[1] AnglicÈ, a jackstraw.

[2] Coarse Irish snuff.

[3] AnglicÈ, cash down.

[4] AnglicÈ, a fool.

[5] A simpleton.

[6] AnglicÈ, a flaw of the reputation.

[7] AnglicÈ, confusion

[8] Notul. 1.

1° in voce rus. Nonne potiÙs legendum jus, scilicet, ad vaccarum pabulum? De hoc jure apud Nabinos agricolas consule Scriptores de re rustied passim. Ita Beatleius.

Jus imo antiquissimum, at displicet vox Æquivoca; jus etenim a mess of pottage aliquande audit, ex. gr.

Omne suum fratri Jacob jus vendidit Esau,

[9] Notul. 2.

Veherem in jumento. Curriculo-ne? an ponÈ sedentem in equi dorso? dorsaliter planÈ. Quidenim dicit Horatius de uxore sic vectÀ? Nonne" Post equitem sedet atra cura"?—Parson.

[10] Notul. 3.

Lac et mella. MetaphoricÈ pro tea: muliebris est compotatio GrÆcis non ignota, teste Anacreonte,—

[11] Notul. 4.

Bacchi succo. Duplex apud poetas antiquiores habebatur hujusce nominis numen. Vineam regebat prius: posterius cuidam herbÆ exoticÆ pracerat quÆ tobacco audit. Succus utrique optimus.—Coleridge.

[12] Notul. 5.

AquÆ-vitÆ vim, Anglo-HybernicÈ, "a power of whisky," ?s???, scilicet, vox pergracca.

Parr.

[13] Notul. 6.

Plumoso sacco. Plumarum congeriea certÈ ad somnos invitandos satis apta; at mihi per multos annos laneus iste saccus, Ang. woolsack, fuit apprimÈ ad dormiendum idoneus. Lites etlam de iand ut aiunt caprind, soporiferas per annos xxx, exercui. Quot et quam prÆclara somnia!—Eldon.

[14] Notul. 7.

Investitura "per annulum et baculum" satis nota. Vide P. Marca de Concord. Sacerdotii et Imperii: et Hildebrandi Pont. Max. bullarium.

Prout.

Baculo certÈ dignissim. pontif.—Maginn.

[15] Notul. 8.

Apta sis. Quemodo noverit? Vide Proverb. Solomonis cap. xxx. v. 19. Nisi forsan tales fuerint puellÆ Sabinorum quales impudens iste balatro Connelius mentitur esse nostrates.

Blomfield.

[16] Notul. 9.

Linguam mobilem. Prius enumerat futurÆ conjugis bona immobilis, postea transit ad mobilia, AnglicÈ, chattel property. PrÆclares orde sententiarum!—Car. Wetherell.

[17] Notul. 10.

[18] M. de Marbois was the first president of the Court of Accounts.

[19] I believe this infamous law, however, has been repealed.

[20] Second son of Admiral Montagu, first Earl of Sandwich. Upon marrying the daughter and heiress of Sir Francis Wortley, he was obliged by the tenour of Sir Francis's will to assume his name.

[21] Published in Swift's Works.

[22] Claude Charlotte, daughter of Philibert, Count of Grammont (author of the celebrated Memoirs), and "La Belle Hamilton," eldest daughter of Sir George Hamilton, Bart. was married to Henry Stafford Howard, Earl of Stafford, at St. Germain's-en-laye, 1694.

[23] Lady Philippa Hamilton, daughter of James Earl of Abercorn, and wife of Dr. Pratt, Dean of Downe.

[24] Youngest daughter of Basil, fourth Earl of Denbigh; married to Daniel, seventh Earl of Winchelsea; died Sept, 17, 1734.

[25] Anne, daughter of Sir W. Pulteney of Misterton, in the county of Stafford; remarried to Philip Southcote, Esq. Died in 1746.

[26] Colonel Oldboy in Lionel and Clarissa.

