Ev’n might Pam, that Kings and Queens o’erthrew,
And mow’d down armies in the fights of Lu;
and Colman’s epilogue to The School for Scandal, 1777:—
And at backgammon mortify my soul,
That pants for loo, or flutters at a vole?
[Miss Horneck.] Miss Mary Horneck, the ‘Jessamy Bride’ vide note, p. 251, l. 14).
[Fielding.] Sir John Fielding, d. 1780, Henry Fielding’s blind half-brother, who succeeded him as a Justice of the Peace for the City and Liberties of Westminster. He was knighted in 1761. There are two portraits of him by Nathaniel Hone.
[by quinto Elizabeth, Death without Clergy.] Legal authorities affirm that the Act quoted should be 8 Eliz. cap. iv, under which those who stole more than twelvepence ‘privately from a man’s person’ were debarred from benefit of clergy. But ‘quint. Eliz.’ must have offered some special attraction to poets, since Pope also refers to it in the Satires and Epistles, i. 147–8:—
Consult the Statute: quart. I think, it is,
Edwardi sext. or prim. et quint. Eliz.
[With bunches of fennel, and nosegays before ’em.] This was a custom dating from the fearful jail fever of 1750, which carried off, not only prisoners, but a judge (Mr. Justice Abney) ‘and many jurymen and witnesses.’ ‘From that time up to this day [i.e. 1855] it has been usual to place sweet-smelling herbs in the prisoner’s dock, to prevent infection.’ (Lawrence’s Life of Henry Fielding, 1855, p. 296.) The close observation of Cruikshank has not neglected this detail in the Old Bailey plate of The Drunkard’s Children, 1848, v.
[mobs.] The mob was a loose undress or dèshabillè, sometimes a hood. ‘When we poor souls had presented ourselves with a contrition suitable to our worthlessness, some pretty young ladies in mobs, popped in here and there about the church.’ (Guardian, No. 65, May 26, 1713.) Cf. also Addison’s ‘Fine Lady’s Diary’ (Spectator, No. 323); ‘Went in our Mobbs to the Dumb Man’ (Duncan Campbell).
[yon solemn-faced.] Cf. Introduction, p. xxvii. According to the ‘Jessamy Bride,’ Goldsmith sometimes aggravated his plainness by an ‘assumed frown of countenance’ (Prior, Life, 1837, ii. 379).