P. 238, 1. 29. Orpheus, 'being a Translation out of the Fourth Book of Virgil's Georgic' by Lord Mulgrave, referred to already, p. 222. P. 239, 1. 3. Erichthonius. Virgil, Georg. iii. 113:

'Primus Erichthonius currus et quattuor ausus

Iungere equos, rapidusque rotis insistere victor.'

1. 20. your noble kinsman the Earl of Dorset. 'Their mothers were half-sisters, being both daughters of Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex.' SCOTT.

P. 242, 1. 25.

POSTSCRIPT TO THE ÆNEIS.

The present Earl of Peterborough. The friend of Pope and Swift, the hero of the war of the Spanish succession, 'Mordanto.'

1. 34. Sir William Trumball; to whom Pope's first Pastoral is dedicated; died 1716.

P. 243, 1. 15. Fabrini: printed at Venice, 1623.

1. 18. Sir William Bowyer. Mentioned in a note on the Second Georgic: Nature has conspired with Art to make the garden at Denham Court of Sir William's own plantation one of the most delicious spots of ground in England; it contains not above five acres (just the compass of Alcinous's garden, described in the Odysses),' &c.

1. 27. Earl of Exeter. John Cecil, fifth Earl, a Nonjuror. The village of Dryden's birth is Aldwinkle in Northamptonshire.

P. 244, 1. 1. William Walsh. See Pope's note on his First Pastoral, where this remark of Dryden's is quoted; and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.

1 20. part of the Third Georgic. Mr. Malone conjectures the concealed translator may have been Lord Lansdowne, author of the poem which precedes that translation in the Miscellanies. SCOTT.

1. 27. After his Bees. Alluding to a translation of the Third Book of the Georgics, exclusive of the story of Aristæus, which appeared in the third volume of the Miscellanies; by the famous Addison, then of Queen's College, Oxford. Scott.

1. 32. Dr. Guibbons. The same of whom Dryden elsewhere says: 'Guibbons but guesses, nor is sure to save.' SCOTT.

1. 32. Dr. Hobbs. Also an eminent physician of the time, ridiculed, in the Dispensary, under the title of Guiacum. ScOTT. 1. 35. The only one of them. Blackmore.

PREFACE TO FABLES (1700).

P. 246, 1. 10. a certain nobleman. The Duke of Buckingham. 1. 18. the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses. See i. p. 223.

1. 19. balk. Cf. Dedication of the Georgics, if I balked this opportunity.'

1. 20. Fifteenth Book.

Of the Pythagorean Philosophy.'

P. 247, 1. 4. the Hunting of the Boar.

the Eighth Book.

Meleager and Atalanta from

1. 5. Cinyras and Myrrha, from the Tenth; Baucis and Philemon from the Eighth.

1. II. Sandys. See above.

1. 20. Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer

was transfused into his body. Faery Queene, iv. 2, 34:

'Then pardon O most sacred happie spirit!

That I thy labours lost may thus revive,

And steale from thee the meede of thy due merit,
That none durst ever whilest thou wast alive,

And being dead in vaine yet many strive:

Ne dare I like; but through infusion sweete

Of thine own spirit which doth in me survive,

I follow here the footing of thy feete,

That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.'

11. 26-28. Fairfax's Tasso was published in 1600. Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recovery of Jerusalem. One of the stanzas is quoted

above in a note on p. 210, l. 13.

P. 248, 1. 23. octave rhyme. The stanza was used, in French, by Thibaut, King of Navarre, in the previous century, and before Boccaccio, in Italian, by the author of the Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore. But Boccaccio was the first author to give the octave its rank as the Italian 'measure for heroic verse' (p. 107).

P. 249, 1. 2. our learned Mr. Rymer. From the severity of the Third Miscellany (1693), Dryden had returned to his more gentle opinion of Rymer, an excellent critic' as he is called in the Vindication of the Duke of Guise (1683).

