and put to death in the day of their power. Three thousand persons are said to have perished by legal execution for witchcraft during the continuance of their sessions, besides those who were summarily murdered by brutal mobs. A wretch named Matthew Hopkins was the chief of the witch-finders' at that time. One of his practices with his victims agrees with that alluded to in the text: He wrapped them in sheets, with the great toes and thumbs tied together, and dragged them through ponds or rivers, when, if they sank, it was held as a sign that the baptismal element did not reject them, and they were cleared; but if they floated, as they usually did for a time, they were then set down as guilty, and doomed!' In England, Scotland, and the North American Colonies, the horrible and bloody superstitions connected with witchcraft appear to have flourished with a peculiar intensity. The Foreign Quarterly Reviewer quotes a writer as estimating the number of persons put to death for witchcraft in England alone, from the time of the passing of the first statute upon it under Henry VIII, at not less than thirty thousand. (See the interesting paper in Chambers' Information, &c. for fuller details.)

P. 41, 1. 3. The substance of this sentiment may be found, expressed in various ways and with manifold applications, in Plutarch's treatise De Inimicorum Utilitate (On the usefulness of enemies); see in particular p. 91 line 28 of the Moralia, vol. ii. (Frankfort, 1620).

P. 42, 1. II. The Guelfs were the party in Italy that sided with the popes in their long struggle with the German emperors. They took their name from the Guelf or Welf family, to which the reigning dukes of Bavaria belonged before the rise of the house of Wittelsbach, and which was in a state of chronic antagonism to the Suabian imperial house. The Ghibelines the imperialist faction-derived their name from the little Suabian town of Waiblingen, the original seat of the great Hohenstaufen line of emperors.

1. 12.

The League for the support of the Roman Catholic Church; founded by the more zealous portion of the French Catholics, with the Guises at their head, to counteract the progress of Protestantism, which threatened to become the religion of the state under the joint influence of the weakness of Henry III and the popularity of Henry of Navarre.

P. 44, 1. 23. Addison must surely have been thinking, when he wrote thus, of the case of the great Duke of Marlborough, who, by a cabal concerted between an ungrateful court and an intriguing ministry, had, about six months before, been ignominiously dismissed from the command of the army and deprived of all his offices.

P. 45, 1. 24. The phrase 'honest man,' to signify a member of one's own, i. e. the right party, had come down from the civil war. • Honest men,' says Cromwell, writing to the Parliament after the battle of Naseby, 'have served you faithfully in this action.'

P. 47, 1. 17. Cassandra, the daughter of Priam king of Troy, had the gift of true prophecy, but her prophecies were fated never to be believed.

P. 48, 1. 16.

hire. The word P. 50, 1. 22.

Hackney boat, like a hackney carriage, is one that plies for hackney' is from the Norman-French haquenée, a nag. By a white witch' is meant a person supposed to be endowed like other witches with supernatural powers, but who used them for good purposes. Dryden (quoted in Wills' Sir Roger de Coverley) writes :At least as little honest as he could,

And like white witches, mischievously good.'

1. 33. The Whig ministry had been driven from power in 1710, so that Addison, who had lost his post of Chief Secretary for Ireland, might very truly be regarded as a 'Whig out of place.'

P. 52, 1. 9. Gray's Inn Walks or Gray's Inn Gardens, were in Charles II's time, and the days of the Tatler and Spectator, a fashionable promenade on a summer evening.' (Murray's Modern London.)

1. 12. The great Austrian general who shared with Marlborough the glories of the day of Blenheim, and who in his old age gained the splendid victories over the Turks which led to the peace of Passarowitz (1718).

1. 17. So, too, the Prince (who belonged to a younger branch of the house of Savoy), used to sign himself Eugenio von Savoye.' Queen Anne, on the occasion of this visit, 'made the Prince a present of a sword richly set with diamonds to the value of £4,500.' (Lord Stanhope's Reign of Queen Anne.)

1. 18. Scanderbeg, prince of Epirus, whose proper name was George Castriot, was the hero who, at the head of his Albanian mountaineers, long resisted the westward progress of the Turks in the fifteenth century, and often defeated Amurath and Mohammed II.

P. 53, 1. 6. The mark (=13s. 4d.), long supposed to have been a real money, is now universally admitted to have been employed by us only as a measure of value.' (Encycl. Metropolitana.) Thirty marks'

=

£20.

