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. Bug = Lord Hervey, then Vice-Chamberlain. See Sat. and Ep., Prol. 309. Dorimant= George Bubb Dodington. See Sat. and Ep., Prol. 280. Dorimant is a character in Sir George Etherege's Man of the Mode, and was designed by the author for his own picture.

1. 89. Barnard, thou art a Cit, with all thy worth. Johnson, Life of Blackmore: 'In the early part of Blackmore's time, a citizen was a term of reproach.' Humourist, vol. 2. p. 176: 'Hard by stands a customer of inferior quality, a citizen's wife; who is reduced to the hard necessity of regulating her expenses by her husband's allowance, and is bursting with vexation to know herself restricted to lace of but fifty shillings a yard.'

1. 90. The first folio ed. has 'Bestia and Bug, their honours, and so forth.' their honours. Fielding, Tom Jones, bk. 8. ch. 2: There is narrow a one of all those officer fellows but looks upon himself to be as good as arrow a squire of £500 a-year. To be sure it doth me good to hear their men run about after 'um crying "your honour," and "your honour." Marry come up with such honour, and an ordinary at a shilling a head.' 1. 98. jargon. Wedgwood, Dict.: Fr. jargonner, to gaggle as a goose. sounds not understood.'

Properly the chattering of birds, Hence figuratively, an utterance of

1. 106. And foremost in the circle eye a king. Lord Hervey's Memoirs describe the rivalry between the German and the Italian Opera which grew, in 1734, as serious an affair as that of the Greens and Blues at Constantinople. The Court was Handelist; the King and Queen sate freezing at the empty Haymarket Opera, while the Prince with the Tory nobility filled that of Lincoln's-Inn-Fields.

1. 112. honest S*z. Augustus, eldest son of Baron Schutz, had been equerry to George II. when Prince, and became Master of the Robes, and Privy Purse to him, as King. He was a general favourite at Court. Mrs. Schutz was one of the Queen's Ladies-in-Waiting, and Miss Schutz accompanied the Princess Royal to Holland as one of her Maids of Honour.

1. 128. some farm the poor-box. A society had been chartered by Queen Anne under the title of the 'Charitable Corporation,' with the object of lending money to the poor upon pledges. In 1731 some of the officers embezzled half a million of its funds, and such numbers were ruined that Parliament was compelled to interfere. A lottery of £500,000 was allowed for the relief of the sufferers, and those of the managers who were members of the House were expelled.

1. 159. aboard, so Warb. ed. 1751; but in earlier editions abroad.

1. 162. My wig all powder, and all snuff my band. Carruthers, Life, P. 408: Like Dryden, Pope took snuff. But when he went abroad or received company he was as particular and precise in his dress as he was in his poetry.'

1. 173. Hale. Richard Hale, M.D., spoke the Harveian oration 1724. Spence, Anecd. p. 60: 'I shall be very glad to see Dr. Hales, and always love to see him, he is so good and worthy a man. Only he has his hands so much imbrued in blood.-What! he cuts up rats, aye, and dogs too!' Not to be confounded with Dr. Stephen Hale, the 'plain Parson Hale' of Mor. Essays, 2. 198.

SATIRES AND EPISTLES. IV.

(Imitation of Horace, 1 Ep. 6.)

1737.

To Mr. Murray. William Murray, afterwards Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and Earl of Mansfield. He was at this time a young man of thirtytwo, and a rising lawyer, who dallied with literature, and affected the acquaintance of the wits. Pope reckons him among the young friends, by whom he endeavoured to repair the gaps which time had made in his circle: There is a Lord Cornbury, a Lord Polwarth, a Mr. Murray, and one or two more.' To Swift, May 17, 1739.

1. 4. Creech. From whose translation of Horace, first published 1684, the two opening lines are taken.

1. 5. congregated ball. If a conjecture may be hazarded as to the possible meaning of this epithet, it = 'condensed, conglomerated.'

