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Admiralty.
15 Edward Wettenhall was Bishop of Kilmore from 1699 to 1713.
16 In the Dedication to The Tale of a Tub Swift had addressed Somers in very different terms: “There is no virtue, either in public or private life, which some circumstances of your own have not often produced upon the stage of the world.”
17 Their lodgings, opposite to St. Mary’s Church in Stafford Street, Dublin.
Letter 15.
1 The Stamp Act was not passed until June 1712: see the Journal for Aug. 7, 1712.
2 Both in St. James’s Park. The Canal was formed by Charles II. from several small ponds, and Rosamond’s Pond was a sheet of water in the south−west corner of the Park, “long consecrated,” as Warburton said, “to disastrous love and elegiac poetry.” It is often mentioned as a place of assignation in Restoration plays.
Evelyn (Diary, Dec. 1, 1662) describes the “scheets” used on the Canal.
3 Mrs. Beaumont.
4 The first direct mention of Hester Vanhomrigh. She is referred to only in two other places in the Journal (Feb. 14, 1710−11, and Aug, 14, 1711).
5 See Letter 3, note 17.
6 No. 27, by Swift himself.
7 No. 7 of Harrison’s series.
8 The printers of the original Tatler.
9 Harley had forwarded to Swift a banknote for fifty pounds (see Journal, March 7, 1710−11).
10 At Moor Park.
11 Scott says that Swift here alludes to some unidentified pamphlet of which he was the real or supposed author.
12 See Letter 11, note 13.
13 The Examiner.
14 See Letter 6, note 43.
15 Mistaken.
16 Mrs. De Caudres, “over against St. Mary’s Church, near Capel Street,” where Stella now lodged.
17 “A crease in the sheet” (Deane Swift).
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18 “In the original it was, good mallows, little sollahs. But in these words, and many others, he writes constantly ll for rr” (Deane Swift).
19 See Letter 4, note 19.
20 “Those letters which are in italics in the original are of a monstrous size, which occasioned his calling himself a loggerhead” (Deane Swift). [Italics replaced by capitals for the transcription of this etext.]
21 I.e., to ask whether.
Letter 16.
1 Harcourt.
2 “A shilling passes for thirteenpence in Ireland” (Deane Swift).
3 Robert Cope, a gentleman of learning with whom Swift corresponded.
4 Archdeacon Morris is not mentioned in Cotton’s Fasti Ecclesiae Hiberniae.
5 See Letter 14, note 6.
6 See Letter 10, note 2.
7 Abigail Hill, afterwards Lady Masham, had been introduced into the Queens service as bed−chamber woman by the Duchess of Marlborough. Her High Church and Tory views recommended her to Queen Anne, and in 17O7 she was privately married to Mr. Samuel Masham, a gentleman in the service of Prince George (see Letter 14, note 6). The Duchess of Marlborough discovered that Mrs. Masham’s cousin, Harley, was using her influence to further his own interests with the Queen; and in spite of her violence the Duchess found herself gradually supplanted. From 1710 Mrs. Masham’s only rival in the royal favour was the Duchess of Somerset. Afterwards she quarrelled with Harley and joined the Bolingbroke faction.
8 See Letter 4, note 16.
9 No. 14 of Harrison’s series.
10 See Letter 15, note 4.
11 Richard Duke, a minor poet and friend of Dryden’s, entered the Church about 1685. In July 1710 he was presented by the Bishop of Winchester to the living of Witney, Oxfordshire, which was worth 700 pounds a year.
12 Sir Jonathan Trelawney, one of the seven bishops committed to the Tower in 1688, was translated to Winchester in 17O7, when he appointed Duke to be his chaplain.
13 See Letter 4, note 3.
14 See Letter 3, note 39.
15 See Letter 14, note 14.
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16 See Letter 7, note 28.
17 Cf. Feb. 22, 1711.
18 Esther Johnson lodged opposite St. Mary’s in Dublin.
19 This famous Tory club began with the meeting together of a few extreme Tories at the Bell in Westminster. The password to the Club”October”was one easy of remembrance to a country gentleman who loved his ale.
20 “Duke” Disney, “not an old man, but an old rake,” died in 1731. Gay calls him “facetious Disney,” and Swift says that all the members of the Club “love him mightily.” Lady M. W. Montagu speaks of his
“Broad plump face, pert eyes, and ruddy skin,
Which showed the stupid joke which lurked within.”
