6

fortune of £1,500 a-year, in the simple luxury of good eating.' Cf. Sat. and Ep. 6. 87:

"Hard task! to hit the palate of such guests,

When Oldfield loves what Dartineuf detests.'

1. 26. a whole bog barbecued. Pope: A West Indian term of gluttony; a hog roasted whole, stuffed with spice, and basted with Madeira wine.' 1. 28. As a comment on this line the reader may refer to Lord Chesterfield's Works, 5. 199.

1. 39. beccaficos. A term of the market, not of ornithology, under which several species of the genus Sylvia are included. S. hortensis is migratory, and spends the summer in our island. Willoughby, Ornithology, says, Beccafigos abound in Candy and Cyprus, where they are salted in great numbers, and transported into other countries. With us, in England, they are called Cyprus-birds, and are in no less esteem with our merchants for the delicacy of their taste, than they were of old with the Italians.' King, Art of Cookery (1708), gives, as the English equivalent, Chats.' 'The chats come to us in April and breed, and about autumn return to Afric.'

1. 42. Bedford-head. A celebrated eating-house in Southampton-street, Covent-garden. Cf. Sober Advice:

'When sharp with hunger, scorn you to be fed

Except on peachicks at the Bedford-head?'

1. 49. Avidien, or his wife. Mr. Edward Wortley Montagu and Lady Mary, according to Mr. Carruthers. Warburton naïvely remarks on this couplet, 'Our poet had the art of giving wit and dignity to his Billingsgate.'

1. 56. or heard their son was drown'd. The foolish and vicious conduct of their son was a severe distress to Lady Mary and Mr. Montagu. So incurable were his vicious propensities, that the wish falsely ascribed to them in the text would hardly have been unnatural, had it been true.

1. 60. souse. Johnson, 'to immerse in pickle,' Lord Harvey uses it in its metaphorical sense, Mem. 2. 150:

And little Titch with lower scandal souse.'

1. 75, seq. This passage is quoted by Chesterfield in Common Sense, Feb. 11, 1738; a paper which may be read as an illustration of the present Satire (Works, 5. 197).

1. 88. The sickness of long life, old age. Wakefield; Ter. Phormio, 4. 1. 9: 'Senectus ipsa morbus.'

1. 101. Lord Fanny. See Sat. and Ep. 1. 6, note.

1. 119. the new-built churches. Fifty new churches were erected to supply the place of those destroyed in the Fire. Stanhope, Reign of Queen Anne, p. 480: April, 1711, the Queen sent a message to the Commons recommending to them the supplying of new churches in the growing suburbs of London. In consequence of this, fifty new churches were directed to be

built within the bills of mortality, computing 4,750 souls to each church. The cost was defrayed by the duty on coals.' Cf. Dunciad, 2. 27.

fall. In 1732 some of these churches, being founded on boggy land,

or run up by fraudulent contractors, were ready to fall.

1. 120. repair Whitehall. This charge, the neglect of the public buildings by the Whig ministry, Pope had urged before-Dunciad, 3. 327:

'See under Ripley rise a new Whitehall,

While Jones' and Boyle's united labours fall.'

See Pope's note there.

1. 122. As M**o's was. Assumed by Warton to mean the Duke of Marlborough.

five per cent. By statute of 12 Anne the rate of interest had been reduced to five per cent., though in the public funds it continued to exceed seven per cent. A member stated in the House of Commons, in 1717, that money could be obtained, on good security, at four per cent.

1. 129. Thus Bethel spoke, who always speaks his thought, And always thinks the very thing he ought.

This is one of those couplets which betray their own artifice. The first line has been filled in after, and for the sake of the second.

1. 133. In South-sea days. In 1711 the floating debt of the Treasury had reached the vast sum of ten millions. In order to provide for it, Lord Oxford, then at the head of the Treasury, incorporated the proprietors of these debts as a Company with exclusive right to trade to the South Seas.

