This paper and XXX of the present collection were written by Eustace
Budgell. This sanguine, brilliant, but ill-starred young man was a
cousin of Addison's, an Oxford graduate, and a writer of considerable
promise. He was introduced to public life by Addison, whom he
accompanied as clerk when Addison went to Ireland as secretary. For a
time Budgell was a member of the Irish Parliament, and seemed to have a
successful career in prospect both in politics and in letters; but he
became involved in unfortunate financial speculations, especially in
the notorious South Sea Bubble, was guilty of forgery in his efforts
to extricate himself, and finally, in despair, drowned himself in the
Thames.
=Motto.= "Cithaeron calls aloud and the dogs on Mount
Taygetus."--Virgil, _Georgics_, iii. 43.
Cithaeron and Taygetus were mountains, the one in Boeotia and the other
in Laconia.
=121=: 18. =The Bastile= (modern spelling, Bastille). The famous
prison, for prisoners of state, in Paris; destroyed at the beginning
of the French Revolution, July 14, 1789. The 14th of July is still a
national holiday in France.
=123=: 19. =Midsummer Night's Dream=, iv. 1. 124.
=126=: 20. =Threw down his pole.= Such of the hunters as followed the
chase on foot usually carried long vaulting poles, by the aid of which
they could leap hedges, ditches, or miry places, and thus, by going
cross country, often keep as close to the dogs as the mounted huntsmen.
See Ashton's _Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne_, Chap. xxiii.
=127=: 7. =Pascal.= Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French geometrician and
philosopher, and one of the most acute thinkers of his century. His
later years were passed in the celebrated community of Port Royal,
where his metaphysical and religious works were written. After his
death, a number of fragmentary papers intended for a work in defence
of Christianity, which he did not live to finish, were collected and
published under the title _Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion_
(Thoughts of Pascal upon Religion). It is from the seventh section
(_Misère de l'homme_) of this work that the quotation in the text is
taken.
=127=: 27. =Too great an application to his studies in his youth.=
Pascal wrote a famous Latin treatise on Conic Sections at the age of
sixteen, invented a calculating machine at the age of nineteen, and
before he was twenty-one was accounted one of the first mathematicians
of the world. But he says that from the age of eighteen he never passed
a day without pain.
=128=: 10. =Lines out of Mr. Dryden.= John Dryden (1631-1700), the
representative English poet of the last half of the seventeenth
century. The lines quoted are from his Epistle XV, to his cousin of the
same name as himself, John Dryden of Chesterton, a robust, fox-hunting
bachelor. The epistle is a good example of Dryden's masculine
common-sense.