[with an income of forty pounds a year.] Cf. The Deserted Village, ll. 141–2:—
A man he was, to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year.
Cf. also Parson Adams in ch. iii of Joseph Andrews, who has twenty-three; and Mr. Rivers, in the Spiritual Quixote, 1772:—‘I do not choose to go into orders to be a curate all my life-time, and work for about fifteen-pence a day, or twenty-five pounds a year’ (bk. vi, ch. xvii). Dr. Primrose’s stipend is thirty-five in the first instance, fifteen in the second (Vicar of Wakefield, chapters ii and iii). But Professor Hales (Longer English Poems, 1885, p. 351) supplies an exact parallel in the case of Churchill, who, he says, when a curate at Rainham, ‘prayed and starved on forty pounds a year.’ The latter words are Churchill’s own, and sound like a quotation; but he was dead long before The Deserted Village appeared in 1770. There is an interesting paper in the Gentleman’s Magazine for November, 1763, on the miseries and hardships of the ‘inferior clergy.’
[But of all kinds of ambition, etc.] In the first edition of 1765, p. ii, this passage was as follows:—‘But of all kinds of ambition, as things are now circumstanced, perhaps that which pursues poetical fame, is the wildest. What from the encreased refinement of the times, from the diversity of judgments produced by opposing systems of criticism, and from the more prevalent divisions of opinion influenced by party, the strongest and happiest efforts can expect to please but in a very narrow circle. Though the poet were as sure of his aim as the imperial archer of antiquity, who boasted that he never missed the heart; yet would many of his shafts now fly at random, for the heart is too often in the wrong place.’ In the second edition it was curtailed; in the sixth it took its final form.
[they engross all that favour once shown to her.] First version—‘They engross all favour to themselves.’
[the elder’s birthright.] Cunningham here aptly compares Dryden’s epistle To Sir Godfrey Kneller, II. 89–92:—
Our arts are sisters, though not twins in birth;
For hymns were sung in Eden’s happy earth:
But oh, the painter muse, though last in place,
Has seized the blessing first, like Jacob’s race.
[Party]=faction. Cf. lines 31–2 on Edmund Burke in Retaliation:—
Who, born for the Universe, narrow’d his mind,
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.
[Such readers generally admire, etc.] ‘I suppose this paragraph to be directed against Paul Whitehead, or Churchill,’ writes Mitford. It was clearly aimed at Churchill, since Prior (Life, 1837, ii. 54) quotes a portion of a contemporary article in the St. James’s Chronicle for February 7–9, 1765, attributed to Bonnell Thornton, which leaves little room for doubt upon the question. ‘The latter part of this paragraph,’ says the writer, referring to the passage now annotated, ‘we cannot help considering as a reflection on the memory of the late Mr. Churchill, whose talents as a poet were so greatly and so deservedly admired, that during his short reign, his merit in great measure eclipsed that of others; and we think it no mean acknowledgment of the excellencies of this poem [The Traveller] to say that, like the stars, they appear the more brilliant now that the sun of our poetry is gone down.’ Churchill died on the 4th of November, 1764, some weeks before the publication of The Traveller. His powers, it may be, were misdirected and misapplied; but his rough vigour and his manly verse deserved a better fate at Goldsmith’s hands.