It

P. 54, 1. 10. There is great humour in this playful stroke, which is levelled against the Occasional Conformity Bill, passed into law by a triumphant Tory majority in Parliament in the session of 1711. enacted that if any officer, civil or military, or any magistrate of a corpora tion, obliged by the [Test] Acts of Charles II to receive the sacrament, should during his continuance in office attend any conventicle or religious meeting of Dissenters, such person should forfeit £40, to be recovered by the prosecutor; and every person so convicted should be disabled to hold his office, and incapable of any employment in England.' (Stanhope's Reign of Queen Anne.)

1. 18. When the Duke of Marlborough was about to return to England in November, 1711, a project was set on foot for giving him a grand reception on his arrival in London, and for enhancing the splendour of the usual Protestant demonstration on the 17th November. (See note to p. 96.) There was to be a torch-light procession, in which effigies of the Pope, Nuns, Friars, the Pretender, etc., were to be carried through the streets,

and then burnt on a bonfire. But the Government received timely informa tion, and caused the effigies to be seized at the house where they were being prepared; so that the project was nipped in the bud.

1. 28. So called because written by one Sir Richard Baker, who published it in 1641, under the title of A Chronicle of the Kings of England from the time of the Romans' Government unto the Death of King James.

P. 55, 1. 7. A passage in Plato's Alcibiades, respecting the estates assigned to Queens of Persia to keep them in dress and jewels.

P. 57, 1. 15. This gallant admiral, returning with his fleet to England in 1707, perished by shipwreck on the Scilly Isles.

1. 16. Dr. Busby was head-master of Westminster School for fifty-five years, from 1640 to 1695.

1. 22. 1. 29.

The chapel of St. Edmund.

Described in Murray's London as an 'alabaster statue of Elizabeth Russell, of the Bedford family-foolishly shown for many years as the lady who died by the prick of a needle.'

1. 36. Edward I, returning victorious from Scotland in 1296, 'took away with him the coronation-stone from the Abbey of Scone, and placed it in Westminster Abbey, where it forms the seat of the chair of Edward the Confessor, used at the coronation of the sovereign.' (Lewis' Topogr. Dict. of Scotland.) The figure of one of our English kings without a head'

is that of Henry V; Reformation.

it was of silver, and was stolen at the time of the

P. 59, 1. 5. The Committee, or The Faithful Irishman, was a comedy written by Sir Robert Howard soon after the Restoration; it was, as may be supposed, monarchical and anti-puritanic in a high degree.

1. 8. The Distressed Mother was a translation or adaptation, by Ambrose Philips, of Racine's tragedy of Andromaque.

1. 13. A class of dissolute young men, like the Ebrius et petulans' of Juvenal's third Satire, who roamed about the streets of London by night, beating quiet men, and annoying pretty women. 'Several dynasties of these tyrants,' says Lord Macaulay, 'had, since the Restoration, domineered over the streets.' After the Hectors, Scowrers, and others, 'arose the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and the yet more dreaded name of Mohawk.' (Hist. of England, ch. iii.) Other names for the 'fast men' of their day are given in Shadwell's comedy of the Scourers, where Tope, an emptyheaded pretender to the character of a real Scowrer, says: This is nothing; why I knew the Hectors, and before them the Muns, and the Tityre Tus; they were brave fellows indeed.'

P. 60, 1. 7. In which William III was defeated by Marshal Luxemburg, in 1692.

P. 61, 1. 29. To 'smoke' is to detect or find out; in this place, with a view of turning into ridicule.

P. 63, 1. 8. The French fleet, commanded by Admiral Tourville, was

defeated by the British fleet under Admiral Russell off Cape La Hogue in 1692.

P. 63, 1. 23. The want of new churches in the growing suburbs of London had long been felt; an address from Convocation on the subject was presented to the Queen in 1711, and this led to resolutions of the House of Commons, readily passed by the High Church and Tory majority, for building fifty new churches within the bills of mortality.

1. 32. That is, member for the county.

P. 69, 1. 2. This celebrated comedy appeared in 1693.
In Nos. 499 and 511: omitted from this selection.

1. 10.

1. 38. So Shakespeare, in Henry IV, speaks of a 'sea-coal fire.' Londoners naturally so spoke, because all the coal which they burnt was brought up by sea from Newcastle.

