1. 834. By unequal fates and Providence's crime. Compare 'Fortunae, Ptolemaee, pudor crimenque Deorum.' Lucan, Phars. v. 59. Unequal fates is probably Dryden's translation of Virgil's 'fata iniqua' (Aen. ii. 257, and x. 380)..

It was an old custom to hang funeral poems on the hearse. See Shakespeare, Much Ado, Act v. Sc. iii. Claudio hangs verses on Hero's

monument :

"Hang thou there upon the tomb,
Praising her when I am dumb.'

Here

1. 875. Who best could plead and best can judge a cause. Dryden, who never uses a word at random, speaks of judges who had been barristers, and who formerly were the best pleaders as now the best judges. Broughton, not seeing this, changed who best could plead into who best can plead: and succeeding editors followed him. In the Preface to The State of Innocence, Dryden had written, 'He must be a lawyer before he mounts the tribunal.'

1. 877. Adriel, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, who was afterwards made Marquis of Normanby by King William, and Duke of Buckinghamshire by Queen Anne. Mulgrave was a poet, and a great friend of Dryden. He was the author of the Essay on Satire, which was wrongly ascribed to Dryden, and for which Dryden was cudgelled in Rose Alley, in December, 1679. Mulgrave was bountiful to Dryden after the Revolution of 1688, when he had lost the poet-laureateship. Dryden dedicated to him the Translation of the Aeneid. Mulgrave, then Duke of Buckinghamshire, erected a monument to Dryden in Westminster Abbey, in 1720, twenty years after the poet's death. Dryden in writing The Muses' friend' may have had Horace's 'Musis amicus,' applied to Lamia (Od. i. 26), in his mind.

11. 880, 881. Charles deprived Monmouth of all his offices and honours in 1679; and of these he gave the Lord Lieutenancy of the East Riding of Yorkshire and the government of Hull to Mulgrave.

He

1. 882. Jotham, George Savile, who inherited a baronetcy and was created by Charles II successively Viscount, Earl, and Marquis of Halifax, was a statesman of great ability and accomplishments. held the office of Lord Privy Seal, and was one of Charles's chief advisers during the last four years of his reign. He was a 'Trimmer,'

the name given to the party of moderation in the violent disputes between Charles and the opposition, headed by Shaftesbury and Russell. He wrote the 'Character of a Trimmer.' Dryden dedicated to him his play of King Arthur, produced and published in 1691; and in this dedication he says that Halifax had 'held a principal place in King Charles's esteem, and perhaps the first in his affection during his latter troubles.' Halifax took a prominent part in bringing about the Revolution of 1688.

ready stands instead of piercing in the first edition in line 882.

1. 888. Hushai, Laurence Hyde, second son of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, created in 1680 Viscount Hyde, and in 1682 Earl of Rochester. He was appointed one of the Commissioners of the Treasury in 1679, and soon became first Commissioner and a leading minister. On the accession of James he was made Lord Treasurer. Hyde befriended Dryden. Dryden's and Lee's Duke of Guise was dedicated to Rochester 1682, and Dryden dedicated to him in 1692 his Cleomenes. In the latter dedication Dryden refers to Rochester's kindness to him when he was powerful at the Treasury in the reigns of Charles II and James II: 'Your goodness has not been wanting to me during the reign of my two masters, and even from a bare Treasury my success has been contrary to that of Mr. Cowley, and Gideon's fleece has there been moistened, when all the ground has been dry about it.'

1. 899. Amiel, Edward Seymour, who had been Speaker of the House of Commons from 1673 to 1679. He succeeded to a baronetcy in 1688, and is best known as Sir Edward Seymour. He was the head of the house of Seymour, the then Duke of Somerset being of a younger branch of the family. He opposed the Bill of Exclusion; he was afterwards an eager promoter of the Revolution.

1. 910. the unequal ruler of the day, Phaeton. unequal, incompetent. 1. 920. plume, pluck. The regal rights are to be plucked like a bird's feathers. Elsewhere Dryden uses the word plume in the sense of strip or rob by plucking: 'He has left the faction as bare of arguments as Æsop's bird of feathers, and plumed them of all those fallacies and evasions which they borrowed from Jesuits and Presbyterians.' (Vindication of the Duke of Guise.)

'One whom, instead of banishing a day,

You should have plumed of all his borrowed honours.'

Maiden Queen, Act iii. Sc. 1.

'Not with more ease the falcon from above

Trusses in middle air the trembling dove,

Then plumes the prey.' Translation of Aeneid, xi. 1045.

1. 939. With reference to David's speech, which begins at this line, Spence says that he was told by Pope that King Charles obliged

Dryden to put his Oxford speech into verse, and to insert it towards the close of his Absalom and Achitophel.' (Anecdotes of Men and Books, p. 112.) The Oxford speech is the speech made by Charles at the opening of the parliament at Oxford, March 21, 1681. There are some points of resemblance in the two speeches, but David's speech is certainly far from being a paraphrase of King Charles's.

11. 957-960. These four lines about Monmouth were added in the second edition.

1. 966. destroy in first edition, instead of supplant.

1. 971. His old instructor, Shaftesbury, who lost his place as Chancellor in Nov. 1673.

