l. 12. the Triple Bond, the alliance of England, Holland, and Sweden against France in 1667, broken by the war with France against Holland in 1672. But Shaftesbury then knew nothing of the secret Treaty of Dover, 1670.
l. 16. Usurp'd, in ed. 1 'Assum'd'.
l. 25. Abbethdin 'the president of the Jewish judicature', 'the father of the house of judgement'. Shaftesbury was Lord Chancellor, 1672-3.
Page 234, l. 4. David would have sung his praises instead of writing a psalm, and so Heaven would have had one psalm the less.
ll. 5, 6. Macaulay pointed out in his essay on Sir William Temple that these lines are a reminiscence of a couplet under the portrait of Sultan Mustapha the First in Knolles's Historie of the Turkes (ed. 1638, p. 1370):
Greatnesse, on Goodnesse loues to slide, not stand, and leaues for Fortunes ice, Vertues firm land.
l. 15. The alleged Popish Plot, invented by Titus Oates, to murder the king and put the government in the hands of the Jesuits. Shaftesbury had no share in the invention, but he believed it, and made political use of it.
Page 235, l. 4. This line reappears in The Hind and the Panther,
Part I, l. 211. As W.D. Christie pointed out, it is a reminiscence
of a couplet in Lachrymæ Musarum, 1649, the volume to which
Dryden contributed his school-boy verses 'Upon the Death of the Lord
Hastings':
It is decreed, we must be drain'd (I see)
Down to the dregs of a Democracie.
This is the opening couplet of the English poem preceding Dryden's, and signed 'M.N.' i.e. Marchamont Needham (p. 81).