25

As the sage dame, experienced in her trade,
By names of toasts retails each batter'd jade;
(Whence hapless Monsieur much complains at Paris
Of wrongs from duchesses and Lady Maries ;) 2
Be thine, my stationer! this magic gift;
Cooke shall be Prior, and Concanen, Swift:
So shall each hostile name become our own,
And we too boast our Garth and Addison.

With that she gave him (piteous of his case,
Yet smiling at his rueful length of face) 26
A shaggy tapestry,27 worthy to be spread
On Codrus' old, or Dunton's modern bed;
Instructive work! whose wry-mouth'd portraiture28
Display'd the fates her confessors endure.

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25 [An allusion to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had some questionable money transactions with M. Ruremonde, a Frenchman, at the time of the South Sea affair, in 1720--21. In the edition of the Dunciad, in Poetical Works, 1735, Pope had the following note on the above couplet. “This passage was thought to allude to a famous lady, who cheated a French wit of £5000 in the South Sea year. But the author meant it in general of all bragging travellers, and of all whores and cheats under the name of ladies." This note was suppressed in the small edition of 1736, and was never again restored by Pope.]

26

"Risit pater optimus illi

Me liceat casum misereri insontis amici

Sic fatus, tergum Gætuli immanæ leonis." &c.-Virg. Æneid. v. 27 A sorry kind of tapestry frequent in old inns, made of worsted or some coarser stuff, like that which is spoken of by Donne, Faces as frightful as theirs who whip Christ in old hangings. The imagery woven in it alludes to the mantle of Cloanthus, in Æneid v.

28 Of Codrus the poet's bed, see Juvenal, describing his poverty very copiously, Sat. iii. ver. 103, &c.

"Codrus had but one bed, so short to boot,

That his short wife's short legs hung dangling out.
His cupboard's head six earthen pitchers graced,
Beneath them was his trusty tankard placed;
And to support this noble plate, there lay
A bending Chiron, cast from honest clay.
His few Greek books a rotten chest contain'd,
Whose covers much of mouldiness complain'd,
Where mice and rats devour'd poetic bread,
And on heroic verse luxuriously were fed.
'Tis true poor Codrus nothing had to boast,
And yet poor Codrus all that nothing lost."-Dryden.

31

CURLL TOSSED IN A BLANKET BY THE WESTMINSTER SCHOLARS.

Earless on high, stood unabash'd De Foe,
And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below.29

But Mr. Concanen, in his dedication of the letters, advertisements, &c., to the author of the Dunciad, assures us, "that Juvenal never satirised the poverty of Codrus." John Dunton was a broken bookseller, and abusive scribbler: he wrote Neck or Nothing, a violent satire on some minister of state, a libel on the Duke of Devonshire and the Bishop of Peterborough, &c.

29 John Tutchin, author of some vile verses, and of a weekly paper called The Observator: he was sentenced to be whipped through several towns in the west of England, upon which he petitioned King James II. to be hanged. When that prince died in exile, he wrote an invective against his memory, occasioned by some humane elegies on his death. He lived to the time

of Queen Anne.

[The sentence against Tutchin-passed by the infamous Jeffreys—was imprisonment for seven years, and that he should be flogged through every market town in Dorsetshire, every year. The sentence, as the Clerk of the Arraigns stated in Court, amounted to a whipping once a fortnight for seven Tutchin was shortly afterwards seized with the small-pox, and

years.

III.

G

There Ridpath, Roper,30 cudgell'd might ye view,
The very worsted still look'd black and blue.
Himself among the storied chiefs he spies,3
As, from the blanket, high in air he flies,

31

And oh! (he cried) what street, what lane but knows
Our purgings, pumpings, blanketings, and blows?

In every loom our labours shall be seen,

And the fresh vomit run for ever green! 32

See in the circle next, Eliza placed,

Two babes of love close clinging to her waist;33
Fair as before her works she stands confess'd,
In flowers and pearls by bounteous Kirkall dress'd.
The goddess then: "Who best can send on high
The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky;

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obtained his liberty by bribing the Chief Justice. His offence was uttering seditious words. The trial took place in 1685; Tutchin was then very young, but he lived, as Mr. Macaulay observes, "to be known as one of the most acrimonious and pertinacious enemies of the House of Stuart, and of the Tory party." Daniel de Foe was sentenced to the pillory in 1702, for his ironical treatise, "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." He was also fined and imprisoned for two years. Pope, by the epithet "earless," gives an unfounded aggravation to the punishment.]

30 Authors of the Flying-post and Post-boy, two scandalous papers on different sides, for which they equally and alternately deserved to be cudgelled, and were so.

31 The history of Curll's being tossed in a blanket, and whipped by the scholars of Westminster, is well known. Of his purging and vomiting, see A Full and True Account of a Horrid Revenge on the Body of Edm. Curll, &c., in Swift and Pope's Miscellanies.

"Se quoque principibus permixtum agnovit Achivis

Constitit, et lacrymans: Quis jam locus, inquit, Achate!

Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ?"-Virg. Æn. i.

32 A parody on these lines of a late noble author:—

"His bleeding arm had furnish'd all their rooms,
And run for ever purple in the looms."

[Curll makes a pithy comment on this note:-" Dryden was well drubbed in the Mall for his Hind and Panther; and Pope's drubbing for his Dunciad Dryden was indeed waylaid and severely and other libels, is to come beaten, at the instigation of the profligate Rochester; but this was in 1679, ten years before the publication of the Hind and Panther. Swift calls Ridpath, mentioned above, a Scotch rogue.]

33

"Cressa genus, Pholoë, geminique sub ubere nati."-Virg. Æneid. v. [The allusion in the text is to Eliza Haywood. See Notes.]