[86]: 1. Eton. The most famous of English schools; in sight of Windsor Castle.
86: 8. Younger brother. By English law the eldest son succeeds to the family estate and titles.
86: 21. A tulip-root. About the middle of the seventeenth century there was a craze for tulips in England. The bulbs were grown in Holland, and were sold for fabulous prices. Dealing in them became a kind of speculation, and tulip bulbs were bought and sold on the exchange, as stocks are now, without changing hands at all. As much as a thousand pounds has been paid, it is said, for a single bulb. The Dutch government finally passed a law that no more than two hundred francs should be charged for one bulb. By the time this paper was written the mania had mostly passed, yet tulips were still highly prized. In The Tatler, Addison has a pleasant paper (No. 218) telling of a cook maid who mistook a "handful of tulip-roots for a heap of onions and by that means made a dish of pottage that cost above a thousand pounds sterling." Forty years later, young Oliver Goldsmith, when a medical student in Leyden, almost beggared himself by the purchase of a parcel of tulip-roots to send to his good uncle Contarine in Ireland.
[89]: 1. Trading nation, like ours. In such passages as this Addison betrays his Whig sympathies. The trading and moneyed classes, it will be remembered, were all in the Whig party; the landed aristocracy, in the Tory party. In Spectator, No. 21,—referred to in the closing lines of this paper,—he dwells at length on the opportunities and advantages of the business life as compared with the overcrowded professions.
IX. The Coverley Ancestry
Motto. "Wise, but not by rule."—Horace. Satires, II. ii. 3.
[90]: 19. Harry the Seventh. Henry VII, king of England, 1485-1509.
90: 19. Yeomen of the guard. The bodyguard of the sovereign, numbering one hundred, who attend him at banquets and other state occasions. They are popularly called "beefeaters," and still wear the uniform here described. The wardens of the Tower of London wear a uniform differing but slightly from that of the yeomen of the guard.
90: 28. The Tilt-yard occupied not only a part of the "common street," now called Whitehall, but the greater part of the "parade ground" in St. James's Park, just behind the Horse Guards building.