[44] This seems to have been copied by Gay in his Trivia:
Why do you, boys, the kennel's surface spread,
To tempt, with faithless pass, the matron's tread?
How can you laugh to see the damsel spurn,
Sink in your frauds, and her green stocking mourn?
[45] The witty Earl of Dorset, whom we have often had occasion to mention in these notes. His first wife was the Countess-Dowager of Falmouth. Sheffield insinuates, that he had previously lampooned this lady, and hints at some scandal now obsolete. She died without any issue by Dorset.
[46] Alluding to Dorset's verses to Mr Edward Howard. "On his incomparable incomprehensible Poem, called the British Princess."
[47] Mulgrave here alludes to some anecdotes of his own life and amours, which probably were well known at the time, but are now too obscure to be traced. He was three times married, and always to widows. His lordship is here pleased to represent himself as a gallant of the first order, skilled in all the arts of persuasion and conquest. But his contemporaries did not esteem him so formidable, at least if we may believe the author of a satire, called, "A Heroical Epistle from Lord Allpride to Doll Common;" a bitter and virulent satire on Mulgrave. He is thus described, in an epigram on Lord Allpride:
Against his stars the coxcomb ever strives,
And to be something they forbid contrives.