65 23-27. Nos. 26, 329, 69, 317, 159, 343, 517. 66 13. The stamp tax. This was imposed by the Tories in 1712, and was intended to lessen the number of publications and so to cut off some of the attacks on the government. It required a half-penny stamp on each printed half-sheet. Only the strongest papers could live under so heavy a tax. 67 9. The Guardian. 67 15. See note on 19 17. Nestor Ironside and the Miss Lizards. These characters fill in the Guardian the position held in the Spectator by the members of the Spectator Club. 68 9. No attempt was then made at accurate historical costuming. 68 15. Booth, Barton (1681-1733), made his reputation in the part of Cato as the leading actor of his time. 68 18. The Inns of Court. Four buildings (Gray's Inn, Lincoln's Inn, The Inner Temple, and The Middle Temple) owned and occupied by the London barristers. 68 20. The territory within the limits of the original city of London is the business center of the metropolis. The "auxiliaries from the City" were therefore made up of representatives of the commercial class, who were not supposed to know much about literature. 68 22. Jonathan's and Garraway's, two coffee-houses frequented by brokers and merchants. 68 33. 68 34. Kit-Cat. See note on 18 17. The October Club was made up of Tories, and represented the extreme wing of the party. 69 30. Bolingbroke. See note on 40 30. 70 24. Athalie. See note on 18 26. Saul. The most successful play of Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), a great Italian dramatist who followed the classic model. "He occupies his scene with one great action and one ruling passion, and removes from it every accessory event or feeling." (Enc. Brit.) Of Cinna, which was written by Corneille, the same work says that it is "perhaps generally considered the poet's masterpiece, and it undoubtedly contains the finest single scene in all French tragedy, a scene which may take rank with any other perhaps ever written." Cato can claim no such praise as this. But Macaulay seems to underestimate the whole school. 71 32. It may be, as Macaulay says, that Pope was more galled by the censure than gratified by the praise, but it is not likely; and, further, there is not the slightest particle of evidence for it. On the contrary, Pope's expressions certainly show gratitude for the favorable notice, which was, he says, so lavish of praise as to make him hope it indicates a particular partiality to himself. This letter was sent, not to Addison, whom Pope did not know at the time, but to Steele, whom he regarded as the author of the criticism; and it led to his introduction to Addison. 72 4. Whom he had injured without provocation. This is another assumption. Dennis had very likely criticised Pope's Pastorals, and so drawn upon himself Pope's ridicule in the Essay on Criticism, vv. 585-587: But Appius reddens at each word you speak, Dennis's reply to these three comparatively innocent lines was an abusive pamphlet of thirty-two pages, in which he called Pope a 'hunchbacked toad,' 'a little affected hypocrite,' 'the very bow of the god of love,' etc. 73 20-23. Here again Macaulay is altogether too hard on Steele. His friends, it is true, were inclined to regret his abandonment of the Guardian in order to devote himself to political writing; but there was no lack of respect in their comments on his conduct. He was, of course, virulently attacked and calumniated by the Tory writers. 76 26, 27. As Swift grew older his pessimism and fierce hatred of society increased, and his last years were darkened by terrible suffering and mental disease. In 1708 Swift was in the full strength and vigor of middle life, influential and active among men; in 1738 he was over seventy, and descending through a lonely and wretched old age to his most pitiable end. 76 34. Swift's Tale of a Tub, which was written as a satire on abuses in the Church, was regarded as an attack on the Christian religion itself. It is supposed to have roused the hostility of Queen Anne, and so to have made Swift's elevation to a bishopric impossible. 77 4. Sacrificed honor and consistency to revenge. See note on 43 17. Undoubtedly personal motives had their influence on Swift, but there is no occasion for saying that his change of party was entirely due to them. 77 32. More odious than any other man, because he was suspected of having been concerned in the plot to bring back the Stuarts to the throne, which some of the Tory leaders had formed. Within a few years, however, Swift was very popular in Ireland. 78 31. But Steele asserts positively, in the letter to Congreve prefixed to the second edition of the play, that Addison was its author. 79 4. In 1715 a rising took place in Scotland in favor of the Stuart Pretender, the rebellion described in Scott's novel of Rob Roy. 79 12. Squire Western, in Fielding's novel, Tom Jones. 80 1. He accordingly determined, etc. The absurdity of representing that Steele started the Town Talk because he was dissatisfied with the moderation of the Freeholder is evident when we remember that the first number of the Freeholder appeared on December 23, and of the Town Talk on December 17. Nor is it remarkable that the latter has not been handed down to fame, since only nine numbers of it appeared. 