[91f] The most important of the puppet-shows was Powell’s, in the Little Piazza, Covent Garden, which is frequently mentioned in the Tatler.
[91g] The precise nature this negligent costume is not known, but it is always decried by popular writers of the time.
[91h] Retched. Bacon has “Patients must not keck at them at the first.”
[92a] Swift was born on November 30.
[92b] Mrs. De la Riviere Manley, daughter of Sir Roger Manley, and cousin of John Manley, M.P., and Isaac Manley (see pp. [7], [24]), wrote poems and plays, but is best known for her Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of both sexes. From the New Atalantis, 1709, a book abounding in scandalous references to her contemporaries. She was arrested in October, but was discharged in Feb. 1710. In May 1710 she brought out a continuation of the New Atalantis, called Memoirs of Europe towards the Close of the Eighth Century. In June 1711 she became editress of the Tory Examiner, and wrote political pamphlets with Swift’s assistance. Afterwards she lived with Alderman Barber, the printer, at whose office she died in 1724. In her will she mentioned her “much honoured friend, the Dean of St. Patrick, Dr. Swift.”
[92c] “He seems to have written these words in a whim; for the sake of what follows” (Deane Swift).
[94b] In a letter to the Rev. Dr. Tisdall, of Dec. 16, 1703, Swift said: “I’ll teach you a way to outwit Mrs. Johnson: it is a new-fashioned way of being witty, and they call it a bite. You must ask a bantering question, or tell some damned lie in a serious manner, and then she will answer or speak as if you were in earnest; and then cry you, ‘Madam, there’s a bite!’ I would not have you undervalue this, for it is the constant amusement in Court, and everywhere else among the great people.” See, too, the Tatler, No. 12, and Spectator, Nos. 47, 504: “In a word, a Biter is one who thinks you a fool, because you do not think him a knave.”