[388a] Sir Solomon de Medina, a Jew, was knighted in 1700.
[388b] Davenant had been said to be the writer of papers which Swift contributed to the Examiner.
[389a] Henry Withers, a friend of “Duke” Disney (see p. [153]), was appointed Lieutenant-General in 1707, and Major-General in 1712. On his death in 1729 he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
[390] Dyer’s News Letter, the favourite reading of Sir Roger de Coverley (Spectator, No. 127), was the work of John Dyer, a Jacobite journalist. In the Tatler (No. 18) Addison says that Dyer was “justly looked upon by all the fox-hunters in the nation as the greatest statesman our country has produced.” Lord Chief-Justice Holt referred to the News Letter as “a little scandalous paper of a scandalous author” (Howell’s State Trials, xiv. 1150).
[391] Dr. John Sharp, made Archbishop of York in 1691, was called by Swift “the harmless tool of others’ hate.” Swift believed that Sharp, owing to his dislike of The Tale of a Tub, assisted in preventing the bishopric of Hereford being offered to him. Sharp was an excellent preacher, with a taste for both poetry and science.
[392a] An edition of the Countess d’Aulnoy’s Les Contes des Fées appeared in 1710, in four volumes.
[392b] Francis Godolphin, Viscount Rialton, the eldest son of Sidney, Earl of Godolphin, succeeded his father as second Earl on Sept. 15, 1712. He held 3 various offices, including that of Lord Privy Seal (1735–1740), and died in 1766, aged eighty-eight. He married, in 1698, Lady Henrietta Churchill, who afterwards was Duchess of Marlborough in her own right. She died in 1733.
[392c] See p. [256]. Ladies of the bed-chamber received £1000 a year.
[392d] William O’Brien, third Earl of Inchiquin, succeeded his father in 1691, and died in 1719.