[27] Walter The Children in the Wood.

[28] Echo The World.

[29] Dick The Apprentice.

[30] Sam Squib Past Ten o'Clock.

[31] Sadi The Mountaineers.

[32] Sharp The Lying Valet.

[33] Jonson The Devil to Pay.

[34] Trudge Inkle and Yarico.

[35] Ben Love for Love.

[36] John Dory Wild Oats.

[37] Sheva The Jew.

[38] Colonel Feignwell Bold Stroke for a Wife.

[39] Young Philpot The Citizen.

[40] Lenitive The Prize.

[41] Acres The Rivals.

[42] Bannister's Budget A Monodramatic Entertainment.

[43] Blabbo The Caravan.

[44] Storm Ella Rosenberg.

[45] Little Farthing Rushlight—A popular song sung by Bannister.

[46] Lancelot Gobbo The Merchant of Venice.

[47] Sir David Dunder Ways and Means.

[48] Besides the fried pigs were other most famous delicacies, which to this day are not quite obsolete. There were called sasserges.—Ed.

[49] "Better know to illiterate people as Confucius."— Washington Irving.

[50] In China (whatever European astronomers may assert to the contrary) an eclipse is caused by a great dragon eating up the sun.

To avert so shocking an outrage, the natives frighten away the monster from his intended hot dinner, by giving a morning concert, al fresco; consisting of drums, trumpets, cymbals,gongs, tin-kettles, &c.

[51] The Princesses of France, in whose household M. de Beaumarchais held an office.

[52] The Reflector.

[53] AnglicÈ, John, my jewel.

[54] AnglicÈ, Black Biddy.

[55] A policeman.

[56] An Irish phrase, synonymous with distressed.

[57] Great-coat.

[58] Between.

[59] AnglicÈ, Tom Braddigan.

[60] Good-morrow.

[61] A handicap.

[62] An Irish imprecation.

[63] Be quiet.

[64] One of the Belfast banks is thus named.

[65] AnglicÈ, Have it your own way.

[66] Take his oath.

[67] AnglicÈ, A short pipe.

[68] A phrase expressive of using the power of persuasion.

[69] My soul to the devil.

[70] QuÆre, rides and ties.

[71] Thomas Wharton, Earl of Wharton, appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, April 21, 1709. How Addison became the secretary of this Verres, as delineated by Swift,—or how Wharton, who professed to think virtue to be only a name, and would not have given a guinea as the purchase-price of the best reputation, obtained the appointment of the Queen's vicegerent in Ireland,—would be matters of perfect astoundment, were it not known that Wharton forced himself upon Lord Godolphin, by showing him a treasonable letter of that lord's to the abdicated family, of which he had contrived to become the possessor. Wharton's vice-regal power was but of short duration; he was recalled: Lords Justices were appointed in the September of the same year, and Wharton returned to England to make a bad use of the letter. Godolphin had, however, been too cunning for him, and procured an act of grace in his absence, which enabled him to set the vengeance of the Lord Lieutenant at defiance. As an apology for Addison's serving under such a man, it may be urged, that the acceptance of the office so proffered implied no approbation of his crimes; and that a subordinate officer is under no obligation to examine the opinions or conduct of those under whom he acts, excepting that he may not be made the actual tool of his atrocities or crimes.

[72] Addison's habitual taciturnity and fondness for the bottle are well known. There is a story, not yet forgotten, that the profligate Duke of Wharton, who was, perhaps, only the reputed or imputed son of this earl, afterwards Marquis of Wharton, once at table plied Addison so briskly with wine, in order to make him talk, that he could not retain it in his stomach. His grace is said to have observed, that "he could get wine, but not wit out of him."

[73] Lord Godolphin conferred on Addison, as a reward for his poem entitled The Campaign, commemorative of the battle of Blenheim, the place of Commissioner of Appeals, in the room of the celebrated Locke, who had been appointed a Lord of Trade. The year following, he attended Lord Halifax to Hanover; and, in the next, was appointed secretary to Sir Charles Hedges, and was continued in that office by his successor, Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland.

