1. 34. The Phædra and Hippolytus, translated and altered by Edmund Smith from Racine's great tragedy of Phèdre, was brought out at the Haymarket in 1709, and almost immediately damned.

P. 360, 1. 8. Unfortunately English music was of such a poor quality that it could not stand its ground; nor are things much better at the present day. 1. 32. See note to p. 357, l. 16.

P. 361, 1. 38.

P. 362, 1. 25.

Twelfth Night, Act i. Sc. 1.

Baptista Lully, though not absolutely the founder of French opera, was one of its earliest promoters: his first opera came out in 1673. He rose to great honour through the favour of Louis XIV, and died

at Paris in 1687.

1. 33. The Pit.

P. 364, 1. 30.

See the thirteenth chapter of Aristotle's Poetics.

P. 365, 1. 3. The Orphan and Venice Preserved are by Otway, Edipus is by Lee and Dryden, Oroonoko by Southerne; for the rest see note on P. 250, 1. 10.

1. 12.

The Mourning Bride is Congreve's only tragedy; Tamerlane and Ulysses are by Rowe. Speaking of the first appearance of these plays, Downes says that the Mourning Bride (1697) had such success that it continued acting uninterrupted thirteen days together;' that Tamerlane (1700), through the excellent acting of Betterton, Vanbrugh, Mrs. Bracegirdle, and Mrs. Barry, became a stock play; and that Ulysses (1705), being excellently well performed, had a successful run, but fell short of Tamerlane and the Ambitious Step-mother, by the same author. (This is the same 'Downs the prompter,' under whose name there is a curious letter in No. 193 of the Tatler.) On the Phædra and Hippolytus see note to P. 359.

1. 20. The Tragi-comedy was not the product of the English theatre.' The play of La Celestina, the earliest regular dramatic piece known, written in Spain in the fifteenth century, was called a 'tragicomedia'; and one or more of the plays of Timoneda, a Spanish dramatist rather anterior to Shakespeare, were so designated. Tragi-comedy was much in favour with Beaumont and Fletcher, the latter of whom describes it as a kind of play which ends happily, but in which some of the principal characters are brought so near to destruction that the true tragic interest is excited. Addison's description of such a play is generally quite true, that it was a motley piece of mirth and sorrow'; but this is what the public taste demanded, both in Spain and in England, at the time when the national drama in each country was in full vigour. Lope de Vega, no less than Shakespeare, relieved his tragic scenes with comic talk and droll situations; for, as he honestly said, the people pays for amusement, and it must have it.'

P. 366, 1. 7. George Powell was both author and actor; at one time he was regarded as rivalling Betterton; but he was negligent and idle, and presumed too much on his own powers, so as to lose at last the favour of the public. In his later years he took to drinking, and died in 1714.

1. 31. The first and third acts of Edipus were written by Dryden, the rest by Lee.

P. 367, 1. 9. The Conquest of Mexico is the second title of Dryden's popular heroic play, The Indian Emperor.

1. 26. In the last act of Otway's tragedy of Venice Preserved, in the middle of an impassioned and highly wrought scene between Jaffier and Beividera, the bell is heard to toll for the execution of Pierre, the archconspirator.

P. 369, 1. 31. The tragedy of Les Horaces.

P. 370, 1. 9. The Electra.

P. 371, 1. 37. Christopher Bullock (d. 1724), besides writing several plays himself, was a good and sprightly actor in his day, the parts of 'fops, pert gentlemen,' &c., being sustained by him with effect. (Baker's Biogr. Dramatica.) Henry Norris was chiefly known for his admirable performance in Farquhar's comedy of The Constant Couple, whence he acquired the nick-name of Jubilee Dicky.'

P. 373, 1. 33. Downes tells us that about 1690 Congreve's Old Bachelor and Double Dealer, and Southerne's Fatal Marriage, were acted with much applause at Drury Lane, 'specially Mr. Doggett's and Madame Barry's performances being unparallelled.' He was a most successful actor of comedy for many years, and retiring from the stage with a competence, settled at Eltham, where he died in 1721. He was a staunch friend to the Hanove rian succession, and founded the race for Thames watermen known as that for 'Doggett's coat and badge,' which is annually rowed on the 1st August, the anniversary of George I's accession.

