XIII. How to bear Poverty
Motto. "The shame of poverty and the fear of it."—Horace, Epistles, I. xviii. 24.
[111]: 16. The glass was taken ... pretty plentifully. The Queen Anne men were not very temperate. Says Mr. Lecky: "The amount of hard drinking among the upper classes was still very great, and it is remarkable how many of the most conspicuous characters were addicted to it. Addison, the foremost moralist of his time, was not free from it. Oxford, whose private character was in most respects singularly high, is said to have come, not infrequently, drunk into the very presence of the Queen."—England in the Eighteenth Century, Chap. iii.
Swift writes in his Journal to Stella, October 31, 1710: "I dined with Mr. Addison and Dick Stuart. They were both half fuddled; but not I."
[113]: 13, 19. Laertes ... Irus. Classical names were frequently taken for imaginary personages by the writers of this time. Laertes, in Homer's Odyssey, is the father of Ulysses, and Irus is a beggar.
113: 16. Four shillings in the pound. Laertes evidently has to pay three hundred pounds a year interest on his mortgage of six thousand pounds, which is one fifth of his whole income, or "four shillings in the pound."
113: 18. Easier in his own fortune. Because, of course, he has to pay taxes on his whole estate.
[114]: 25. Mr. Cowley. Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), one of the most popular poets of the second third of the seventeenth century. The vogue of his poetry, however, rapidly declined; but his prose essays are still very pleasant reading. The essay which Steele seems to refer to in the latter part of this paragraph is that on Greatness, which closes with a translation of Horace's Ode, Odi profanum, Bk. iii. 1.
114: 28. The elegant author who published his works. Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, who issued a complete edition of Cowley's Poetical Works, prefaced with a Life, in 1680. Sprat's Life of Cowley is one of the most interesting pieces of biography of the seventeenth century.
[115]: 5. Great vulgar. The phrase is from the second line of Cowley's translation of the Odi profanum of Horace, above mentioned:
"Hence, ye profane! I hate ye all,
Both the great vulgar and the small."
But Steele's sentence is certainly obscure.
[116]: 11. If e'er ambition did my fancy cheat, etc. These lines are Cowley's own, and are inserted in the essay on Greatness.