Disney was a French Huguenot refugee, and his real name was Desaulnais. He commanded an Irish regiment, and took part in General Hill’s expedition to Canada in 1711 (Kingsford’s Canada, ii. 465). By his will (Wentworth papers, 109) he “left nothing to his poor relations, but very handsome to his bottle companions.”
21 There were several Colonel Fieldings in the first half of the eighteenth century, and it is not clear which is the one referred to by Swift. Possibly he was the Edmund Fieldinggrandson of the first Earl of Denbighwho died a Lieutenant−General in 1741, at the age of sixty−three, but is best known as the father of Henry Fielding, the novelist.
22 Cf. Feb. 17, 1711.
23 See Letter 3, note 37.
24 “It is a measured mile round the outer wall; and far beyond any the finest square in London” (Deane Swift).
25 “The common fare for a set−down in Dublin” (ib.).
26 “Mrs. Stoyte lived at Donnybrook, the road to which from Stephen’s Green ran into the country about a mile from the south−east corner” (ib.).
27 “Those words in italics are written in a very large hand, and so is the word large” (ib.). [Italics replaced by capitals for the transcription of this etext.]
28 Deane Swift alters “lele” to “there,” but in a note states how he here altered Swift’s “cypher way of writing.” No doubt “lele” and other favourite words occurred frequently in the MS., as they do in the later letters.
Letter 17.
1 Sir Thomas Mansel, Bart., Comptroller of the Household to Queen Anne, and a Lord of the Treasury, was raised to the peerage in December 1711 as Baron Mansel of Margam. He died in 1723.
2 Lady Betty Butler and Lady Betty Germaine (see Letter 3, note 40 and Letter 4, note 3).
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3 James Eckershall, “second clerk of the Queen’s Privy Kitchen.” Chamberlayne (Magnae Britanniae Notitia, 171O, p. 536) says that his wages were 11 pounds, 8 shillings and a penny−ha’penny, and board−wages 138
pounds, 11 shillings and tenpence−ha’penny, making 150 pounds in all. Afterwards Eckershall was gentleman usher to Queen Anne; he died at Drayton in 1753, aged seventy−four. Pope was in correspondence with him in 172O on the subject of contemplated speculations in South Sea and other stocks.
4 In October 1710 (see Letter 6, note 44) Swift wrote as if he knew about the preparation of these Miscellanies. The volume was published by Morphew instead of Tooke, and it is frequently referred to in the Journal.
5 In 1685 the Duke of Ormond (see Letter 2, note 10) married, as his second wife, Lady Mary Somerset, eldest surviving daughter of Henry, first Duke of Beaufort.
6 Arthur Moore, M.P., was a Commissioner of Trade and Plantations from 1710 until his death in 1730. Gay calls him “grave,” and Pope (“Prologue to the Satires,” 23) says that Moore blamed him for the way in which his “giddy son,” James Moore Smythe, neglected the law.
7 James, Lord Paisley, who succeeded his father (see Letter 10, note 33) as seventh Earl of Abercorn in 1734, married, in 1711, Anne, eldest daughter of Colonel John Plumer, of Blakesware, Herts.
8 Harley’s ill−health was partly due to his drinking habits.
9 Crowd or confusion.
10 The first wife of Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset, was Lady Elizabeth Percy, only daughter of Joscelyn, eleventh Earl of Northumberland, and heiress of the house of Percy. She married the Duke, her third husband, at the age of eighteen.
11 John Richardson, D.D., rector of Armagh, Cavan, and afterwards chaplain to the Duke of Ormond. In 1711 he published a Proposal for the Conversion of the Popish Natives of Ireland to the Established Religion, and in 1712 a Short History of the Attempts to Convert the Popish Natives of Ireland. In 17O9 the Lower House of Convocation in Ireland had passed resolutions for printing the Bible and liturgy in Irish, providing Irish preachers, etc. In 1711 Thomas Parnell, the poet, headed a deputation to the Queen on the subject, when an address was presented; but nothing came of the proposals, owing to fears that the English interest in Ireland might be injured. In 1731 Richardson was given the small deanery of Kilmacluagh.
12 See Feb. 27, 1711.
13 Harley.
14 “Bank bill for fifty pound,” taking the alternate letters (see Letter 15, note 9).
15 See Letter 5, note 17.
16 See Nos. 27 and 29, by Swift himself.