1. 4. physical. Pertaining to health. 'Is Brutus sick, and is it physical To walk unbraced and suck up the humours 1. 8. doctor's bill. Cf. also 'Like him that took the doctor's bill Butler, Hudibras, i. 1. 604. 'So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art Pope, Essay on Criticism, 108. receipt recipe. Here a mere repetition of doctor's bill in the same line 'The apothecary train is wholly blind; And many deaths in one prescription make.' Dryden, Letter to his Kinsman John. Cf. also the line above quoted in note to p. 7, 1. II: 'Write dull receipts how poems may be made.' Pope, Essay on Criticism, 115. 1. 25. lanthorn. Lat. laterna or lanterna, a case for holding a light. Laterna is the more common form, from which has arisen a more than doubtful etymology from lateo; ' intra quod lux candelae latet.' It was often made of horn, whence the erroneous spelling lanthorn. Cf. the pun on the word in Midsummer Night's Dream, v. 1. 231, 'This lanthorn doth the horned moon present.' 1. 32. a reading. A is here a preposition signifying on. Cf. Life of Pope, p. 131, l. 7. P. 14, 1. 29. fustian. A common and coarse kind of cloth made of linen and cotton. Hence trumpery of any kind; vain bombastic lan guage. 'Hold, hold, quoth she; no more of this, Sir knight, you take your aim amiss: For you will find it a hard chapter To catch me with poetick rapture, In which your mastery of art Doth show itself, and not your heart: Butler, Hudibras, ii. 1. 583. Cf. also Milton, Areopagitica, p. 35, Clarendon Press Series: Nothing had bin there writt'n now these many years but flattery and íustian.' And in Hudibras, i. 1. 98, we have the word in its literal sense:''Twas English cut on Greek and Latin Like fustian heretofore on satin.' P. 15, 1. 6. loggerheads. Blockheads. 'Poins. Where hast been, Hal? Prince. With three or four loggerheads amongst three or four score hogsheads.' Shakspeare, 1 Henry IV, ii. 4. 1. 8. cits. Contraction of 'citizens,' and almost always used in an unfavourable or contemptuous sense. Oh ye addlebrained cits, who henceforth in their wits When in diamonds and gold ye have him thus enrolled? Cf. p. 40, 1. 26. Andrew Marvell, Letter to the Lord Mayor. 1. 13. Gotham. The name of a parish and village in Nottinghamshire. Near it is a place called Cuckoo Bush; the bush having been planted to commemorate the story out of which was to grow the well-known saying, the 'Wise men of Gotham,' or the Fools of Gotham.' The tale is thus :'King John passing through this place towards Nottingham, intending to go over the meadows I have just described, was prevented by the villagers; they apprehending that the ground over which a king passed was for ever after to become a public road. The king, incensed at their proceedings, sent from his court soon after some of his servants to enquire of them the reason of their incivility and ill-humour, that he might punish them by way of fine or some other way he might judge most proper. The villagers hearing of the approach of the king's servants thought of an expedient to turn away his majesty's displeasure from them: When the messengers arrived at Gotham they found some of the inhabitants engaged in endeavouring to drown an eel in a pool of water; some were employed in dragging carts upon a large barn to shade the wood from the sun; others were tumbling their cheeses down a hill that they might find the way to Nottingham for sale; and some were employed in hedging in a cuckoo which had perched upon an old bush which stood where the present one now stands; in short, they were all employed in some foolish way or other, which convinced the king's servants that it was a village of fools. Whence arose the old adage "The wise men of Gotham." Thoroton's History of Nottingham. Hence one could hardly 'land' at Gotham. The writer either did not know the origin of the saying, or the word 'land' is used here in a loose sense for 'arrive.' 1. 24. Mock Astrologer. The full title of this play is 'An Evening's Love, or the Mock Astrologer.' P. 16, l. 13. rants of Maximin. I remember some verses of my own [Maximin and Almanzor] which cry vengeance upon me for their extravagance, and which I wish heartily in the same fire with Statius and Chapman.' Dryden, Dedication to the Spanish Friar, 1681. Cf. p. 103, 1, 25, 'But I knew that they were bad enough to please even when I wrote them.' 1. 20. written before. A mistake. Tyrannic Love, 1670; Granada, 1672. 1. 29. malice to the parsons. The force of Johnson's religious emotions perhaps made him over-sensitive on such points as this. There is not much malice in the sentence, and Dryden after all only states a plain historical fact. P. 17, 1. 30. Clifford's remarks. "Notes on Mr. Dryden's Poems, in Four Letters by Martin Clifford, late master of the Charterhouse'; London, 1687. P. 18, 1. 7. Ancient Pistol. 'I remember just such another fuming Achilles in Shakspeare, one ancient Pistol, whom he avows to be a man of so fiery a temper and so impatient of injury, even from Sir John Falstaff, his captain, and a knight, that he not only disobeyed his commands about carrying a letter to Mrs. Page, but returned him an answer as full of contumely and in as opprobrious terms as he could imagine.' Clifford's Notes on Dryden. 1. 11. Huffcap. A blusterer, a bully. As for you, Colonel Huffcap, we shall try before a civic magistrate who's the greater plotter of us two, I against the State, or you against the Petticoat.' Dryden, Spanish Friar, act iv. sc. I. 1. 20. vindication. Morocco,' 1674. 'Notes and Observations on the Empress of P. 19, 1. 6. Dryden. More probably Crowne. See note on p. 10, 1. 16. 1. 29. the London. Cf. note to the Select Dryden, Annus Mir., st. 151. 