[3] Hutchinson had thus achieved very considerable success and distinction when he was thirty-seven years of age—“the fatal year” in the development of genius, according to Lord Beaconsfield. Grattan accomplished his great work at the age of thirty-six, the age at which Lord Byron had finished his poetry. Fitzgibbon, too, ran high in this respect. At twenty-nine he was a leading lawyer, and M.P. for the University, having displaced and replaced the Provost’s son; at thirty-four he was Attorney-General, governing the country. He was Lord Chancellor and a peer before he had attained what Dr. Webb, in his “Faust,” calls “the mature age of forty-one.” He died at 53.
[4] [Pue’s Occur.]
[5] Alnager, or Aulnager, from the Latin Ulna, an ell, was an officer for measuring and stamping cloth in the wool trade. Pranceriana Poetica has the line:—
“Send Prancer back to stamping friezes.”
[6] See his will.
[8] Lord Lieutenant Townshend’s organ was “The Batchelor; or, Speculations of Jeoffrey Wagstaffe, Esq.,” published at the Mercury in Parliament-street, by one Hoey, a popish printer. To be “mimicked by Jephson and libelled by Hoey,” were amongst the social terrors of the period.—[Baratariana.]
[9] Pranceriana has the line, “To storm her fane in Owen’s Arch.”
[10] It was Sir Hercules Langrishe who accounted to Lord Lieutenant Townshend for the marshy and undrained condition of Phœnix Park, by observing that the English Government “had been too much engaged in draining the rest of the kingdom.”