The lord of thousands.

surmis'd

1. 134. Pope had speculated in South-sea stock in 1720. It is not ascertained if he was a great loser. Johnson suggested that he only lost what he imagined himself to have gained. In a letter to Atterbury (Works, 7. 200, Roscoe's ed.) Pope speaks as if his loss had been considerable. Pope's pecuniary affairs have been minutely investigated by Mr. Dilke in the Athenæum, 1854.

6

now excis'd. Lord Hervey, Memoirs, 1. 159: That which gave rise to these commotions was a project of Sir R. Walpole to ease the landtax of a shilling in the pound, by turning the duty on tobacco and wine, then payable on importation, into inland duties, i.e. changing the customs on those two commodities into excises. By this scheme, joined to the continuation of the salt duty, he proposed to improve the revenue £500,000.' There was already an excise on malt, salt, and spirits, which in 1733 produced over three millions. Walpole's proposal therefore was only one for the extension of an existing duty, not for the creation of a new excise.

1. 135. In forest planted by a father's band, i.e. when he lived in Windsor Forest, where his father had purchased twenty acres of land.

K

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1. 136. five acres, i. e. at Twickenham. Carruthers, Life, p. 170: The scene of the poet's operations was small, not much larger than his favourite model, the garden of Alcinous, which comprised four acres. But the Twickenham five acres ultimately boasted, amid their winding walks and recesses, a shell temple, a large mount, a vineyard, two small mounts, a bowling-ground, a wilderness, a grove, an orangery, a garden-house, a kitchen-garden.'

1. 137. piddle. Johnson, Dict.: To pick at table; to feed squeamishly and without appetite.' Pope, ap. Spence, Anecdotes, p. 29: When I fell into the method of translating thirty or forty verses of Homer before I got up, and piddled with it the rest of the morning, it went on cosily enough.' Sat. and Ep., Prol. 164: 'pidling Tibalds.' It was known as an expression more peculiarly Pope's. As such it is introduced by Hawkins Browne into his parody on Pope, Pipe of Tobacco :

'Nor less the critick owns thy genial aid

While supperless he plies the piddling trade.'

1. 152. Tho' double tax'd. In 1722 an Act was passed for raising £100,000 a-year from the estates of Roman Catholics and Nonjurors. The family of the Pendrills was specially excepted in consideration of the devotion of their house to Charles II. in his escape after the battle of Worcester.

1. 154. standing armies. The maintenance of a body of troops had been one of the points always in dispute between William III. and his Parliament. The cry against standing armies was revived by the Tory opposition for factious purposes, and was almost annually dilated on by their orators in the House. Pulteney, in 1732, had made a speech on the topic. The preamble to the Mutiny Act, still annually passed, embodies the phrase, and points to the old jealousy of the 'country party.'

1. 159. sage Homer's rule. Odyssey, 15. 74.

1. 166. Vernon. Mrs. Vernon, the proprietor of Pope's house and garden at Twickenham.

1. 172. Twenty year. Lord Hervey, Mem. 1. 280: 'Expedition was never reckoned among the merits of the Court of Chancery; but whilst Lord King presided there (1725-1733) the delays of it were insupportable.'

1. 175. Shades that to Bacon could retreat afford. Gorhambury, Hertfordshire, twenty-two miles from London. The house was built by Sir Nicolas Bacon in 1568. It is described by Pennant in his Journey from Chester, 1782. It was pulled down by Lord Verulam, in 1785, when the present house was built.

1. 176. booby Lord. William, first Viscount Grimston. Having a quarrel with the Duchess of Marlborough, she revenged herself by reprinting a weak play of his. See Walpole, Royal and Noble Authors.

1. 177. Helmsley. 'Hemsley' in Warburton's ed., 1751, is an error. The estates in the parishes of Helmsley and Kirkby-Moorside, belonging to the Duke of Buckingham, were purchased by Sir Charles Duncombe, ancestor of Lord Feversham. The present house, now called Duncombe Park,' was built in 1718, from designs by Vanbrugh.

SATIRES AND EPISTLES. III.

(Imitation of Horace, 1 Ep. 1.)

1737.

To Lord Bolingbroke. Horace's Epistle is addressed to Mecenas.

1. 3. sabbath of my days. Born in 1688, Pope was now forty-nine. 1. 6. See modest Cibber now has left the stage. Ironical, Cibber having returned to the stage after a formal retirement in 1733.