P. 70, 1. 24. The comedy of The Marriage-hater Matched, written by Tom Durfey, appeared in 1692.

1. 28. 'Ruelle' is the passage between a bed and the wall, and the phrase 'homme de ruelle 'originated in the practice of great ladies in France, about this time, receiving the visits of their acquaintances in bed. P. 71, 1. 25. Hor. Epod. 2. 69. P. 75, 1. 36. After the nomination of a Cardinal, the Pope first shuts his mouth' in a private consistory. While his mouth is shut, the cardinal elect can take no part in the proceedings of any of the pontifical congregations. Fifteen days later, the Pope holds another private consistory, and opens his mouth,' i. e. removes the disqualification previously imposed. The phrase was. probably suggested by the verse of Ecclesiasticus (xv. 5), * In the midst of the congregation shall she [Wisdom] open his mouth.'

1. 38. Diogenes Laertius relates that a silence of five years' duration was imposed by Pythagoras on his disciples, and that during this initiation they were only allowed to listen; after this trial they were admitted to the presence of their master for the first time.

II.

EDITORIAL PAPERS.

P. 78, 1. 15. Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Book II, Introd. § 14. P. 83, 1. 2. Gilbert Burnet, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, travelled in Switzerland and Italy about the year 1685, and published a narrative of his travels in 1687. He saw the inscription mentioned in the text at Lyons; it was on a lady named Suria Anthis. Burnet (Travels, p. 3) conjectures that her husband wrote the inscription, and that the words mean that Suria, having become a Christian, had neglected the worship of the gods of Olympus.

1. 13. Compare the characters of Dr. Cantwell and Maw-worm in Cibber's play of The Hypocrite, as altered by Bickerstaffe.

1. 33. A circular space in Hyde Park, near the east end of the Serpentine. See Garth's Epil. to Cato, and Pope, M. E. ii. 251. 'Certain traces of the Ring, formed in the reign of Charles I, and long celebrated, may be recognised by the large trees somewhat circularly arranged in the centre of the Park.' (Murray's London.)

P. 85, 1. 15. By 'nodding-places' are meant passages where some error or inconsistency has crept into the text, through weariness or oversight on the part of the author. Horace, in his Art of Poetry, wrote:

'Indignor, quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus ;'

and Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, has :—

P. 86, 1. 7.

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,

Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.'

Galen was a famous Greek medical writer and physician, who flourished in the second century after Christ.

P. 89, 1. 1. Lucius Annæus Seneca, the tutor and educator of Nero, and at last the victim of the cruelty and cupidity of his pupil, was the author of various celebrated treatises on moral and philosophical subjects.

Epictetus was a philosopher of the Stoic school, who flourished towards the close of the first century. His philosophy is made known to us by 'the Dissertations of Arrian, by an Enchiridion or Manual, and by a great number of sentences preserved in the writings of the Emperor Aurelius, Gellius, and others.

P. 89, 1. 36. Addison, quoting probably from memory, does not give the lines quite exactly. They are in Waller's poem 'On the Earl of Roscommon's translation of Horace de Arte Poetica,' and stand thus :—

'Poets lose half the praise they should have got,

P. 90, 1. 3.

Could it be known what they discreetly blot.'

P. 92, 1. 38.

i.e. expurgated.

Quæ genus' and 'As in præsenti' are the opening words of two sections of Lilly's Latin Grammar, which, in Addison's time, was used in all English grammar-schools.

P. 93, l. 16. For an account of these signatory letters see Introd. ad fin. P. 94, 1. 24. Dr. William Alabaster, a native of Suffolk, educated at Cambridge, and afterwards incorporated at Oxford, accompanied the ill-fated Essex on his expedition to Cadiz in 1597. He was famous for his profound acquaintance with what is termed cabalistic learning, which consists in the combination of particular words, letters, and numbers, by which it is pretended you can see clearly into the sense of Scripture.' (New General Biogr. Dict., ed. by Hugh Rose.)

6

P. 95, 1. 22. He means the general body of 'the wits' of that age, whom Hobbes' philosophy had disposed to free-thinking, and contact with French and Italian court-manners to licentiousness. The gayer portion of them became dramatists (Congreve, Farquhar, Wycherley, &c.), and too often,