*11. 1006-1009 may be thus paraphrased: 'They, i. e. the factious party, demand law and shall have law. They are not content with my clemency, with grace or mercy-which is as it were the hinder parts of law and may be seen with safety-but rashly demand to see the very face of law.' 'Grace' is explained by lines 939-944; ' Law' by lines 991-1003. 11. 1007, 8. Grace Her hinder parts. There is a reference here, as in Astræa Redux (262–265), to the appearance of God to Moses: 'And he (the Lord) said, Thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see me and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock, and it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand, while I pass by: and I will take away mine hand and thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen' (Exodus xxxiii. 20-23). See The Hind and the Panther, Part iii. line 1040, 'Vice, though frontless and of hardened face, Is daunted at the sight of awful grace.'

1. 1009. From Ovid; Ars Amat. i. 655,

1. 1030.

'Neque enim lex aequior ulla est
Quam necis artifices arte perire sua.'
'Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.'

'Incipient magni procedere menses.'

And compare in Annus Mirabilis, stanza 18,

Virg. Ecl. iv. 5.
Id. 12.

'And now, a round of greater years begun.'

Also Astræa Redux, 1. 292.

Religio Laici.

Preface.

P. 122, 1. 16. The preface of the Athanasian Creed is, 'Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic

faith. Which faith, except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.'

P. 123, l. I. interessed. The form of the time, and always used by Dryden. Disinteressed occurs in line 335 of Religio Laici. Both here and in line 335 the old form has been replaced by the editors with the modern word, interested, disinterested; and the change in line 335 spoils the rhythm. Dryden has interessing in the Preface to the State of Innocence, and uninteressed in the Prefaces to Troilus and Cressida and Albion and Albanius.

P. 124, 1. 11. Mr. Coleman's letters. Edward Coleman was Secretary to the Duke of York, and a very zealous Roman Catholic. He had been engaged in correspondence with Père la Chaise, Confessor to Louis XIV, with the Pope's Nuncio, and with other Roman Catholics abroad for bringing about the establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in England. He was the first of Oates's victims: he was executed December 3, 1678.

1. 26. Mariana and the others named are all Jesuit writers of the sixteenth century.

1. 28. Edmund Campian and Robert Parsons were two English Jesuits. Parsons wrote under the name of Doleman. Campian and Parsons obtained in 1580 a bull from the Pope declaring that the previous bull of Pius V deposing and excommunicating Queen Elizabeth did for ever bind the heretics, but not Roman Catholics, until a favourable opportunity arose for putting it in execution. Armed with this bull, they came into England to proclaim that the Pope had power to dethrone monarchs, and that Queen Elizabeth's subjects were freed from their allegiance. Campian was executed for preaching this doctrine in 1581. Parsons fled to Rome, where he published, under the name of N. Doleman, a work with the title 'A Conference about the Next Succession of the Crown of England.' Parsons died at Rome in 1610.

P. 125, 1. 27. Father Cres. Serenus Cressy was originally chaplain to the Earl of Strafford, and afterwards to Lord Falkland: he subsequently became a Roman Catholic and a Benedictine monk at Douay. After the Restoration he came to England, and was chaplain to the Queen.

P. 126, 1. 18. William Tyndal, a zealous Lutheran, was the first translator into English of the New Testament and the Pentateuch. His version was prohibited and publicly burnt by order of Henry VIII, who was against the Lutherans. Tyndal was seized at Brussels and strangled to death in 1536. His last words were 'Lord, open the King's eyes.' P. 127, 1. 5. Isaac Walton's Life of Hooker, which was published in 1662, is here referred to. In it is the letter of George Cranmer to

Hooker here mentioned.

P. 127, 1. 13. Martin Mar-prelate, John Penry, a Welsh clergyman of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who became an Anabaptist and a writer against Episcopacy, under the above nom de guerre. He was executed in 1593 for writing against the established religion.

*1. 14. Marvel. Andrew Marvel (d. 1678), famous for his controversies with Samuel Parker and other high-church writers. Marvel's best-known pamphlets are 'The Rehearsal Transposed' and 'Mr. Smirke, or the Divine in Mode.' Wood terms him 'the buffooning champion' of the Nonconformists.

1. 38. Hacket and Coppinger, two Calvinistic mad enthusiasts. The former proclaimed himself in 1591 in the streets of London as the Messiah, come to purify the Church of England; and Coppinger was one of his prophets. Hacket was executed; Coppinger starved himself to death in prison. A third, Arthington, recanted and was pardoned.

P. 129, 1. 29. The ingenious young gentleman' for whom Dryden says that he wrote this poem was a Mr. Henry Dickinson, of whom nothing else is known. The name is ascertained by a poem by Duke addressed to him by name as the translator of Father Simon's work; and in the translation the initials H. D. are given as those of the translator. Derrick made a mistake, saying that the translator complimented by Dryden was John Hampden, grandson of the famous John Hampden. Richard Simon, the author of the Critical History of the Old Testament, was a priest of the Oratory in Paris, and a good Oriental scholar. He wrote also a Critical History of the New Testament.

1. 21. the Stagirite, Aristotle.

The Poem.

1. 56. triumphs. The accent is on the last syllable, as was the custom in Dryden's time, and as it always is in his poems. See The Hind and the Panther, Part iii. 566. In Dryden's poem to Lady Castlemaine there is the following line,

'Let others still triumph and gain their cause,' which, in apparent ignorance, is silently altered in R. Bell's edition to 'Let others triumph still and gain their cause.'

1. 75. For the use of the verb renown as transitive compare Pope: 'The bard whom pilfered pastorals renown.'

Prologue to the Satires, i. 173.

11. 76, 77. Todd has compared the language of these lines to Zophar's in Job: 'Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?' (Job xi. 7, 8.)