=Motto.= "The shame of poverty and the fear of it."--Horace,
_Epistles_, I. xviii. 24.
=111=: 16. =The glass was taken ... pretty plentifully.= The Queen
Anne men were not very temperate. Says Mr. Lecky: "The amount of hard
drinking among the upper classes was still very great, and it is
remarkable how many of the most conspicuous characters were addicted to
it. Addison, the foremost moralist of his time, was not free from it.
Oxford, whose private character was in most respects singularly high,
is said to have come, not infrequently, drunk into the very presence of
the Queen."--_England in the Eighteenth Century_, Chap. iii.
Swift writes in his _Journal to Stella_, October 31, 1710: "I dined
with Mr. Addison and Dick Stuart. They were both half fuddled; but not
I."
=113=: 13, 19. =Laertes ... Irus.= Classical names were frequently
taken for imaginary personages by the writers of this time. Laertes, in
Homer's _Odyssey_, is the father of Ulysses, and Irus is a beggar.
=113=: 16. =Four shillings in the pound.= Laertes evidently has to pay
three hundred pounds a year interest on his mortgage of six thousand
pounds, which is one fifth of his whole income, or "four shillings in
the pound."
=113=: 18. =Easier in his own fortune.= Because, of course, he has to
pay taxes on his whole estate.
=114=: 25. =Mr. Cowley.= Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), one of the most
popular poets of the second third of the seventeenth century. The
vogue of his poetry, however, rapidly declined; but his prose essays
are still very pleasant reading. The essay which Steele seems to refer
to in the latter part of this paragraph is that on _Greatness_, which
closes with a translation of Horace's Ode, _Odi profanum_, Bk. iii. 1.
=114=: 28. =The elegant author who published his works.= Thomas Sprat,
Bishop of Rochester, who issued a complete edition of Cowley's Poetical
Works, prefaced with a Life, in 1680. Sprat's _Life of Cowley_ is one
of the most interesting pieces of biography of the seventeenth century.
=115=: 5. =Great vulgar.= The phrase is from the second line of
Cowley's translation of the _Odi profanum_ of Horace, above mentioned:
"Hence, ye profane! I hate ye all,
Both the great vulgar and the small."
But Steele's sentence is certainly obscure.
=116=: 11. =If e'er ambition did my fancy cheat=, etc. These lines are
Cowley's own, and are inserted in the essay on _Greatness_.