P. 100. Tales. A legal technical term. When the list of men called to serve on a jury has been exhausted by challenging, either side has a right to demand that more such men (tales) shall be called. The reference to Euripides is obscure. Dr. Garnett writes, "I can only conjecture that Butler is alluding to the contest between Eschylus and Euripides for the dramatic crown in the Frogs of Aristophanes, even though the case is not tried before a jury, and to the character for trickery and equivocation which Euripides supports therein. In the Acharnians of Aristophanes is a scene in which Dicæarchus, having himself to make his defence before a jury, applies to Euripides for rags from the wardrobes of some of the distressed heroes of his tragedies, to assist him in exciting compassion. It is possible that some confused notion of this scene also may have been in Butler's mind."

P. 100. Speroni was an Italian scholar of great eminence in the sixteenth century, author of a tragedy called Canace e Maccareo (1546).

P. 102. Well might thou scorn. Dryden desired Milton's permission to turn Paradise Lost into a rhymed dramatic poem, and is said to have received it in the contemptuous words "Ay, you may tag my verses if you will." This strange experiment was called The State of Innocence, or the Fall of Man. Dryden's view at this time was that blank verse was too low for a poem, nay more, for a paper of verses." Scott, in his Life of Dryden, observes that "the versification of Milton, according to the taste of the times, was ignoble from its supposed facility."

"

P. 103. Voiders. Baskets for broken bread, P. 105. Prologue to Aurengzebe. Here Dryden recants his former heresies regarding blank verse. At the beginning of his career as a dramatist he

ardently maintained the efficiency of the rhymed couplet in heroic drama; but in this prologue to the last and best of his rhymed plays he admits that he found it inadequate when dealing with tragic emotions. Henceforward Dryden's supreme mastery of this form was reserved for satirical, polemical and narrative poetry; and his next play, All for Love, gave splendid proof of his increased dramatic power when freed from the "shackles of rhyme."

P. 107. Prologue to the Tempest. It was clearly from no want of perception that Dryden collaborated with D'Avenant (who ought to have known better too), in placing on the stage such a travesty of the Tempest as was perfectly suited to the Court of Charles II. Scott says that this prologue is "onc of the most masterly tributes ever paid at the shrine of Shakespeare." It concludes with twelve lines of considerable indelicacy, which are fortunately irrelevant to our subject.

P. 108. Prologue to Albumazar. Dryden mistook in claiming Albumazar as the original of the Alchemist. Jonson's play was acted in 1610, and first printed in 1612. The date of Albumazar's first appearance is 1614, when it was acted at Cambridge.

P. 109. Cobb's tankard. Cobb is a tankard-bearer (water-carrier) in Every Man in his Humour. Captain Otter, a character in The Silent Woman, has three tankards which he names Horse, Bull, and Bear.

P. 110. When in the Fox, etc. In allusion to a buffooning scene in The Fox where Sir Politick Would-be seeks to conceal himself under cover of a tortoise-shell, whence he is driven by blows and sword-pricks.

P. 113. Well had I been deposed. On William

III.'s accession Dryden had been deprived of the laureateship; he refers to his successors, Thomas Shadwell and Tate, in the line below,

"For Tom the second reigns like Tom the first."

P. 114. Be kind to my remains. Congreve was not forgetful of this injunction; in the dedication of Dryden's Dramatic Works which he edited in 1730, he declares himself to have been "most sensibly touched with that expression;" and he pays a feeling tribute to the personal character of the great poet.

P. 119. Old Spenser next. Johnson observes of this passage: "In this poem is a very confident and discriminate character of Spenser, whose work he had then never read. So little sometimes is criticism the effect of judgment."

P. 123. An equal genius. Prior has been speaking of Horace.

P. 126. Venice, Egypt, Persia, Greece, or Rome. I do not recollect any scene of Shakespeare laid in Persia.

P. 127. Tickell's verses were addressed to the Earl of Warwick, who did not long survive his stepfather, Addison. According to Johnson there is not "a more sublime or more elegant funeral-poem to be found in the whole compass of English literature."

P. 130. To thee, O Craggs. Atterbury writes to Pope, "I cannot but think it a very odd set of incidents, that the book [Addison's Works] should be dedicated by a dead man to a dead man; and even that the new patron to whom Tickell chose to inscribe his verses, should be dead also before they were published."

P. 133. At the Devil. The Devil Tavern, other

wise the Dunstan, where a famous club met, at which Jonson presided as perpetual chairman.

P. 137. Here lay poor Fletcher's half-eat scenes. The scene is Theobald's study.

P. 137. Though her power retires. The power of Dulness.

P. 148. Great Faustus. The pantomime of The Necromancer, or Harlequin Dr. Faustus was acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1723; and the name Faustus, says Mr. Austin Dobson, would seem to have become identified with contemptible stage performances.

P. 149. A bard here dwelt. This stanza is said to have been written by Lord Lyttelton.

P. 160. Stanzas to Mr. Bentley. Mr. Bentley had made a set of designs for Gray's poems.

P. 161. The Rosciad. The design of The Rosciad is to criticise the actors of the day by passing them in review before an imaginary court of justice. Against the proposal to appoint Sophocles as judge, Lloyd is represented as proposing our greatest native dramatists.

P. 163. Not Brent would always please. Charlotte Brent, afterwards Mrs. Pinto, was a celebrated singer, a pupil of Dr. Arne's; she sang at Covent Garden during the ten years from 1759 to 1770.

P. 166. So sang, in Roman tone and style. The lines which Cowper has translated above occur towards the end of Milton's verses to Manso, and are as follows:

"Forsitan et nostros ducat de marmore vultus, Necteus aut Paphia myrti aut Parnasside lauri Fronde comas, at ego secura pace quiescam."

P. 172. Address to the shade of Thomson. This is the address as Burns first wrote it; it was subse

quently altered, and various local allusions inserted which are no improvement on the original poem.

P. 183. Shakespeare unlock'd his heart. ing's characteristic comment on this is,

Brown

"Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

P. 184. Bard of the Fleece. Akenside said of this poem that "he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's Fleece; for, if that were ill-received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." It is curiously Wordsworthian both in feeling and style. The last line in the sonnet alludes to a short poem of Dyer's called Grongar Hill of which these are the closing lines:

P. 210.

"And often, by the murmuring rill,
Hears the thrush, while all is still,
Within the groves of Grongar Hill."

The Leaf and Flower. Scott, in common with the rest of the world in his day, supposed this poem to be the production of Chaucer. It has now been ascertained to be a work of the fifteenth century, and Mr. Skeat has no doubt that it was written, as it purports to be, by a woman.

P. 251. If it be He. Severn, the artist, who watched by Keats through the months his agony lasted.

P. 261. My boundly reverence. The reverence which I am bound to pay, according to Mr. Palgrave. P. 273. That submarine Gem-lighted city. The city of Baly in the Curse of Kehama, which poem was dedicated to Landor.

P. 296. Better and truer verse. I have left out a parenthetical line between these two.