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 be tween 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.

P. 386, l. 12.

P. 387, 1. 2.

The old version has:

The swane fethars that his arrowe bar,

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, 1. 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:

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.

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-æsthetic 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, l. 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. 11. 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, 1. 9. The materials for the story of Herod and Mariamne are taken from Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews.

P. 415, l. 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, l. 4. The passages quoted are, Il. viii. 69, Æn. xii. 725.

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, l. 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