[25]. the very Original of our English Tragical Harmony. Cf. Dryden, Epistle Dedicatory of the Rival Ladies, ed. W. P. Ker, i., p. 6, and Bysshe, Art of English Poetry, 1702, p. 36. See Johnson's criticism of this passage, Preface, p. [140].
Such verse we make, etc. Dennis makes these two lines illustrate themselves.
[26]. Jack-Pudding. See the Spectator, No. 47. The term was very common at this time for a “merry wag.” It had also the more [pg 309] special sense of “one attending on a mountebank,” as in Etherege's Comical Revenge, iii. 4.
Coriolanus. Contrast Dennis's opinion of Coriolanus in his letter to Steele of 26th March, 1719: “Mr. Dryden has more than once declared to me that there was something in this very tragedy of Coriolanus, as it was writ by Shakespear, that is truly great and truly Roman; and I more than once answered him that it had always been my own opinion.”
[29]. Poetical Justice. Dennis defended the doctrine of poetical justice in the first of the two additional letters published with the letters on Shakespeare. Addison had examined this “ridiculous doctrine in modern criticism” in the Spectator, No. 40 (April 16, 1711). Cf. Pope's account of Dennis's “deplorable frenzy” in the Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris (Pope's Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope, x. 459).
[30]. Natura fieret. Horace, Ars poetica, 408.
a circular poet, i.e. a cyclic poet. This is the only example of this sense of circular in the New English Dictionary.
[32]. Hector speaking of Aristotle,—Troilis and Cressida, ii. 2. 166; Milo, id. ii. 3. 258; Alexander, Coriolanus v. 4. 23.
Plutarch. Though Dennis is right in his conjecture that Shakespeare used a translation, the absence of any allusion to North's Plutarch would show that he did not know of it. He is in error about Livy. Philemon Holland's translation had appeared in 1600.
[33]. Offenduntur enim, etc. Ars poetica, 248.