P. 374, l. 140. Æolus (Virg. Æn. i. 81),

'cavum conversa cuspide montem Impulit in latus.'

P. 375, 1. 14. Scenery and scenic effects were unknown to the English stage before the civil war, and for some time after the Restoration. They gradually came into use during the reign of Charles II, the competition of the different theatres compelling a continual enlargement of these sources of attraction, when they were once introduced. (Wright's Hist. Histrionica.)

1. 15. Salmoneus, a king of Elis, is said in Greek mythology to have endeavoured to imitate the lightnings of Jove by driving his chariot over a brazen bridge, and scattering blazing torches around him as he passed. For his impiety Jupiter smote him with his thunderbolts, and assigned to him a hot place in Tartarus. (Virg. Æn. vi. 585.)

1. 25. Thomas Rymer (1639-1714) was a member of Gray's Inn, but preferring literature to the law, entered the field of dramatic criticism, and in the ambition to be himself the great sublime he drew,' produced the model tragedy of Edgar in 1677. This play, which is in rhyme, has an Anglo-Saxon plot; St. Dunstan, who is of course represented as an ambitious turbulent monk, plays an important part; Edgar, however, defies the proud ecclesiastic, and resolves to marry his god-child in spite of him; the piece, though called a

tragedy, winds up with a brace of marriages. In two tracts, entitled The Tragedies of the Last Age (1678), and A Short View of Tragedy (1693), Rymer, in a rough and boisterous style, compared Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Fletcher to the great tragedians of antiquity, greatly to the disadvantage of the former. The plays of Shakespeare which he singles out for his foolish animadversion are Othello and Julius Cæsar. Whether he wrote any other tract on King Lear I cannot say, but I have not met with any such; perhaps it is a slip of Addison's. But Rymer's name, in spite of literary failures, will ever be held in grateful remembrance by the English historical student, on account of that great collection, edited by him, of important state-papers, national and international, which goes by the name of Rymer's Fœdera.

P. 376, 1. 8. André Dacier (1651-1722) was a refined critic and an indefatigable scholar; he edited or translated Horace, Aristotle's Poetics, Plutarch's Lives, the Reflexions of Marcus Aurelius, &c., &c. Trained under a famous scholar, Tanneguy Lefèvre, he fell in love with his tutor's daughter, and married her; she became the celebrated Madame Dacier, and raised her name, through her learning and talents, to an equality with that of her husband.

1. 18. Archbishop Whately used to say, with reference to the profundity imputed to certain authors, that there might be two reasons why you could not see to the bottom of a stream,—either because it was deep, or because it was muddy.

1. 33. The god of ridicule and satire.

P. 377, 1. 28. From the prologue to the Andria of Terence; the lines mean, 'whose carelessness he prefers to emulate, rather than the dull industry of these [his critics].'

1. 30. The passage in the first volume of South's Sermons (Oxf. ed. of 1842), at p. 168.

1. 39. Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxxvii. 3.

§3. On Literary Matters.

P. 379, 1. 2. The name of Sir Philip Sidney's short treatise is, the Defence of Poesy; it was written about 1584.

1. 23. This theory of the motives which induced Homer to write the Iliad is ridiculous, seeing that the main portions of the poem were certainly in existence at least three hundred years before the Persian empire was founded.

1. 38. Addison's notion is, that Chevy Chase was written during the war of the Roses, and that the concluding verse, alluding to the feuds of noblemen, is almost a demonstration of this. But the theory breaks down altogether, for the old genuine version of the ballad, printed (with many inaccuracies) at the beginning of Percy's Reliques, and accurately given in Mr.

Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, contains no such concluding verse,

but ends as follows:

'Jhesu Crist our balys bete,

And to the blys us brynge!

Thus was the hountynge of the Chivyat:

God sende us alle good ending!'

