[Footnote 43: This Preface was originally prefixed to the fourth volume
of the collected edition issued in 1710-11.]
[Footnote 44: No. 238.]
[Footnote 45: No. 9.]
[Footnote 46: See No. 11.]
[Footnote 47: No. 193.]
[Footnote 48: Addison.]
[Footnote 49: Nos. 153, 18, 42, 220.]
[Footnote 50: Benjamin Hoadly, afterwards Bishop of Bangor, Salisbury,
and Winchester, successively, was in 1709 engaged in controversy with
Dr. Francis Atterbury, who represented the high-church party. George
Smalridge, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, was a Jacobite.]
[Footnote 51: See Nos. 72, 114.]
[Footnote 52: Arthur Maynwaring was descended from the ancient family of
the Maynwarings of Over Peover, Cheshire. He was born in 1668, at
Ightfield, Shropshire, and was educated at the Shrewsbury Grammar School
and at Christ Church, Oxford, where Smalridge was his tutor. Filled with
prejudices against the Revolution, he came to London to study law, but a
political satire which he published brought him under Dryden's notice,
and the kind reception given him by several Whig statesmen, to whom he
was introduced, caused him to change his views on politics, and after
his father's death in 1693 he gave up the law and determined to push his
fortunes at the Court. He was made a Commissioner of Customs and
afterwards Auditor of the Imprests. He was admitted to the Kit-Cat Club,
and in 1706 the interest of Godolphin procured him a seat in the House
of Commons. Upon the fall of the Whig ministry in 1710, Maynwaring set
up the _Medley_, a weekly paper in which the attacks of the _Examiner_
were answered, and wrote various political pamphlets. But his health
soon broke down, and he died in November, 1712. Mrs. Oldfield, the
actress, was the sole executrix of his will, by which he divided his
small property of some £3000 between her, a son that he had by her, and
his sister. There appear to have been many good points in his character.
His "Life and Posthumous Works" were published by Oldmixon in 1715.
"Maynwaring, whom we hear nothing of now, was the ruling man in all
conversations, indeed what he wrote had very little merit in it" (Pope,
in Spence's "Anecdotes," 1820, p. 338). Steele says that Harley told him
that he had to thank Maynwaring for his post of Gazetteer.]
[Footnote 53: Swift.]
[Footnote 54: "Encouragement of these volumes," in the octavo edition.
The list of subscribers to the original octavo edition comprised the
names of some four hundred of the most prominent persons of the day.]