...stanzas, one by Dr. Johnson, the other from "Babes in the Wood." Johnson's contemptible stanza goes: I put my hat upon my head, And walked into the Strand,...there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand. The admirable stanza reads: These pretty Babes with hand in hand Went wandering up and down; But never...

...of ballads, made popular by the publication of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (17 65): I put my hat upon my head, And walked into the Strand;...there I met another man, Whose hat was in his hand. (Johnson, 1964: 269) Equally, he could use parody in the orher direction, to artack the unthinking...

...Here is Johnson's well-known stanza, as Wordsworth quoted it: "I put my hat upon my head, And walk'd into the Strand, And there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand." To advance his argument that what made this stanza bad poetry was not simple form or natural language...

...described in Celeste Langan's story of nineteenth-century England was being repeated in the Indies: I put my hat upon my head And walked into the Strand, And there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand.168 The meeting of a bourgeois and a beggar through the common language of the public road might...

...of life and nature. Such verses have been triumphed over in parodies of which Dr Johnson's stanza22 is a fair specimen. I put my hat upon my head, And walk'd into the Strand, And there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand. Immediately under these...

...Here is Dr. Samuel Johnson's parody of the predictable meters and restrained manner of the ballad: I put my hat upon my head And walked into the strand,...there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand. Johnson shows us the lows, step by stolid step. But the heights of the ballad form are reached in "Sir...