[74] Addison was a sound Whig. Bolingbroke records, that, after the peace which followed the ever memorable battle of Blenheim, he engaged with Addison in a two hours' conversation, and their politics differed toto cÆlo from each other.

[75] Budgell has recorded that he attended Lord Halifax and Addison in a barge to Greenwich to meet George the First from Hanover. Halifax said he expected to have the Treasurer's staff, and to have great influence; that he would endeavour to avoid some of the errors of late reigns, and make his master a great king, and would recommend Addison to be a secretary of state. Addison, as Budgell says, blushed, and thanked him for such honourable friendship, but declared that his merits and ambition did not carry him to so high a place. Halifax was, however, circumvented in all his speculations: Walpole acquired more influence, or succeeded by intrigue; and the effects mortified Lord Halifax so acutely, that a pulmonary fever was the consequence, and death soon put a quietus upon his lordship's unsuccessful struggle for power.

[76] Lowndes was secretary to the Lords of the Treasury.

[77] Congreve first introduced Addison to the notice of lord Halifax while being educated at Oxford for the church, when his lordship is said to have dedicated Addison to the state, and avowed he would never do the church any other harm than in keeping him out of it. The post which Addison here alludes to, was that of secretary to Lord Sunderland, who was then appointed to the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland, but never went to Dublin to assume the vice-regal dignity. Addison evidently deemed that appointment a degradation, and much inferior to that of being secretary to the Lords Regent of the kingdom till the arrival of the new King. As to his having been in Lord Sunderland's employ formerly, it has reference to his being his lordship's secretary upon the earl's succeeding Sir Charles Hedges, as Secretary of State, in 1706.

[78] This assertion seems strange, when it is known that in 1711, long prior to his marriage with the Countess of Warwick, Addison had expended ten thousand pounds upon the purchase of the Bilton estate, near Rugby, in Warwickshire: and Oldmixon, in his History, says, Addison left by his will, in 1719, to his daughter and to Lady Warwick, his fortune, which was about twelve thousand pounds. His daughter, who resided at Bilton till her death, in 1797, enjoyed an income of more than twelve hundred pounds per annum.

[79] Addison sat in the two last parliaments of Queen Anne. The Commons' Journals record that on a petition against his election for Lestwithiel, in 1708, he was found not duly elected; but by Lord Wharton's interest at the general election, he was chosen member for Malmesbury: indeed, as Swift wrote to Stella, so popular had Addison then become, that "if he had stood for the kingship, he would have been chosen."

[80] Ambrose Phillips, "one of the wits at Button's," and Addison's constant associate at that resort of the literati. In the latter part of Queen Anne's reign, being a Whig, he was secretary to the Hanover Club, and was, soon after the accession of George the First, put into the commission of the peace; and, in 1717, appointed one of the Commissioners of the Lottery. Paul Whitehead relates that when Addison became Secretary of State, Phillips applied to him for some preferment, but was coolly answered, that it was thought he was already provided for, by being made a justice for Westminster. To this observation Phillips with some indignation replied, "Though poetry was a trade he could not live by, yet he scorned to owe subsistence to another which he ought not to live by." Phillips will be long remembered by his translation from Racine of the tragedy of the "Distressed Mother." He died, struck with palsy, in Hanover-street, Hanover-square, June 18, 1749.

[81] Young Craggs was the son of a barber, who, by his merit, became Postmaster-general, and home-agent to the Duke of Marlborough; he was one of the first characters of the age, and had distinguished himself in the House of Commons. The classical names of Damon and Pythias, of Pylades and Orestes, of Nisus and Euryalus, are not oftener found conjoined in ancient story than those of Addison and Craggs in the real life of modern times. Addison, notwithstanding the discomfiture evinced in these letters, succeeded in procuring the appointment of a Lord Commissioner at the Board of Trade, which post he held till he was made Secretary of State, April 16, 1717. But Addison was then fast sinking into a bad habit of body: his great care was how to live, and, as Tacitus Gordon, his great admirer, used to relate, was then killing himself in drinking the widow Trueby's water, spoken of in the "Spectator." Unfit for the drudgery of a political life,—the pack-horse of the state,—he pleaded the being incapable of supporting the fatigues of his office, and resigned the seals in March 1718, upon a pension from the King of seventeen hundred pounds per annum. Craggs, who was his successor, died prematurely and unmarried, in his twenty-eighth year, in 1721.

[82] Queen Anne, to whom Addison had been recommended by the Duchess of Marlborough, on his appointment to be Secretary for Ireland, augmented the salary annexed to the place of Keeper of the Records in Birmingham Tower, to three hundred pounds per annum, and bestowed it on him.

[83] William, first Earl Cowper, Lord High Chancellor of England; he died Oct. 10, 1723.

[84] Addison, it is said, was first introduced into the Warwick family as tutor of the young lord here mentioned. The earl died soon after the date of this letter; and Addison, at forty-five, took great pains to woo the countess, who is described as being personally fraught with half the pride of the nation. They were married in August 1716, though not happily; for tradition reports they were seldom in each other's company. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in a letter to Pope, written from the East, after this period, says, "I received the news of Addison's being declared Secretary of State with the less surprise, in that I knew that post was almost offered to him before. At that time he declined it; and I really believe he would have done well to have declined it now. Such a post as that, and such a wife as the countess, do not seem to be in prudence eligible for a man that is asthmatic; and we may see the day when he will be heartily glad to resign them both."

[85] Dean Addison, who died April 20, 1703, left four children: Joseph, the writer of these letters; Gulston, here spoken of as Captain Addison, who died governor of Fort St. George, in the West Indies; Dorothy, of whom Swift, in a letter dated October 25, 1710, says, "I dined to-day with Addison and Steele, and a sister of Addison's, who is married to Mons. Sartre, a Frenchman, prebendary of Westminster. Addison's sister is a sort of wit, very like him: I am not fond of her." She married, secondly, Daniel Combes, Esq. Addison bequeathed her in his will five hundred pounds, which she lived to enjoy till March 2, 1750. The "other namesake" was possibly Addison's other brother, Lancelot, who, Chalmers states, was fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and an able classical scholar.

[86] The original of this letter having been forwarded in an envelope, and wanting the notation, at foot of the first page, of the name of the person to whom addressed, leaves it a conjecture who his grace was, whether Ormond or Grafton. Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, is the Lord Lieutenant whose illness Addison describes. The earl never went to Ireland to assume the vice-regal dignity; and, though this has never been satisfactorily accounted for, the real causes were, in all probability, his lordship's continued indisposition, and the death of Anne, Countess-dowager of Sunderland, his mother. Charles Duke of Grafton, and Henry Earl of Galway, were appointed Lords Justices of Ireland, Nov. 1, 1715.

[87] I understand that the distinguished writer mentioned below as having first pointed attention to Milton's comic sonnet, had also in MS. some specimen of his own composing.

[88] Mercury, god of eloquence, son of Jupiter and Maia.

[89] A pot-house lodging.

[90] This story has been adapted from the German of Zschokke.

[91] "Eripiunt subito nubes coelumque diemque."—Virg. Æn. i. v. 88.

[92] He is once called so by Westmoreland, Second Part of Henry IV. Act iv. Sc. 1.

but it occurs nowhere else, and we must not place much reliance on the authenticity or the verbal accuracy of such verses. He was Prince John of Lancaster, and afterwards Duke of Bedford. The king was then, as the king is now, Duke of Lancaster.

[93] Henry IV. Part 1. Act iii. Sc. 3.

The quiet and business-like manner in which Bardolph enforces on the heir-apparent his master's reasonable proposition of robbing the exchequer, is worthy of that plain and straightforward character. I have always considered it a greater hardship that Bardolph should be hanged "for pix of little price" by an old companion at Gadshill, than that Falstaff should have been banished. But Shakspeare wanted to get rid of the party; and as, in fact, a soldier was hanged in the army of Henry V. for such a theft, the opportunity was afforded. The king is not concerned in the order for his execution however, which is left with the Duke of Exeter.

I have omitted a word or two from the ordinary editions in the above quotation, which are useless to the sense and spoil the metre. A careful consideration of Falstaff's speeches will show that, though they are sometimes printed as prose, they are in almost all cases metrical. Indeed, I do not think that there is much prose in any of Shakspeare's plays.

[94] These passages also are printed as prose: I have not altered a single letter, and the reader will see not only that they are dramatical blank-verse, but dramatical blank-verse of a very excellent kind. After all the editions of Shakspeare, another is sadly wanted. The text throughout requires a searching critical revision.

[95] See footnote "[94]" above.

[96] I consider this epilogue to be in blank-verse,—

but some slight alterations should be made: the transposition of a couple of words will make the passage here quoted metrical.

[97] It may be thus attempted in something like the metre of the original, which the learned know by the sounding name of Tetrameter Iambic Acatalectic:

[98] This is printed as prose, but assuredly it is blank verse. The alteration of a syllable or two, which in the corrupt state of the text of these plays is the slightest of all possible critical licenses, would make it run perfectly smooth. At all events, in the second line, "emulation" should be "emulative," to make it agree with the other clauses of the sentence. The courtier's melancholy is not pride, nor the soldier's ambition, &c. The adjective is used throughout,—fantastical, proud, ambitious, politic, nice.

[99] "Senectus ipsa est morbus."—Ter. Phorm. iv. i. 9.

[100] Query on? "Wherein we play in" is tautological. "Wherein we play on," i.e. "continue to play."

[101] Psalm xc. "A prayer of Moses, the man of God," v. 10.

[102] Formerly, that is to say, previous to the peace of 1815, a journey between Quebec and Sandwich was an undertaking considerably more tedious and troublesome than the voyage from London to Quebec. In the first place, the commissariat of the expedition had to be cared for; and to that end every gentleman who was liable to travel had, as a part of his appointments, a provision basket, which held generally a cold round of beef, tin plates and drinking-cups, tea, sugar, biscuits, and about a gallon of brandy. These, with your wardrobe and a camp-bed, were stowed away in a batteau, or flat-bottomed boat; and off you set with a crew of seven stout, light-hearted, jolly, lively Canadians, who sung their boat-songs all the time they could spare from smoking their pipe. You were accompanied by a fleet of similar boats, called a brigade, the crews of which assisted each other up the rapids, and at night put into some creek, bay, or uninhabited island, where fires were lighted, tents made of the sails, and the song, the laugh, and the shout were heard, with little intermission, all the night through; and if you had the felicity to have among the party a fifer or a fiddler, the dance was sometimes kept up all night,—for, if a Frenchman has a fiddle, sleep ceases to be a necessary of life with him. This mode of travelling was far from being unpleasant, for there was something of romance and adventure in it; and the scenes you witnessed, both by night and day, were picturesque in the highest degree. But it was tedious; for you were in great luck if you arrived at your journey's end in a month; and if the weather were boisterous, or the wind a-head, you might be an indefinite time longer.

"But your march of improvement is a sore destroyer of the romantic and picturesque. A gentleman about to take such a journey now-a-days, orders his servant to pack his portmanteau, and put it on board the John Molson, or any of his family; and at the stated hour he marches on board, the bell rings, the engine is put in motion, and away you go smoking, and splashing, and walloping along, at the rate of ten knots an hour, in the ugliest species of craft that ever disfigured a marine landscape."