1. 31. Parian charms. Not a happy imitation of Horace's 'marmor vetus.' The frigidity is in the word 'charms,' a frigidity which is not produced by the 'Parii lapides' of Virgil; Georg. 3. 34.

1. 42.

Sigh, while his Chloe, blind to wit and worth,
Weds the rich dulness of some son of earth.

Lord Campbell, Chief Justices, 2. 339: Murray 'was attached to a young lady of beauty, accomplishments, and birth, and she listened favourably to his suit. But her family, requiring a sight of his rent-roll, were not contented that her jointure and pin-money should be charged upon his rood of ground in Westminster Hall, and married her to a squire of broad acres in a midland county.' He afterwards married Lady Elizabeth Finch, daughter of the Earl of Winchilsea.

1. 49.

Grac'd as thou art, with all the power of words, So known, so honour'd, at the house of Lords. It seems incredible that Pope could have allowed this piece of bathos to

escape from his pen. The specimen of anticlimax given in Scriblerus, Art of Sinking (Roscoe, 5. 257),

And thou, Dalhousie, the great God of war,

Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar,'

is not more ridiculous than that here committed by Pope himself. It was parodied by Hawkins Browne:

'Persuasion tips his tongue whene'er he talks,

And he has chambers in the King's Bench Walks.'

1. 49. at the House of Lords. Observe the preposition. Young Mr. Murray was laying the foundation of his great reputation by pleading, on Scotch appeals, at the bar of the House of Lords, in which he afterwards, as Lord Mansfield, himself took the leading place.

1. 50. another yet is nigh. Abbey to the House of Lords.

1. 52.

Alluding to the proximity of Westminster

Where Murray (long enough his country's pride)
Shall be no more than Tully, or than Hyde.

Fulfilled in the year 1793. Stanley, Mem. of Westminster Abbey, p. 286: 'Lord Mansfield and Sir W. Follett are the only representatives of the legal profession buried in the Abbey.'

Shall be no more than, is ironical; but in such a connection irony is not in place.

1. 56. Ward. A quack who professed to cure, among other diseases, madness, by his pills of pulvis antimonialis.' His name is of constant recurrence in the squibs of the time. Sat. and Ep. 5. 182:

Ward tried on puppies and the poor his drop.' Bolingbroke wished Pope to consult him in 1744, when Pope was failing. 1. 61. Cornbury disdains. Afterwards Lord Hyde. Spence, Anecd. p. 59: On Lord Hyde's return from his travels, his brother-in-law, Lord Essex, told him, with a great deal of pleasure, that he had got a pension for him. Lord Hyde's answer was, "How could you tell I was to be sold; or how could you know my price so exactly?"

1. 63. Tindal. Matthew Tindal, D.C.L., Fellow of All Souls' (died 1733), denied a Church in his treatise, The Rights of the Christian Church asserted against the Romish and all other Priests, &c., 1706. He was very far from denying virtue. On the contrary, his thesis that Christianity is only a republication of the religion of nature, lays an exclusive stress on virtue. The allusion in the words denies virtue, is probably not to any moral theory, but to the loose conduct attributed to Tindal. Cf. Dunciad, 2.399:

Toland and Tindal, prompt at priests to jeer.'

1. 85. Timon. The Duke of Chandos probably meant.

Prol. 300, note.

Cf. Sat. and Ep.,

1. 112. Up, up, cries Gluttony; 'tis break of day. Wakefield: 'Dryden, Transl. of Persius, Sat. 5: Up, up, says Avarice, thou snor'st again.'

1. 126. If, after all, we must with Wilmot own. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The passage quoted by Pope is in Letter to Artemisia (Chalmers, 8. 242):

That cordial drop heav'n in our cup has thrown
To make the nauseous draught of life go down.'

SATIRES AND EPISTLES. V.

(Imitation of Horace, 2 Ep. 1.)

1737.