1. 3. from the Provençal. See Rymer on the 'Provencial Poetry' in his Short View of Tragedy. 'This Provencial was the first of the modern languages that yielded and chim'd in with the musick and sweetness of ryme; which making its way by Savoy to Monferat, the Italians thence began to file their volgare, and to set their verses all after the Chimes of Provence. Our Intermarriages and our Dominions thereabouts brought us much sooner acquainted with their Tongue and Poetry; and they with us that would write verse, as King Richard, Savery de Mauleon, and Rob. Grostead, finding the English stubborn and unwieldy fell readily to that of Provence, as more glib, and lighter on the Tongue. But they who attempted verse in English, down till Chaucer's time, made an heavy pudder, and are always miserably put to 't for a word to clink; which commonly fall so awkard and unexpectedly as dropping from the Clouds by some Machine or Miracle. Chaucer found an Herculean

labour on his hands; and did perform to Admiration. He seizes all Provencal, French, and Latin that came in his way, gives them a new garb and livery, and mingles them amongst our English: turns out English, gowty or superannuated, to place in their room the foreigners fit for service, train'd and accustomed to Poetical Discipline. But though the Italian reformation was begun and finished well nigh at the same time by Boccace, Dante, and Petrarch, our language retain'd something of the churl; something of the Stiff and Gothish did stick upon it, till long after Chauver. Chaucer threw in Latin, French, Provencial, and other Languages, like new Stum to raise a Fermentation; in Queen Elizabeth's time it grew fine, but came not to an Head and Spirit, did not shine and sparkle till Mr. Waller set it a running.' This is the passage of literary history summed up in Rymer's table of contents in the following remarkable terms: 'Chaucer refin'd our English. Which in perfection by Waller.' Rymer knew something about Provençal poetry, and something about Chaucer, and through Dryden and Pope has made it a matter of traditional belief that Chaucer belongs, in some way or other, to 'the Provençal School.' Dryden seems not to have distinguished between Provençal and old French.

P. 249, 1. 31. the other harmony of prose; a reminiscence of Aristotle, Poet. c. iv. τῆς λεκτικῆς ἁρμονίας.

P. 250, 1. 19. dead-colouring. See vol. i p. 109, l. 7.

1. 26. staved; like contraband hogsheads.

P. 251, l. 9 a religious lawyer. Jeremy Collier.

P. 252, 1. 24. Mr. Hobbes. 'The Iliads and Odysses of Homer. Translated out of Greek into English by Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, with a large Preface concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Poem written by the Translator,' 1676.

1. 31. now the words are the colouring. See p. 147, and p. 223. P. 253, 1. 14. Choleric, &c. Dryden had before him the locus classicus on humours, in the Nun's Priest's Tale (the Cock and the Fox).

1. 34. Longinus, c. 12 καὶ ὁ μὲν ἡμέτερος διὰ τὸ μετὰ βίας ἕκαστα ἔτι δὲ τάχους ῥώμης δεινότητος οἷον καίειν τε ἅμα καὶ διαρπάζειν σκηπτῷ τινι παρεικάζοιτ' ἂν ἢ κεραυνῷ, ὁ δὲ Κικέρων ὡς ἀμφιλαφής τις ἐμπρησμὸς οἶμαι πάντη νέμεται καὶ ἀνειλεῖται, κ.τ.λ.

P. 254, 1. 6. the violent playing of a new machine. Dryden's memory had misplaced the Dream of Agamemnon, which in the Second Book comes before the Catalogue of the Ships.

1. 26. philology. Includes all studies connected with literature. P. 255, 1. 5. the invention of Petrarch. What Petrarch sent to Boccaccio was a Latin version of Boccaccio's story of Griselda in the Decameron, accompanied by a letter: there is an English translation

of the letter in Robinson and Rolfe's Essay on Petrarch, 1898. Petrarch made his translation in the year 1373.

1. 8. by a Lombard author. See Troilus and Cressida above, p. 213, 1. 14.

P. 256, 1. 32. John Littlewit: at the beginning of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair; not quite as in Dryden's quotation: 'A pretty conceit and worth the finding! I have such luck to spin out such fine things still, and like a silk-worm, out of myself.'

