‘Lauder on Milton’ is one of the books bound to the trunk-maker’s in Hogarth’s Beer Street, 1751. He imposed on Johnson, who wrote him a ‘Preface’ and was consequently trounced by Churchill (ut supra) as ‘our Letter’d POLYPHEME.’
[Our Dodds shall be pious.] The reference is to the Rev. Dr. William Dodd, who three years after the publication of Retaliation (i.e. June 27, 1777) was hanged at Tyburn for forging the signature of the fifth Earl of Chesterfield, to whom he had been tutor. His life previously had long been scandalous enough to justify Goldsmith’s words. Johnson made strenuous and humane exertions to save Dodd’s life, but without avail. (See Birkbeck Hill’s Boswell, 1887, iii. 139–48.) There is an account of Dodd’s execution at the end of vol. i of Angelo’s Reminiscences, 1830.
[our Kenricks.] Dr. William Kenrick—say the earlier annotators—who ‘read lectures at the Devil Tavern, under the Title of “The School of Shakespeare.”’ The lectures began January 19, 1774, and help to fix the date of the poem. Goldsmith had little reason for liking this versatile and unprincipled Ishmaelite of letters, who, only a year before, had penned a scurrilous attack upon him in The London Packet. Kenrick died in 1779.
[Macpherson.] ‘David [James] Macpherson, Esq.; who lately, from the mere force of his style, wrote down the first poet of all antiquity.’ (Note to second edition.) This was ‘Ossian’ Macpherson, 1738–96, who, in 1773, had followed up his Erse epics by a prose translation of Homer, which brought him little but opprobrium. ‘Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable,’ says Johnson in the knockdown letter which he addressed to him in 1775. (Birkbeck Hill’s Boswell, 1887, ii. 298.)
[Our Townshend.] See note to line 34.
[New Lauders and Bowers.] See note to l. 80.
[And Scotchman meet Scotchman, and cheat in the dark.] Mitford compares Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle, 1699, Act iii—
But gods meet gods and jostle in the dark.
But Farquhar was quoting from Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus, 1679, Act iv (at end).
[Here lies David Garrick.] ‘The sum of all that can be said for and against Mr. Garrick, some people think, may be found in these lines of Goldsmith,’ writes Davies in his Life of Garrick, 2nd ed., 1780, ii. 159. Posterity has been less hesitating in its verdict. ‘The lines on Garrick,’ says Forster, Life of Goldsmith, 1871, ii. 409, ‘are quite perfect writing. Without anger, the satire is finished, keen, and uncompromising; the wit is adorned by most discriminating praise; and the truth is only the more unsparing for its exquisite good manners and good taste.’