To Augustus. Augustus was one of George the Second's baptismal names. Lord Hervey, Mem. i. 305: Not that there was any similitude between the two princes besides their names. George Augustus neither loved learning nor encouraged men of letters, nor were there any Mæcenases about him. There was another essential difference between the two Augustuses; as personal courage was the only quality necessary to form a great prince, which the one was suspected to want, so I fear it was the only one the other was ever thought to possess.'

1. I. sustain the balanc'd world, &c. The irony of this opening address was sufficiently patent to Pope's contemporaries. The modern reader must, in order to realise it, recall the insignificant figure which George II. made in the government of England.

As to foreign affairs, whatever weight this country possessed on the Continent was due to the statesmanship of Sir Robert Walpole, seconded by the Queen. The King comprehended nothing of them, but looked solely to the particular interests of the Electorate. After 1730, Sir Robert found it necessary to control the foreign affairs, as well as the home, which were his more peculiar province. As to Arts, George the Second's indifference and ignorance were proverbial. See Lord Hervey, Mem. vol. 2, for the story of his banishing a number of paintings by the old masters from Kensington, and filling their place with wretched modern daubs.

1. 2. open all the Main. In 1737 heavy complaints were made by the city of London merchants of what they called the‘depredations' of the Spanish cruisers. The fact was, the merchants were interfered with, by the vessels of war, in a profitable, but illicit, trade with the Spanish settlements. See the case stated by Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace, Works,

8. 145. Bowles explains open all the Main, that 'the King was so liberal as to leave it open to the Spaniards.' It means rather 'open it to British commerce.' Ironically, because it was what was not done. The grievance was that a fleet had not been despatched to the West Indies to enable the merchants to smuggle with impunity. The Main is short for The Spanish Main. By this term English sailors understood that part of the mainland of South America which belonged to Spain. Its use for 'the ocean' is wholly poetical.

1. 16. Finds envy never conquer'd, but by death. Cf. Waller, Panegyric: 'But living virtue, all achievements past

Meets envy still to grapple with, at last.'

1. 29. Wonder of Kings! &c. The obligation to keep near the original Latin covers the sneer here concealed, which without the protection of Horace on the opposite page becomes too palpable.

1. 38. And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote. I have no doubt that Pope refers to a fact, but the quotation was either made in conversation, or if in print, has not been detected. A reprint of Marshe's edition of Skelton's Workes, 1568, had appeared the year previous, 1736. Pope says (Spence, Anecdotes, p. 87), 'Skelton's poems are all low and bad, there is nothing in them that is worth reading.' But the epithet beastly is inappropriate; yet, says Mr. Dyce (Skelton, i. 6), it has cast a blight on Skelton's reputation from which it has hardly yet recovered.'

1. 40. Christ's Kirk o' the Green. A humorous Scottish poem, perhaps of the sixteenth century; though it has been ascribed to James I. of Scotland, in which case it must have been written about 1420.

1. 41. the Devil. The 'Devil' tavern between Temple Bar and the Middle Temple gate. The sign was taken from the legend of St. Dunstan, the house being nearly opposite the church of St. Dunstan. Here Ben Jonson lorded it with greater authority than Dryden did afterwards at Will's, or Addison at Button's.

1. 62. courtesy of England, is restricted in law to the single case of not disturbing the husband in the enjoyment, for his life, of his wife's estate, after her death. Pope applies it loosely to the case of not disturbing the claim of a poet to rank as a classic where a prescriptive title of a full century could not be made out.

1. 66. look in Stowe, i. e. in his 'Annales or General Chronicle of England,' which was the most popular collected history of our country during the seventeenth century, and till superseded at the beginning of the eighteenth by Echard, Rapin, Carte, and others. Stowe's 'Annales went through a succession of editions between 1573 and 1720. It is not very properly referred to on the present occasion, as it makes scarce any mention of literature. Stowe is mentioned disrespectfully by Donne, Sat. 4: