The number of livings in England.—Pate. “Distinguished, new, told by no other tongue.”—Horace. “Reading prefaces, &c.”—Swift’s note in the margin. Plutarch.—Swift’s note in the margin. Xenophon.—Swift’s note in the margin, marked, in future, S. Spleen.—Horace. “But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.”
—Dryden’s “Virgil” “That the old may withdraw into safe ease.” In his subsequent apology for “The Tale of a Tub,” Swift wrote of these machines that, “In the original manuscript there was a description of a fourth, which those who had the papers in their power blotted out, as having something in it of satire that I suppose they thought was too particular; and therefore they were forced to change it to the number three, whence some have endeavoured to squeeze out a dangerous meaning that was never thought on. And indeed the conceit was half spoiled by changing the numbers; that of four being much more cabalistic, and therefore better exposing the pretended virtue of numbers, a superstition then intended to be ridiculed.” “Under the rainy sky, in the meetings of three and of four ways.” Lucretius, lib. 2.—S. “’Tis certain, then, the voice that thus can wound;
Is all material body, every sound.” To be burnt or worm-eaten. The Royal Society first met at Gresham College, the resort of men of science. Will’s Coffee-House was the resort of wits and men of letters. Viz., about moving the earth.—S. “Virtuoso experiments and modern comedies.”—S. He lived a thousand.—S. Viz., in the year 1697.—S. Dryden died in 1700, and the publication of the “Tale of a Tub,” written in 1697, was not until 1704. The title-page in the original was so torn that it was not possible to recover several titles which the author here speaks of.—S. See Virgil translated, &c.—S. Peter, the Church of Rome; Martin, the Reformed Church as established by authority in England; Jack, the dissenters from the English Church Establishment. Martin, named probably from Martin Luther; Jack, from John Calvin. The coats are the coats of righteousness, in which all servants of God should be clothed; alike in love and duty, however they may differ in opinion. Covetousness, ambition, and pride, which were the three great vices that the ancient fathers inveighed against as the first corruptions of Christianity.—W. Wotton. The tailor. A sacred monkey. The Roman Catholics were considered by the Reformers to have added to the simple doctrines of Christianity inventions of their own, and to have laid especial stress on the adoption of them. Upon Swift’s saying of the three brothers, “Now the coats their father had left them were, it is true, of very good cloth, and besides so neatly sewn that you would swear they were all of a piece, but, at the same time, very plain, with little or no ornament,” W. Wotton observes: “This is the distinguishing character of the Christian religion. Christiana religio absoluta et simplex, was Ammianus Marcellinus’s description of it, who was himself a heathen.” But the learned Peter argues that if a doctrine cannot be found, totidem verbis, in so many words, it may be found in so many syllables, or, if that way fail, we shall make them out in a third way, of so many letters. Quibusdam veteribus codicibus [some ancient MSS.].—S. There are two kinds—oral tradition and the written record,—reference to the value attached to tradition in the Roman Church. The flame-coloured lining figures the doctrine of Purgatory; and the codicil annexed, the Apocryphal books annexed to the Bible. The dog-keeper is said to be an allusion to the Apocryphal book of Tobit. Dread hell and subdue their lusts. Strained glosses and interpretations of the simple text. Images in churches. The locking up of the Gospel in the original Greek or in the Latin of the Vulgate, and forbidding its diffusion in the language of the people. The Pope’s bulls and decretals, issued by his paternal authority, that must determine questions of interpretation and tradition, or else many absurd things would follow. Constantine the Great, from whom the Church of Rome was said to have received the donation of St. Peter’s patrimony, and first derived the wealth described by our old Reformers as “the fatal gift of Constantine.” See Wotton “Of Ancient and Modern Learning.”—S. Satire and panegyric upon critics.—S. Vide excerpta ex eo apud Photium—S. “Near Helicon and round the learned hill
Grow trees whose blossoms with their odour kill.”—Hawkesworth. A quotation after the manner of a great author. Vide Bentley’s “Dissertation,” &c.—S. “And how they’re disappointed when they’re pleased.”—Congreve, quoted by Pate. Refusing the cup of sacrament to the laity. Thomas Warton observes on the following passage its close resemblance to the speech of Panurge in Rabelais, and says that Swift formed himself upon Rabelais. Transubstantiation. The Reformation. The cross (in hoc signo vinces). Pieces of the wood said to be part of it were many in the churches. One miracle to be believed was that the Chapel of Loretto travelled from the Holy Land to Italy. Made a true copy of the Bible in the language of the people. Gave the cup to the laity. Allowed marriages of priests. Homerus omnes res humanas poematis complexus est.—Xenophon in Conviv.—S. A treatise written about fifty years ago by a Welsh gentleman of Cambridge. His name, as I remember, Vaughan, as appears by the answer to it by the learned Dr. Henry More. It is a piece of the most unintelligible fustian that perhaps was ever published in any language.—S. This piece was by the brother of Henry Vaughan, the poet. After the changes made by Martin that transformed the Church of Rome into the Church of England, Jack’s proceedings made a rent from top to bottom by the separation of the Presbyterians from the Church Establishment. The galleries over the piazzas in the old Royal Exchange were formerly filled with shops, kept chiefly by women. Illustrations of this feature in London life are to be found in Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday,” and other plays. The contraction of the word mobile to mob first appeared in the time of Charles the Second. Jack the Bald, Calvin, from calvus, bald; Jack with a Lanthorn, professing inward lights, Quakers; Dutch Jack, Jack of Leyden, Anabaptists; French Hugh, the Huguenots; Tom the Beggar, the Gueuses of Flanders; Knocking Jack of the North, John Knox of Scotland. Æolists pretenders to inspiration. Herodotus, l. 4.—S. Bombast von Hohenheim—Paracelsus. Fanatical preachers of rebellion. Pausanias, l. 8.—S. The Quakers allowed women to preach. The worshippers of wind or air found their evil spirits in the chameleon, by which it was eaten, and the windmill, Moulin-À-vent, by whose four hands it was beaten. Henry IV. of France. Ravaillac, who stabbed Henry IV. Swift’s contemporary, Louis XIV. of France. Western civet. Paracelsus was said to have endeavoured to extract a perfume from human excrement that might become as fashionable as civet from the cat. It was called zibeta occidentalis, the back being, according to Paracelsus, the western part of the body. Ep. Fam. vii. 10, to Trebatius, who, as the next sentence in the letter shows, had not gone into England. A lawyer’s coach-hire.—S. The College of Physicians. The bad critics. A name under which Thomas Vaughan wrote. Revelations xxii. 11: “He which is filthy, let him be filthy still;” “phrase of the will,” being Scripture phrase, of either Testament, applied to every occasion, and often in the most unbecoming manner. He did not kneel when he received the Sacrament. His inward lights. Predestination. Vide Don Quixote.—S. Swift borrowed this from the customs of Moronia—Fool’s Land—in Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem. The Presbyterians objected to church-music, and had no organs in their meeting-houses. Opposed to the decoration of church walls. Baptism by immersion. Preaching. “This wicked Proteus shall escape the chain.”—Francis’s Horace. Lib. de AËre, Locis, et Aquis.—S. Charles II., by the Act of Uniformity, which drove two thousand ministers of religion, including some of the most devout, in one day out of the Church of England. “Including Scaliger’s,” is Swift’s note in the margin. The sixth sense was the “common sense” which united and conveyed to the mind as one whole the information brought in by the other five. Common sense did not originally mean the kind of sense common among the people generally. A person wanting in common sense was one whose brain did not properly combine impressions brought into it by the eye, the ear, &c. Reference here is to the exercise by James II. of a dispensing power which illegally protected Roman Catholics, and incidentally Dissenters also; to the consequent growth of feeling against the Roman Catholics. “Jack on a great horse and eating custard” represents what was termed the occasional conformity of men who “blasphemed custard through the nose,” but complied with the law that required them to take Sacrament in the Church of England as qualification for becoming a Lord Mayor or holding any office of public authority. PÈre d’Orleans.—S. Trazenii, Pausan. L. 2.—S.
Henry VIII. “Fidei Defensor.” Edward VI. Queen Mary. Queen Elizabeth. James I. Episcopacy. Charles I. Cromwell. Charles II. James II. William III. High Church against Dissent.