P. 257, 1. 17. the turn of words. See p. 108, l. 17, and note.

P. 258, 1. 5. one of our late great poets. Cowley; see above, p. 108, and compare the judgement of the Battle of the Books on Cowley: 'one half lay panting on the ground to be trod in pieces by the horses feet; the other half was borne by the frighted steed through the field. This Venus took, washed it seven times in ambrosia, then struck it thrice with a sprig of amarant; upon which the leather grew round and soft, and the leaves turned into feathers, and being gilded before, continued gilded still; so it became a dove, and she harnessed it to her chariot.' Compare Dryden's reference in the Dedication of Aurengzebe: his master Epicurus and my better master Cowley.'

1. 27. for Catullus read Martial:

11

'Occurrit tibi nemo quod libenter

Quod quocunque venis, fuga est et ingens,

Circa te Ligurine solitudo:

Quid sit scire cupis: nimis poeta es.' iii. 44.

1. 30. auribus istius temporis accommodata: accommodata.' Tac. Orat. c. 21.

auribus iudicum

P. 259, 1. 2. he who published the last edition of him. Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer was published in 1597 and 1602. The Preface contains the passage which Dryden alludes to: "And for his (Chaucer's) verses, although, in divers places, they seem to us to stand of unequal measures, yet a skilful reader, who can scan them in their nature, shall find it otherwise. And if a verse, here and there, fal out a syllable shorter or longer than another, I rather aret it to the negligence and rape of Adam Scrivener that I may speake as Chaucer doth), than to any unconning or oversight in the author: for how fearful he was to have his works miswritten, or his vearse mismeasured, may appeare in the end of his fift booke of Troylus and Creseide, where he writeth thus:

'And for there is so great diversitie

In English, and in writing of our tongue,
So pray I God that none miswrite thee,
Ne thee mismetre for defaut of tongue.'

By his hasty and inconsiderate contradiction of honest Speght's

panegyric, Dryden has exposed himself to be censured for pronouncing rashly upon a subject with which he was but imperfectly acquainted. The learned Tyrwhitt has supported Speght's position with equal pains and success, and plainly proves that the apparent inequalities of the rhyme of Chaucer arise chiefly from the change in pronunciation since his time, particularly from a number of words being now pronounced as one syllable, which in those days were prolonged into two, or as two syllables, which were anciently three. These researches, in the words of Ellis, "have proved what Dryden denied, viz., that Chaucer's versification, wherever his genuine text is preserved, was uniformly correct, although the harmony of his lines has, in many cases, been obliterated by the changes that have taken place in the mode of accenting our language." Specimens of the Early English Poets, vol. i. p. 209.' Scott.

P. 259, 1. 20. a Harrington. Sir John Harington's Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse appeared in 1591.

P. 260, 1. 12. the tale of Piers Plowman, i. e. the Ploughman's Tale, printed at the end of the Canterbury Tales; written by the author of the Ploughman's Creed. See Skeat, Chaucerian and other Pieces; Supplement to the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

P. 261, 1. 21. Dr. Drake. James Drake wrote an answer to Collier.
The Ancient and Modern Stages Reviewed, or Mr. Collier's View of the
Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage set in a True Light, 1699.
1. 27. prior læsit. Terence, Eunuchus prol. 4:

'Tum siquis est qui dictum in se inclementius
Existumabit esse, sic existumet

Responsum non dictum esse quia laesit prior.'

P. 261, 1. 15. Baptista Porta; the famous Italian physiognomist. P. 263, 1. 16. Wife of Bath, in the Prologue to her Tale; modernized by Pope.

P. 264, 1. 34. The late Earl of Leicester. Philip, third Earl, to whom Don Sebastian is dedicated; brother of Algernon Sidney. He died in 1697.

6

now

P. 267, 1. 17. some old Saxon friends. The study of early English and the cognate dialects was making great progress at this time, through the industry of Dr. Hickes, Mr. Thomas Hearne, and other scholars; Dryden was probably thinking particularly of Rymer. 1. 30. their grandam gold. Compare The Wild Gallant, iv. 1: I think on't, Frances has one hundred and twenty pieces of old grandam-and-aunt gold left her, that she would never let me touch.' P. 268, 1. 13. into the old Provençal: as before, Dryden does not distinguish Provençal from old French.

P. 269, 11. 25-33. Dryden did not know Boccaccio's Teseide, immediate original of the Knight's Tale.

the