Джозеф Аддисон - The Tatler, Volume 1

Forster suggests that it was Addison.

See No. 1.

This phrase, as well as Unnion's forgetting his wound, is criticised in a little book called, "Annotations on the Tatler , in two parts," 12mo, said to have been written originally in French by Monsieur Bournelle, and translated into English by Walter Wagstaff, Esq. London, Bernard Lintott, 1710. The annotator goes no farther with his annotations than to Tatler No. 83. See Nos. 78, 191.

"Bell. Catal.," c. 53.

"A man of a particular turn of mind" (Johnson).

In 1705, after the battle of Blenheim, Marlborough was made Prince of Mildenheim by the Emperor. Lewis XIV. succeeded to the French throne in 1643; Marlborough was born in 1650.

It has been suggested, with little or no reason, that Sappho is meant for Mrs. Manley (Author of the "New Atalantis"), or Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas (known as "Corinna"), or Mrs. Elizabeth Heywood. See No. 40.

"Paradise Lost," viii. 283.

Dryden's "State of Innocence and Fall of Man: an Opera," act iii. sc. i. In the Spectator (No. 345), Addison illustrated Milton's chaste treatment of the subject of Eve's nuptials by contrasting what he says with the account in the opera in which Dryden, according to Lee's verses, refined "Milton's golden ore, and new-weaved his hard-spun thought."

Addison, on reading here this remark upon Virgil, which he himself had communicated to Steele, discovered that his friend was the author of the Tatler . He was at this time in Ireland, Secretary to Lord Wharton, and returned to England with the Lord Lieutenant on the 8th of September following. (Tickell's Preface to Addison's Works.)

"Æneid," iv. 124.

"The Rehearsal," act i. sc. 2. This play of the Duke of Buckingham's was produced in 1671, and the poet Bayes, as finally drawn after revision, was a satire on Dryden.

John Morphew was the publisher of the Tatler .

See No. 4.

Stockjobbers, who contract for a sale of stock which they do not possess, are called sellers of bearskins; and universally whoever sells what he does not possess was said to sell the bear's skin, while the bear runs in the woods. "You never heard such bellowing about the town of the state of the nation, especially among the sharpers, sellers of bearskins— i.e. stockjobbers, &c." (Swift). See No. 38.

Dr. Richard Bentley, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, took a leading part in the controversy regarding the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris. In 1709 he published critical notes on the Tusculan Disputations.

There are several sneers at the members of the Royal Society in the Tatler .

See No. 1.

See No. 4.

William Bullock was a comic actor whose abilities are praised by Gildon and others. He was the original Sir Tunbelly Clumsy in Vanbrugh's "Relapse." Later on in this number (p. 70), Steele says that Bullock had a peculiar talent of looking like a fool, and in No. 188 he compares Bullock and Pinkethman in a satirical vein.

Perhaps Colonel Hunter, afterwards Governor of New York; or Colonel Brett, one of the managers of Drury Lane Theatre.

See No. 34.

The pun is, of course, on the word "unmarred."

By Thomas Shadwell, 1676.

See note on p. 67, above.

A very coarse play by Edward Ravenscroft, produced in 1682, and often acted on Lord Mayors' days and other holidays.

Charles Le Brun, who was born in 1619, and died in 1690, was the son of a sculptor, of Scotch extraction. Under Colbert's patronage he founded the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, at Paris, and he received many honours from Louis XIV. Le Brun's painting of the Defeat of Porus is 16 feet high and 39 feet 5 inches long.

Porus was an Indian king who was defeated and put to death by Alexander the Great. See Q. Curtius, viii. 12, 14.

"Bell. Catil." cap. 61.

Steele seems to have forgotten that he was Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., and had only an old maid-servant. (Nichols.)

Prince George of Denmark, the consort of Queen Anne, died on October 21, 1708, after a few days' illness. This dream gives a picture of the state of England from his death until the conclusion of the negotiations at the Hague in 1709.

The mourning of Queen Anne was so long that the manufacturers remonstrated, and secured a limit to the duration of public mournings.

About this time the D[uke]. of M[arlborough]. returned from Holland with the preliminaries of a peace.—(Steele.)

"Mr. Bickerstaff thanks Mr. Quarterstaff for his kind and instructive letter dated the 26th instant" (folio).

Congreve's first play, produced in 1693. See also No. 193. This piece is attacked in Jeremy Collier's "Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage," 1698.

Swift.

A Scotch physician in the reigns of Charles I. and Charles II. An advertisement of his "famous Scots Pills" requested the public to beware of counterfeits, especially an ignorant pretender, one Muffen, who kept a china-shop.

"Henley would fain have me to go with Steele and Rowe, &c., to an invitation at Sir William Read's. Surely you have heard of him. He has been a mountebank, and is the Queen's oculist; he makes admirable punch, and treats you in gold vessels. But I am engaged, and won't go; neither indeed am I fond of the jaunt" (Swift's "Journal," April 11, 1711). Read was knighted in 1705, for services done in curing soldiers and sailors of blindness gratis. Beginning life as a tailor, he became Queen Anne's oculist in ordinary, and died in 1715. See Spectator , No. 547.

Rozelli, the inventor of a specific for the gout, died at the Hague. In No. 33was an advertisement of the "Memoirs of the Life and Adventures of Signior Rozelli, at the Hague, giving a particular account of his birth, education, slavery, monastic state, imprisonment in the Inquisition at Rome, and the different figures he has since made, as well in Italy, as in France and Holland.... Done into English from the second edition of the French." This work, like the continuation of 1724, has been wrongly attributed to Defoe. Rozelli advertised in the London Gazette , for July 19, 1709, that the book was entirely fictitious, and a libel upon his character.

We learn from Ben Jonson, that Scoggan, or Skogan, was M.A., and lived in the time of Henry IV. "He made disguises for the King's sons, writ in ballad-royal daintily well, and was regarded and rewarded." Jonson calls him the moral Skogan; and introduces him with Skelton, the poet laureate of Henry VIII., into his Masque, entitled "The Fortunate Isles," where he keeps them in character, and makes them rhyme in their own manner.