Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

1. 16. Sir George Etherege, author of several noted plays, amongst others of the comedy of Sir Fopling Flutter, broke his neck by falling down stairs, at the close of an uproarious drinking-bout, in 1694.

1. 38. The Inner, Middle, and Outer Temples in Fleet Street, once the property of the famous order of chivalry which took its name from the Temple of Solomon, after the suppression of the Templars in 1312, were for some time in the hands of the knights of St. John (afterwards of Malta), by whom the two former were leased to the students of the Common Law, a devise which is still in force.

P. 6, 1. 4. Longinus, a Greek writer of the third century after Christ, is the author of a celebrated treatise On the Sublime.'

1. 5. The reference is to the old law-book, 'Coke upon Littleton,' being the commentary of Lord Chief Justice Coke (reign of James I) on a treatise upon Tenures by Judge Littleton, who wrote in the time of Edward IV.

P. 8, 1. 25. The unfortunate son of Charles II and Lucy Barlow, or Walters, had a very handsome person. Macaulay speaks of his 'superficial graces,' and adds that even the stern and pensive William relaxed into good humour when his brilliant guest appeared.' (Hist. of England.)

[ocr errors]

P. 12, 1. 10. Hesiod's Works and Days, 125. The passage describes, not 'the Golden Age,' as Mr. Morley explains it, but the period after the golden age, when the purer race had been removed by Zeus from the earth, yet still revisited their old haunts as blessed spirits, the guardians of mortal men,' 'clothed in mist, going to and fro everywhere over the earth.'

6

P. 15, 1. 11. The second triumvirate, formed between Octavius, Anthony, and Lepidus. See Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act iv. Sc. 1.

P. 17, l. 13. The game at cards which is immortalized by being introduced into Pope's Rape of the Lock :

'Belinda now, whom thirst of fame invites,
Burns to encounter two adventurous knights,

At OMBRE singly, to decide their doom,

And swells her breast with conquests yet to come.'

P. 18, 1. 13. Addison is probably glancing here at the non-juring divines, men like Hickes, Brett, Collier, and Dodwell, whose learning their high Church and Tory friends were fond of maliciously extolling at the expense of their Whig rivals. So Bishop Burnet (History of his Own Times, Book II) speaks of the 'pedantry' by which the preaching of the clergy of the old school was overrun, before the rise of that intellectual and genial body of the Latitudinarian divines.

men,

P. 19, 1. 33. Bishop Hurd remarks,' The word "nature" is used here a little licentiously. He should have said "in the office," or "the quality of a chaplain." At the present day we should rather say 'in the character of a chaplain.'

P. 20, 1. 39. It is not quite clear what bishop of St. Asaph is meant. If it be Dr. Fleetwood, the then occupant of the see, the reference can only be

[blocks in formation]
[ocr errors]

to a small volume, entitled 'The relative duties of parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants, considered in Sixteen Sermons; with Three more upon the case of Self-Murther.' These sermons having been published in 1705, and not again, so far as appears, till 1737, the author's name on the title page is simply W. Fleetwood, Rector of St. Augustine's, &c.'; for he was only appointed to the see of St. Asaph on the death of Beveridge in 1708. Were these sermons likely to have become so generally known (at the time that Addison wrote, 1711) as the work of the then bishop of St. Asaph, that they would be naturally enumerated among a number of collections of sermons by celebrated preachers? It is true that Fleetwood became famous as a preacher, but it was not till later. He published some sermons in 1712, the preface of which so irritated the Tory majority in the House of Commons that the book was ordered to be burnt by the common hangman; Steele then reproduced the preface in No. 384 of the Spectator. But the passage now under consideration was written in 1711.

