(Part II).
[The towers of Kew.] ‘The embellishments of Kew palace and gardens, under the direction of [Sir William] Chambers, and others, was the favourite object of her [Royal Highness’s] widowhood’ (Bolton Corney).
[Along the billow’d main.] Cf. The Captivity, Act ii, l. 18.
[Oswego’s dreary shores.] Cf. The Traveller, l. 411.
[And with the avenging fight.] Varied from Collins’s Ode on the Death of Colonel Charles Ross at Fontenoy.
[Its earliest bloom.] Cf. Collins’s Dirge in Cymbeline.
[SONG]
FROM ‘SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER.’
This thoroughly characteristic song, for a parallel to which one must go to Congreve, or to the ‘Here’s to the maiden of bashful fifteen’ of The School for Scandal, has one grave defect,—it is too good to have been composed by Tony Lumpkin, who, despite his inability to read anything but ‘print-hand,’ declares, in Act i. Sc. 2 of She Stoops to Conquer, 1773, that he himself made it upon the ale-house (‘The Three Pigeons’) in which he sings it, and where it is followed by the annexed comments, directed by the author against the sentimentalists, who, in The Good Natur’d Man of five years before, had insisted upon the omission of the Bailiff scene:—
‘OMNES.
Bravo, bravo!
First FELLOW.