P. 394, 1. 30. Wentworth Dillon, earl of Roscommon (1633-1684), was the author of the Essay on Translated Verse, which, with great inequality of merit, contains not a few vigorous passages. Some of the best lines in the Essay on Criticism were suggested by, not to say borrowed from, passages in Roscommon's poem. John, Lord Sheffield (1649–1721), wrote this Essay on the Art of Poetry, suggested, probably, by Boileau's L'Art Poétique, and also an Essay on Satire, in which he was said to have been helped by Dryden. The Essay on Poetry was much commended both by Dryden and Pope; the latter quotes in the Essay on Criticism the second line of Sheffield's poem,—

'Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.'

All the poems here named are of that critico-aesthetic class, for which Horace's Ars Poetica supplied the inspiration and the prototype.

VII.

TALES AND ALLEGORIES.

P. 398, 1. 21. So Pope, in his beautiful description of the red man's heaven, paints it as

'Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,

Some happier island in the watery waste,

Where slaves once more their native land behold,

No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.' Essay on Man. P. 399, l. 10. Cowley's Essay On the Danger of Procrastination—' There's no fooling with life when it is once turned beyond forty.' (Morley.)

P. 400, 1. 5. A verb, such as dictate,' which can not have a person for its object in the active voice, can never have a person for its subject in the passive. Bishop Hurd says, 'if used at all, it should be dictated to;' but that is not precisely Addison's meaning. All that he wished to say was, that the father's natural affection, no less than the rules of prudence, dictated that he should try to make himself beloved by his son.

P. 404, 1. II. The coarse word in the original is meant to convey the sarcastic suggestion that doctors, equally with soldiers, often put a premature end to human life.

P. 406. In the preceding number (omitted from this selection), Addison tells us that the circumstances which he has woven into the tale of Constantia and Theodosius were related to him by a French priest, with whom he was travelling in a stage coach. I hazard the conjecture that this tale suggested to Goldsmith his poem of 'The Hermit,' though the ending is different.

P. 410, l. 6. Noviciate,' which is the state of a novice, or the period during which a person remains a novice, is here wrongly used.

P. 411, l. 9. The materials for the story of Herod and Mariamne are taken from Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews.

P. 415, 1. 11. The last petition I heard.' It should not be 'I,' but 'Menippus,' for Addison is not relating the fable in the first person, as in the Vision of Mirza.

P. 416, 1. 4.

P. 419, 1. 13.

The passages quoted are, Il. viii. 69, Æn. xii. 725.

See No. 445, page 98.

1. 22. Daniel v. 27.

P. 421, l. 11. This story forms the plot of Aristophanes' comedy, or morality, of Plutus.

VIII.

VARIA.

P. 427, No. 50. Of this paper Swift wrote to Stella,-'Yesterday it (the Spectator) was made of a noble hint I gave (Steele) long ago for his Tatlers, about an Indian supposed to write his travels into England. I repent he ever had it. I intended to have written a book on that subject. I believe he has spent it all in one paper, and all the under hints there are mine too.' Imagining that the paper was by Steele, whereas it was really written by Addison, and that it was suggested by the noble hint' which he had given, Swift seems to have fancied, his memory playing him false, that the 'under hints' were also his own original property; but the presence of the Addisonian humour throughout the paper is too evident to permit of a doubt as to its true parentage. The 'hint' has been abundantly followed up by various writers; witness the Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu, Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, and Morier's Hadji Baba in England.

1. I. The four kings here mentioned were chiefs of the Iroquois Indians who had been persuaded by the British colonists to come and pay their respects to Queen Anne. (Morley.) In a book called 'Some Account of the English Stage from 1660 to 1830' (Bath 1832), it is stated that on the 24th April, 1710, the four kings went to see Macbeth at the Haymarket; but the 'gods' in the gallery raised such a clamour and disturbance, because, they said, they had paid their money to see the Indian kings, and their majesties, being seated in a retired box, were hardly visible, that the play could not proceed; at last four chairs were brought and placed upon the stage, and the kings, with great good-humour, consented to sit upon them, so as to become the observed of all observers.

