Full in the middle way there stood a lake Which Curll's Corinna 13 chanced that morn to make: (Such was her wont, at early dawn to drop 70 Her evening cates before his neighbour's shop) Here fortuned Curll to slide; loud shout the band, And Bernard! Bernard! rings through all the Strand. 75 Fallen in the plash his wickedness had laid: Hear, Jove! whose name my bards and I adore. 80 As much at least as any god's, or more; 15 A place there is, betwixt earth, air, and seas,16 85 90 18 [Mrs. Thomas. See Notes.] 14 Though this incident may seem too low and base for the dignity of an Epic poem, the learned very well know it to be but a copy of Homer and Virgil; the very words voos and fimus are used by them, though our poet (in compliance with modern nicety) has remarkably enriched and coloured his language, as well as raised the versification, in this episode, and in the following one of Eliza. 15 The Bible, Curll's sign; the Cross Keys, Lintot's. 16 See Lucian's Icaro-Menippus; where this fiction is more extended :"Orbe locus medio est, inter terrasque, fretumque, Cœlestesque plagas."-Ovid, Met. xii. 17 Alludes to Homer, Iliad v. ῥέε δ' άμβροτον αἷμα Θέοιο, Ιχώρ, οἷος πέρ τε ῥέει μακάρεσσι Θεοίσιν. A stream of nect'rous humour issuing flow'd, Sanguine, such as celestial sp'rits may bleed."-Milton. And ministers to Jove with purest hands. Forth from the heap she pick'd her votary's prayer, 19 Nor heeds the brown dishonours of his face.20 18 The Roman goddess of the common sewers. 19 Alluding to the opinion that there are ointments used by witches, to enable them to fly in the air, &c. 20 21 22 Par levibus ventis, volucrique simillima somno."-Virg. Æneid. vi. "Carmina turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis.”— Virg. Æneid. vi. of the Sibyl's leaves. 28 Some of those persons whose writings, epigrams, or jests he had owned. [Dr. Evans was of St. John's College, Oxford; author of the Apparition, and of an Epistle to Bobart the botanist, entitled Vertumnus. He was a man of remarkable wit and vivacity, and many of his repartees were long remembered and repeated at Oxford. The Apparition was a satire on Tindal. -Warton.] No rag, no scrap, of all the beau, or wit, 120 Heaven rings with laughter: of the laughter vain, So Proteus, hunted in a nobler shape, 125 130 To him the goddess: Son! thy grief lay down, And turn this whole illusion on the town: 24 [For further notice of these Grub-street "imps," see Notes.] As the sage dame, experienced in her trade, With that she gave him (piteous of his case, 135 140 145 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. And to support this noble plate, there lay And yet poor Codrus all that nothing lost."-Dryden. 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 11. 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 years. Tutchin was shortly afterwards seized with the small-pox, and |