[106] This account is contradicted by Mr. Sheridan, who, with great warmth, asserts, from his own knowledge, that there was not one syllable of truth in this whole account from the beginning to the end. See Life of Swift, edit. 1784, p. 532. R.
[107] Spence.
[108] Henley’s joke was borrowed. In a copy of verses, entitled the Time Poets, preserved in a miscellany called Choice Drollery, 1656, are these lines:
Sent by Ben Jonson, as some authors say,
Broom went before, and kindly swept the way.
J. B.
[109] This weakness was so great that he constantly wore stays, as I have been assured by a waterman at Twickenham, who, in lifting him into his boat, had often felt them. His method of taking the air on the water was to have a sedan chair in the boat, in which he sat with the glasses down. H.
[110] This opinion is warmly controverted by Roscoe, in his Life of Pope; and, perhaps, with justice; for, to adopt the words of D’Israeli, “Pope’s literary warfare was really the wars of his poetical ambition more, perhaps, than of the petulance and strong irritability of his temper.” See also sir Walter Scott’s Swift, i. 316. Ed.
[111] This is incorrect; his ordinary hand was certainly neat and elegant. I have some of it now before me. M.
[112] Pope’s first instructor is repeatedly mentioned by Spence under the name of Banister, and described as the family priest. Spence’s Anecd. 259. 283. Singer’s edit. Roscoe’s Pope, i. 11. Ed.
[113] Dryden died May 1, 1700, a year earlier than Johnson supposed. M.
[114] No. 253. But, according to Dr. Warton, Pope was displeased at one passage, in which Addison censures the admission of “some strokes of ill-nature.”
[115] See Gent. Mag. vol. li. p. 314. N. See the subject very fully discussed in Roscoe’s Life of Pope, i. 86, and following pages.