1. 8. Hang their old trophies o'er the garden-gates. Warton has preserved the tradition that Pope's allusion was to the entrance to Lord Peterborough's lawn at Bevis Mount, near Southampton. Pope had paid his last visit to Bevis Mount in August 1735.

1. 9. ev'n in Brunswick's cause. quoted, as showing how little the authorized commentator appreciated the irony of his author. He says, 'In the former editions it was Britain's cause. But the terms are synonymous.'

Warburton's note on this deserves to be

1. 15. void of fire or force. Cf. Sat. and Ep. 1. 27: With Budgel's fire and force.'

You limp, like Blackmore. Johnson, Life of Blackmore, says that Pope, who was always sneering at Blackmore, might have condescended to learn from him the art of reasoning in verse, which he needed much in his Moral Essays. Cf. Sat. and Ep. 1. 23, note.

1. 26. And house with Montagne now, and now with Locke. Montagne, so in ed. 1740, and in Warburton's ed. 1751. Another instance of Pope's carelessness in spelling proper names. Cf. Sat. and Ep. 5. 82, Johnson for Jonson. Horace's fluctuation between the rival sects, or opposed systems, of Epicureanism and Stoicism is not represented by Pope's Montaigne and Locke, between whom there is no incompatibility.

Epilogue 1. 47, note.

1. 29. Free as young Lyttelton. See Sat. and Ep., 1. 40. That lock up all the functions of my soul. Not necessarily sleep, but all those hours in the twenty-four during which the life of the soul is not active. Pope used to tell of himself that he loved to escape from conversation to reading.

1. 45. can no wants endure what Pope intends to say.

=

cannot endure to want;' but this is not He means 6 can want nothing.'

1. 51. Mead. A distinguished physician then at the head of his profession. Mummius, Dunc. 4. 371, is said by Warton to be meant for Mead, but this must be a mistake.

Cheselden. Equally eminent as an anatomist, and an operating oculist. He was fond of the society of men of letters and learning, and saw much of Pope in his later years. An account, which he published in the Philosophical Transactions, 1728, of some experiments on a patient whom he couched for cataract, formed for a long time the leading case in the psychology of Sight and Touch.

1. 59. Know there are rhymes, which fresh and fresh apply'd. Wakefield, From Euripides, Hippol. 478. Euripides imitated Æschylus, P.V. 378.' 1. 68. figure. The verb is still common in this sense; the noun is only used in some phrases, as make a figure.'

1. 75. long desires; are, perhaps, ' desires which go great lengths.'

1. 82. From low St. James's up to high St. Paul's. The distinction of High Church and Low Church came into use about the beginning of the century (1700), though the distinction of parties thus designated was essentially the same as that which had existed from the first establishment of the Church of England.

At

St. James's, i.e. the Court, patronised the Low Church party, who were staunch adherents of the Hanover family and the Protestant succession. the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, the prebends being in the collation of the bishop of the diocese, Gibson, were mostly filled from the High Church party, though the Dean (Francis Hare), who was nominated by Government, was a Whig.

1. 83. From him, &c. From the lowest to the highest grade of those who deal with money.

1. 84. notches sticks at Westminster, i.e. in the Exchequer. The obsolete system of tallies' was still continued in this office down to 1831, long after the real business of finance had been transacted at the Bank of England. The Exchequer tallies were finally burnt, and in the process burnt down the Houses of Parliament. The office of Teller of the Exchequer' was lucrative, and much coveted. See The Humourist (1725), vol. 2. p. 223: 'Tis a fine thing to dance at Court in a birthday assembly; but not to me who had rather be swinging upon a gate in the country. Horace was an inimitable poet. Would I were a Teller of the Exchequer.' 1. 85. Barnard. Sir John Barnard, M.P. for London, and afterwards Lord Mayor, a conspicuous member of the Opposition or Country party. 1. 88. As Bug now has, and Dorimant would have. Hervey, then Vice-Chamberlain. See Sat. and Ep., Prol. 309.

Bug Lord
Dorimant