'The old ship the "London," one of the many of the Commonwealth, had been destroyed by fire, and the city of London now presented the king with a new ship, called "The Loyal London." This second "London" was burnt before the end of the war, when the Dutch surprised Chatham in 1667.' P. 20, 1. 5. pother. Cf. note to p. 10, 1. 27. 1. 30. fustian. Cf. note to p. 14, 1. 29. P. 21, 1. 1. Move swiftly, &c. This passage Johnson says Dryden knew to be nonsense. Cf. p. 101, 1. 31: This inclination sometimes produced nonsense which he knew,' &c. 1. 5. Poor Robin. Pseudonym for William Winstanley, who published 'The Character of a Scold,' &c., and Almanacks intended to satirise the astrological predictions with which it was in his day the custom to fill this kind of publication. The almanack for 1677, 'A new kind of Almanack,' is very amusing. Thus we have Observations on January':'The year begins very bad with those who are taken picking of a pocket, for it is apt to breed a crick in the neck ... We hear little of battles or skirmishes at present unless it be among the Oyster Wives at Billingsgate.' March. 'We may probably have some wind this month which will blow very good news to him who hath a friend lately dead and left him £500 a year lands and £1000 in money.' Again, on the eclipses of the year he says of the third eclipse: Now you must know that near the mountains of Sierra Nevada, and the North-West parts of America, unto them the moon's body will be half obscured; towards the end of it it may be seen in New France, Greenland, Florida, Cuba, the Pacific Ocean, &c., and in some other places where I never was, nor (by God's help) never intend to be.' 1. 20. huff. A piece of arrogance. 'Quoth Ralpho, honour's but a word To swear by only in a lord; In others it is but a huff To vapour with instead of truth.' Butler, Hudibras, ii. 2. 389. 1. 28. fountain means originally the source or spring of a river, its meaning of a jet of water being more recent. P. 22, 1. 7. fore-right, straight forward. Cf. 'right line' = straight line. 1. 11. light of. The preposition used here is now on. The corruption appears to have arisen from the habit of writing on for of in such phrases as 'There's an end on't,'' a thriving gamester has but a poor trade on't' (Locke), &c. &c. Both of and on were contracted to o, and from these habits they may have become confused in the minds of writers who had more wit than scholarship. 1. 26. to = in comparison with.' 'There is no fool to the sinner.' Archbishop Tillotson. P. 23, 1. 4. two ifs. Cf. p. 20, 1. 24. 1. 6. Marriage-à-la-Mode. A common title for satire, made immortal by association with the pencil of Hogarth, who published the six engravings bearing this title in April, 1745. 1. 9. 1673. First acted 1672; published 1673. Not only tradition but Johnson himself places the Earl of Rochester among Dryden's enemies (p. 30, 1. 23). See also p. 33, 1. 8, where the cause of the enmity is stated, and where it appears that the offence was given at a later date. 1. 16. Sir C. Sedley or Sidley, the Lisideius of the Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry. Cf. p. 9, 1. 5, and note. 1. 19. Amboyna. The full title of this play was 'Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants.' 1. 26. declares in his Epilogue :— 'A poet once the Spartans led to fight 1. 27. Tyrtæus. In the Second Messenian War (B. C. 648-631) the Spartans being hard pressed sent to Delphi for advice. The oracle instructed them to apply to Athens for a leader, which they did; but the Athenians, sympathising with the Messenians though unwilling to disobey the god, sent Tyrtæus, a lame man and a schoolmaster. But his warlike odes roused the Spartans to a pitch of martial ardour which ensured their success and vindicated the authority of the god. See Grote, History of Greece, ii. p. 188 sq. 1. 28. second Dutch war. This was a war declared by England against Holland in March 1672, in accordance with a secret treaty between Charles II and Louis XIV of France, by the advice of the famous 'Cabal' ministry, aided by the influence which Louise de Querouaille, afterwards Duchess of Portsmouth, had acquired over the king. France and England thus united for the conquest of Holland; but the efforts of the allies were brought to nought owing to the courage and conduct of William, Prince of Orange, at the head of the Dutch forces, and the opposition of the English House of Commons to a war they detested. Peace was concluded between England and Holland in Feb. 1674. It was after this peace that Charles II took occasion to degrade England's foreign policy to the lowest depths to which it has ever fallen by accepting an annual pension from Louis on condition of not opposing him in his further prosecution of the war. 1. 24. Rymer's book. This was 'The Tragedies of the Last Age considered and examined by the practice of the Ancients and by the Common Sense of all Ages. In a letter to Fleetwood Shepheard,' 1678. 'I have thought our poetry of the last age as rude as our architecture,' says this worst critic that ever lived'; and again, I will send you some reflections on that Paradise Lost of Milton's, which some are pleased to call a poem.' Johnson might have spoken of this author in the same terms as he did of Settle,-'Enough of Rymer.' P. 24, 1. 8. Dryden's opinion, &c. This opinion in some form Dryden shares with many good critics. Cf. De Quincey on the 'Porter Scene' in Macbeth, where this feeling is analysed and fully explained. De Quincey says:-'An action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible by reaction. . . . . Hence it is that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.' (Works, ed. 1863, vol. xv. p. 197.) This is of course a critique upon an extreme case; but it opens with a statement of a general principle of wide application, and which may almost be described as a psychological truism, being, in fact, only a particular form of the doctrine of the Relativity of Knowledge. T |