XV. Sir Roger goes A-Hunting
This paper and XXX of the present collection were written by Eustace Budgell. This sanguine, brilliant, but ill-starred young man was a cousin of Addison's, an Oxford graduate, and a writer of considerable promise. He was introduced to public life by Addison, whom he accompanied as clerk when Addison went to Ireland as secretary. For a time Budgell was a member of the Irish Parliament, and seemed to have a successful career in prospect both in politics and in letters; but he became involved in unfortunate financial speculations, especially in the notorious South Sea Bubble, was guilty of forgery in his efforts to extricate himself, and finally, in despair, drowned himself in the Thames.
Motto. "Cithaeron calls aloud and the dogs on Mount Taygetus."—Virgil, Georgics, iii. 43.
Cithaeron and Taygetus were mountains, the one in Boeotia and the other in Laconia.
[121]: 18. The Bastile (modern spelling, Bastille). The famous prison, for prisoners of state, in Paris; destroyed at the beginning of the French Revolution, July 14, 1789. The 14th of July is still a national holiday in France.
[123]: 19. Midsummer Night's Dream, iv. 1. 124.
[126]: 20. Threw down his pole. Such of the hunters as followed the chase on foot usually carried long vaulting poles, by the aid of which they could leap hedges, ditches, or miry places, and thus, by going cross country, often keep as close to the dogs as the mounted huntsmen. See Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, Chap. xxiii.
[127]: 7. Pascal. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French geometrician and philosopher, and one of the most acute thinkers of his century. His later years were passed in the celebrated community of Port Royal, where his metaphysical and religious works were written. After his death, a number of fragmentary papers intended for a work in defence of Christianity, which he did not live to finish, were collected and published under the title Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion (Thoughts of Pascal upon Religion). It is from the seventh section (Misère de l'homme) of this work that the quotation in the text is taken.
127: 27. Too great an application to his studies in his youth. Pascal wrote a famous Latin treatise on Conic Sections at the age of sixteen, invented a calculating machine at the age of nineteen, and before he was twenty-one was accounted one of the first mathematicians of the world. But he says that from the age of eighteen he never passed a day without pain.
[128]: 10. Lines out of Mr. Dryden. John Dryden (1631-1700), the representative English poet of the last half of the seventeenth century. The lines quoted are from his Epistle XV, to his cousin of the same name as himself, John Dryden of Chesterton, a robust, fox-hunting bachelor. The epistle is a good example of Dryden's masculine common-sense.