Much discussion has arisen from time to time on the date and other relations of the poem, respecting which see Mr. Hales' preface in Bishop Percy's Folio MS., and the observations of Percy, Warton, and Skeat. This is not the place for any lengthened examination of the matter, but I will briefly state the conclusions which to my own mind appear most probable. (1) The author of the ballad was a Northumberland man; witness the vivid local touches, Glendale glytteryde on ther armor bryght,' the watter a Twyde,' "the bowndes of Tividale,' 'Ser Johan of Agerstone,' &c. (2) The poem is not historical. The conflict described in it is called in one place the battle of Otterburn; but in the real battle of Otterburn, fought in 1388, no Percy was killed; moreover Otterburn lies many miles away from the Tweed and Teviotdale, where the scene of action is laid in the earlier verses; lastly, the king of Scotland, at the date of Otterburn, was named Robert, not James; no James reigned in Scotland before 1424. (3) But the character of the handwriting, and the linguistic forms in the earliest MS. (Ashmole 48), preclude us from assigning the ballad to a later date than the middle of the fifteenth century. (4) Writing under Henry VI, the author probably confounded together, through the defect of his own memory or of the popular traditions, the battle of Pepperden, fought in 1436, and that of Otterburn. Or rather, shall we say? having full knowledge of many a bloody duel between brave Scotch and English borderers, in that incessant frontier foray which devastated the marches for many generations, and having also the popular accounts of the larger conflicts at Otterburn, Homildon, and Pepperden (at all of which Percies and Douglases contended for victory) confusedly present to his mind, he wove an original poem out of these abundant materials, in such a way as, while setting at nought historic accuracy, to fill his canvas with noble figures, boldly drawn and skilfully grouped or contrasted, whose separate actions and misfortunes differed little from those which true tradition recorded, though the setting and connection in which they were exhibited were totally unhistorical.

P. 380, 1. 5. The Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus, and the Thebais of Statius.

P. 383.1. 34. It may be considered certain that the version of Chevy Chase known to Sidney was not this from which Addison quotes (the language and style of which seem to place it in the seventeenth, or not later than the end of the sixteenth century), but that which has been described in a former note, as composed in the middle of the fifteenth century, and preserved in one of the Ashmole MSS. The newer version, however, follows the older one pretty closely, as the reader may see by comparing the two in Percy's

Reliques. Addison's copy appears to have agreed almost word for word with that from which Percy printed the newer version.

The old version has:

P. 386, 1. 12.

The swane fethars that his arrowe bar,

P. 387, 1. 2.

With his hart blood the wear wete.'

Hud. i. 3, 97. The bear, though brought to the ground by

his numerous assailants, still fights desperately:—

P. 389, 1. 20.

P. 390, l. 16.

P. 392, l. 18.

'As Widdrington, in doleful dumps,

Is said to fight upon his stumps.'
Richard Bentley. (Tegg.)

The day of the battle of Blenheim.

The Essay on Criticism, by Pope, had been advertised in the Spectator on the 15th May, 1711, about seven months before this paper was written, as to appear on that day. It was this poem which first brought Pope prominently into notice, for his Pastorals, which had appeared in 1709, had neither received nor deserved much attention. Addison's warm praise in this paper, which must have been the means of making the poem known to thousands of readers who would otherwise never have heard of it, doubtless contributed largely to the success of the Essay. Pope, under the impression that the number was written by Steele, wrote to him (Dec. 30, 1711), saying that he had just read the Spectator of the 20th, wherein, though it be the highest satisfaction to find oneself commended by a person whom all the world commends, yet I am not more obliged to you for that, than for your candour and frankness in acquainting me with the error I have been guilty of, in speaking too freely of my brother moderns.' In a tone of rather exaggerated humility, he asks the Spectator's corrections for the future, kisses the rod of his criticism, and almost protests against the too liberal expression of his praise. The strokes of this nature,' (i. e. attacks on Pope's brother poets,) which Addison refers to, are all general, unless we except the lines which Dennis took to himself, beginning' But Appius reddens at each word you speak.' In a passage at 1. 36, those writers who have joined poetry to criticism are castigated :

6

Some have at first for wits, then poets, passed,

Turned critics next, and proved plain fools at last.'

But the passage which Addison had chiefly in view was probably that beginning at 1. 604, where, speaking of the obscure versifiers of his day, Pope says:

'What crowds of these, impenitently bold,

In sounds and jingling syllables grown old,
Still run on poets in a raging vein,

Ev'n to the dregs and squeezing of the brain,

Strain out the last dull droppings of their sense,

And rhyme with all the rage of impotence.'

P. 393, 1.9. Petronius the satirist, and Quintilian the critic and rhetori cian, both flourished in the first century of our era.