[ocr errors]

If Fleetwood was not meant by the bishop of St. Asaph,' it must have been Beveridge his predecessor, a hundred and fifty of whose Sermons were published in 1708, shortly after his death. These bore on the face of them that they were written by the Bishop of St. Asaph,' and were likely, considering Beveridge's high reputation, to have soon obtained a wide circulation. Ib. Dr. Robert South, born in 1633, is famous for his wit and eloquence. He was a high Tory and a high Churchman, zealous for passive obedience, and furious against toleration; nevertheless he made no demur about taking the oaths to William after the Revolution. Burnet calls him a learned but an ill-natured divine, who had taken the oaths, but with the reserve of an equivocal sense which he put on them.' But Burnet was a bitter partisan, and his testimony against men on the other side must not be trusted too implicitly. In whatever way South reconciled it to his conscience and his principles to swear allegiance in succession to Cromwell, Charles II, James II, and King William, it is certain that these compliances were dictated neither by covetousness nor ambition; whatever revenues he had he, with small reservation, used to distribute among the poor; and he refused a bishopric more than once. He attacked Sherlock's book on the Trinity, charging him with Tritheism, and a long and bitter controversy was the result. He was a canon of Christ Church, and died in 1716.

P. 21, 1. 3. Dr. John Tillotson, the son of a Yorkshire clothier, was raised to the primacy after the Revolution, on the refusal of Archbishop Sancroft to take the oaths to William and Mary. His sermons, once greatly admired, have long been esteemed heavy reading. Byron tells us that when a boy he was forced to read them by his mother, but that they did him no good.

Ib. Dr. Robert Sanderson (1587-1662), was also a Yorkshire man. Isaak Walton, who wrote his Life, tells us that when he was Proctor at Oxford, he aimed at maintaining discipline by persuasion rather than

coercion; if in his night-walk he met with irregular scholars absent from their colleges at University hours, or disordered by drink, or in scandalous company, he did not use his power of punishing to an extremity, but did usually take their names,' and when they came to him next morning, mildly reason with them on the enormity of their conduct. At the Restoration Sanderson was preferred to the see of Lincoln, but held it only two years.

Ib. Dr. Isaac Barrow (1630-1677) attained to eminence at Cambridge both as a mathematician and theologian. For five years before his death he was Master of Trinity College. He is the author of a work on The Supremacy. His sermons were often of enormous length; one charity sermon, preached before the lord mayor and aldermen of London, is said to have taken up three hours and a half in the delivery.

Ib. Dr. Edmund Calamy, one of the leading Presbyterian ministers under the Commonwealth, refused a bishopric at the Restoration, and was one of the two thousand clergymen ejected from their livings under the Act of Uniformity.

P. 21, 1. 32. Under the name of Will Wimble is represented Mr. Thomas Morecraft, the younger son of a baronet of that name, who died July, 1741, at the house of the bishop of Kildare in Ireland.'-—Note to edition of 1766. Morecraft is said to have subsisted a long time on Addison's bounty. The character of Will Wimble has been well compared to that of Mr. Thomas Gules, of Gule Hall, in the county of Salop,' described in No. 256 of the Tatler. (Wills.)

[ocr errors]

P. 23, 1. 23. Foiled' must here mean tired out,' 'rendered helpless'; Fr. affoler.

1. 28. The quail-pipe is a pipe with which fowlers used to imitate the peculiar cry of the hen-bird in order to allure quails. (Latham's Eng. Dictionary.)

P. 25, 1. 25. Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. xxxiii. § 10.

P. 26, 1. 31. P. 29, 1. 27. of humour.

P. 34, l. 10.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, iv. 33-84.

This paper, from first to last, is in Addison's richest vein

[ocr errors]

P. 32, 1. 15. Artis Gymnasticæ apud Antiquor Libri sex, by an Italian, calling himself Hieronymus Mercurius, who died in 1606. (Morley.) From Otway's tragedy of The Orphan, Act. ii. Sc. 4. P. 35, 1. 14. The belief in witchcraft still holds its ground among the English rustics, but the legalised persecution of witches was dying out about the time that Addison wrote. Yet even in 1716, five years after this paper was written, a Mrs. Hicks and her daughter, a child of nine, were hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm by pulling off their stockings, and making a lather of soap! (Foreign Quarterly Review, quoted in Chambers' Information for the People.) One of the worst stains on the memory of the Long Parliament, and on the fair fame of Puritanism generally, is the odious cruelty with which supposed witches were hunted out

[blocks in formation]

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, l. 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, l. 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. Hackney boat, like a hackney carriage, is one that plies for hire. The word 'hackney' is from the Norman-French haquenée, a nag. P. 50, 1. 22. 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,

[ocr errors]

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).

[ocr errors]

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.

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. 'It enacted that if any officer, civil or military, or any magistrate of a corporation, 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,

« ZurückWeiter »