P. 429, 1. 37.

P. 430, I. I.

81, page 256.

Men and women have changed parts since then!
The allusion is to the patches then so much worn; see No.

P. 432, 1.27. Dorset became Lord Chamberlain at the Revolution, and had the unwelcome duty imposed upon him of depriving Dryden of his post

and pension as poet laureate. It is said indeed by Lord Macaulay (Hist. of England, iii. 24), that Dorset gave to the poet during his life out of his own pocket an annual pension equal to that which he had lost. His authorities are,-I. An assertion to that effect made by Prior in the dedication of his Works to the son of this Lord Dorset, an assertion made at the time when Prior was a Whig (he afterwards ratted), and a personal and political opponent of Dryden; 2. Some scurrilous lines by that dull poet and furious partisan, Sir Richard Blackmore, written in 1695, intimating that Dorset'Despised the flatterer [Dryden], but the poet fed.'

It is likely enough that Prior had no other authority for his assertion than the loose words of Blackmore, which need not imply more than that Dryden experienced the occasional bounty of Dorset, a thing by no means improbable. On the other side we have several distinct declarations of Dryden that he was pressed by poverty since, and because of, the loss of his pension. It becomes therefore a question between the veracity of Dryden and that of Prior, and, of the two, we prefer to believe Dryden.

1. 36. Alceste, the misanthrope of Molière's play, prefers to a fantastic and affected sonnet which its author has just recited, an old song, such as that which I am going to repeat to you: '

vigour than 'fire and faggot' were employed on the other side in the reign of Mary. See Hallam's Const. Hist. vol. i.

1. 30. The father of Alexander the Great. Demosthenes, in his great oration for the Crown, frequently alludes to the disastrous effects which the corruption of Æschines and other Athenians by Macedonian gold had had upon the interests of the city.

P. 448, 1..38. The Cartesians are the followers of the philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), one of whose leading metaphysical distinctions was, that while the fundamental attribute of material substance was Extension, the fundamental attribute of Mind was Thought, because by this attribute Mind was revealed to itself. (Lewes' History of Philosophy.)

P. 449, 1. 14. Speaking of a Puritan wrangler, Butler says (Hudibras, Part iii. 2, 443)—

'But still his tongue ran on, the less

Of weight it bore, with greater ease;
And with its everlasting clack,

Set all men's ears upon the rack.'

1. 23. In a volume of the collection of ballads, left by Anthony à Wood to the Bodleian Library, there is an old black-letter copy of this ballad, without date, 'printed for F. Coles in Wine Street near Hatton Garden.' It begins

'In Bath a wanton wife did dwell

As Caucer he doth write,

Who did in pleasure spend her days

In many a fond delight.'

She dies and presents herself at the gate of heaven; her knock is answered by Adam, who objects to open to her; she gives him a shrewish answer; he runs away, and a string of other Biblical personages come up one after another, all endeavouring to turn her away; but her curst tongue is too much for them all. Thomas the apostle comes up in his turn; and then comes the quoted verse :

'I think, quoth Thomas, women's tongues

Of aspen leaves be made:

Thou unbelieving wretch, quoth she,

All is not true that's said.'

St. Paul and St. Peter come up; she scolds and discomfits them both; at last Christ comes up; and after earnest entreaty and fervent expressions of contrition, she is allowed to pass through the gate.

P. 453, l. I. Sir Paul Rycaut, the son of a London merchant, attended Lord Winchilsea as secretary to the embassy during five years which that nobleman passed as ambassador to the Porte at Constantinople. After that he was appointed British consul at Smyrna, and lived there many years. He was a man of an active inquiring turn of mind, and when, returning to England for a time after the recall of the embassy, he published in 1669 his