80 11. Pope was false and malevolent. In the case of Pope, as of Steele, we must guard against Macaulay's characterization of him. To give to Pope's sensitive and morbid nature and strangely mixed character the right interpretation called for a skill in reading motives which Macaulay, with all his powers, did not possess. He had the historic, but not the dramatic, imagination; he did not hold the key to the human heart. It is easy to paint Pope black; and Macaulay admits into his picture no other color. Yet the injustice is hard to correct, because his mistake lies, not in a misstatement, but in a misinterpretation, of facts. Pope's treatment of his friends cannot always be called honorable according to our standards; he was unfortunately fond of equivocation, and not afraid of downright falsehood; and those who injured him he hated with a rancorous and uncontrolled vindictiveness; and still he should not be called unqualifiedly false and malevolent. See Thackeray's essay on Pope in English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century. 80 19. The Rosicrucian mythology. See Pope's letter to Miss Arabella Fermor prefixed to the Rape of the Lock. 80 20. He asked Addison's advice. It is not at all unlikely that this anecdote is fictitious, and invented by Pope to strengthen his case against Addison. 81 25. See note on 21 25. 81 26-29. This also is doubtful. It is one of Spence's anecdotes (see note on 19 8), and was related to him by Pope, whose veracity cannot be relied upon. 81 33 ff. This whole story Macaulay takes from Pope's account to Spence. With regard to it Mr. Courthope says: "It is scarcely necessary to say that, after the light that has been thrown on Pope's character by the detection of the frauds he practised in the publication of his correspondence, it is impossible to give any credence to the tales he poured into Spence's ear, tending to blacken Addison's character and to exalt his own." 82 32. There is no question, however, of the great merits of Pope's Iliad as an independent poem, great as are its defects as a translation. 83 14. There does seem to have been in circulation a vague rumor that Tickell was not the real author of his Translation. See Elwin and Courthope's edition of Pope's Works, Vol. V. p. 158. 84 32, 33. Satirist, Age. Two unprincipled papers which, at the time when Macaulay was writing his essay, had become notorious by the publication of sensational and scandalous news. The editor of the Age was soon after sent to prison for criminal libel. 85 12. See note on 44 22. 85 27. Pope had had privately printed for Bolingbroke a book written by the latter, and had ordered the printer to strike off and keep a large number of additional copies, after having, according to Bolingbroke, introduced various alterations. 86 6. This whole story is probably apocryphal. See Courthope's Life of Addison, pp. 135-138. 86 25. Pope wished it to be believed that he sent the lines to Addison, but it is not at all likely that he did, or that Addison ever saw them. They first appeared in print in 1722, and Pope was accused of having written them after Addison's death. Pope, of course, wished to show that Addison was in fault for the quarrel, and that his own conduct had been entirely honorable. The lines were afterwards included in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and are as follows: Peace to all such! but were there one whose fires While wits and templars every sentence raise, And wonder with a foolish face of praise: Who but must laugh, if such a man there be? Who would not weep, if Atticus were he? 86 34. But his praise of Pope is always with some reserve, and does not equal that bestowed on such minor writers of his coterie as Philips and Tickell. 87 10. Addison's field was social, not personal satire. He is always good-humored and without passion; and he was no more Pope's match than a non-combatant with a taste for archery is a match for a trained duelist. 87 15. Joseph Surface is a hypocritical professor of youthful virtue and sober-headedness in Sheridan's comedy, The School for Scandal. Sir Peter Teazle is another character in the same play. 88 10. Countess Dowager, i.e. the widowed mother of the heir to the title. 88 13. Holland House. With this historic mansion Macaulay himself had close associations, for he was a frequent visitor there during the life of the third Lord Holland, when Lady Holland's drawingrooms used to number among their distinguished guests many men of letters. Holland House was built in 1607 by Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, from whom it took its name, and whose descendant, Edward Rich, Earl of Warwick and Holland, had been the first husband of the Countess Dowager, Addison's wife. This family becoming extinct, the house passed into other hands, and though its later owners again bore the title of Holland, it was by a new patent. Macaulay in his Essay on Lord Holland speaks with feeling of "those turrets and gardens which are associated with so much that is interesting and noble with the courtly magnificence of Rich, with the loves of Ormond, with the counsels of Cromwell, with the death of Addison . . . that dwelling. the favorite resort of wits and beauties, of painters and poets, of scholars, philosophers, and statesmen." 88 14. Nell Gwynn, an actress who became mistress of Charles II. 89 5. Lycidas. What were the circumstances which led Milton to write his great poem of this name? 89 11. See note on 61 6. 89 15. William Somervile (1677-1742), a country gentleman and minor poet, whose most important work, The Chase, celebrates the joys of hunting with dogs, in about 2000 lines of Miltonic blank verse. 89 29-34. The old Whig leaders, Godolphin, Halifax, Somers, and Wharton, were now dead, and besides, it was the policy of George I. to place in power the younger men. Lord Townshend (1674-1738) had |