnot and Swift certain other of the pamphlets in the volume as well as the Comment on Tom Thumb. 6 The sug- gestion would seem to be that the Scriblerus Club was respon- sible for the hoax, if such it was. Another point which might be of interest both in connection with this controversy, and also with the subject of Fielding's models, is the possibility that he used not the octavo pamphlet of 1711, the Comment upon the History of Tom Thumb, but a folio volume which appeared apparently in 1729, the year before the first version of Fielding's play, entitled: Thomas Redivivus: or, a compleat History of the Life and marvellous Actions of Tom Thumb. In three Tomes. Interspersed with that ingenious Comment of the late Dr. WagstaJJ: and Annotations by Several Hands. To which is prefixed historical and critical Remarks on the Life and Writings of the Author. London, 1729. folio. 1 This work is noted in Lowndes' Manual, in Adams, Dictionary of English Literature, and in the following passage by Ritson, dealing with the History of Tom Thumb: "Mr. Hearne was probably led to fix upon this monarch [King Edgar] by some ridiculous lines added, about his own time, to introduce a spurious second and third part. See the common editions of Aldermary church-yard, etc. or that entitled 'Thomas Redivivus . . . [The same as above.] . . . 1729. Folio.' Dr. Wagstaffs comment was written to ridicule that of Mr. Addison in the Spectator, upon the ballad of Chevy-Chace, and is inserted in his Works." 8 The title does not appear in the catalogue of the British Museum, nor in Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica; nor have I been able to find any further description of the nature and contents of the work. 3 Aitken, Life of Sir Richard Steele, (London, 1889) I, 300 n. 4 Vid. Bibliography to the chapter on Swift by Aitken in the Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit., Vol. IX, p. 510. 6 Notes and Queries, 3rd S., Vol. II, p. 132. 6 Notes and Queries, 3rd. S., Vol. I, 381-84; Vol. II, 253-54. 7 Lowndes, The Bibliographers' Manual of English Literature, (Lond., 1865) V, 2681. 8 Ritson, Pieces of A ncient Popular Poetry, (London, 1791), p. 98. See contemporary notice in Monthly Chronicle, For the Year MDCCXXIX, IE (Feb., 1729), 46.