[30] A passage in a letter from our author to Jacob Tonson, dated probably February 1695-6, lets us know yet more plainly, that to the niggard disposition of this bookseller, we owe that the notes, as here acknowledged, were rather slurred over, than written with due care: "I am not sorry that you will not allow any thing towards the Notes; for, to make them good, would have cost me half a year's time at least. Those I write shall be only marginal, to help the unlearned, who understand not the poetical fables. The Prefaces, as I intend them, will be somewhat more learned. It would require seven years to translate Virgil exactly; but, I promise you once more, to do my best in the four remaining Books, as I have hitherto done in the foregoing.—Upon trial, I find all of your trade are sharpers, and you not more than others; therefore, I have not wholly left you. Mr Aston does not blame you for getting as good a bargain as you could, though I could have got a hundred pounds more; and you might have spared almost all your trouble, if you had thought fit to publish the proposals for the first subscriptions, for I have guineas offered me every day, if there had been room; I believe, modestly speaking, I have refused already twenty-five. I mislike nothing in your letter, therefore, but only your upbraiding me with the public encouragement, and my own reputation concerned in the notes; when I assure you I could not make them to my mind in less than half a year's time."
[31] Would Dryden have pardoned such a rhyme?
[32] Sir Thomas Armstrong, then an officer of the guards, and gentleman of horse to the king. He seems to have been remarkable for riot and profligacy, even in that profligate age; witness his stabbing a gentleman in the pit of the theatre. Thus principled, he became, unfortunately for himself and his patron, a favourite of the Duke of Monmouth, and engaged deeply in all his intrigues, particularly in that of the Rye-house plot, on the discovery of which he fled to Holland, of which he was a native: nevertheless, he was there seized and delivered. He was tried by Jefferies; and sustained the brutality of that judge with more spirit than his friends or his enemies expected. Upon a conviction of outlawry for treason, he was executed, June 1685.
[33] Aston is mentioned as a sort of half wit in some of the lampoons of the day; but I have not been able to trace any thing of his history, except that he seems to have been a courtier of the period; perhaps the same Colonel Aston, whom the reader will find in a subsequent note, acting as Mulgrave's second, in an intended duel with Rochester. If this be so, from the slight with which he is here mentioned, there may have been a coolness in their friendship, although, indeed, the mere want of morals was not considered as an insufferable stigma in the reign of Charles II., and might pass for a good-natured joke, were the epithet dull omitted. The name Aston is mentioned in the "Epistle to Julian."
[34] Robert Constable, third Viscount of Dunbar. He is elsewhere mentioned with the epithet of "brawny Dunbar." He married, 1st, Mary, daughter of Lord Bellasis; 2dly, the countess-dowager of Westmoreland.
[35] The unfortunate duke; the qualities of whose mind did not correspond to his exterior accomplishments. Rochester says of him,—
But, now we talk of Maestricht, where is he
Famed for that brutal piece of bravery?
He, with his thick impenetrable scull,
The solid hardened armour of a fool,