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[Footnote 1: At the top of this paper in a 12mo copy of the Spectator, published in 17l2, and annotated by a contemporary Spanish merchant, is written, ‘The character of Dr Swift.’ This proves that the writer of the note had an ill opinion of Dr Swift and a weak sense of the purport of what he read. Swift, of course, understood what he read. At this time he was fretting under the sense of a chill in friendship between himself and Addison, but was enjoying his Spectators. A week before this date, on the 16th of March, he wrote,

‘Have you seen the ‘Spectators’ yet, a paper that comes out every day? It is written by Mr. Steele, who seems to have gathered new life and have a new fund of wit; it is in the same nature as his ‘Tatlers’, and they have all of them had something pretty. I believe Addison and he club.’

Then he adds a complaint of the chill in their friendship. A month after the date of this paper Swift wrote in his journal,

‘The ‘Spectator’ is written by Steele with Addison’s help; ’tis often very pretty.’

Later in the year, in June and September, he records dinner and supper with his friends of old time, and says of Addison,

‘I yet know no man half so agreeable to me as he is.’ ]

[Footnote 2: ‘Plato’s Phaedon’, Sec. 40. The ridicule of Socrates in ‘The Clouds’ of Aristophanes includes the accusation that he displaced Zeus and put in his place Dinos,–Rotation. When Socrates, at the point of death, assents to the request that he should show grounds for his faith

‘that when the man is dead, the soul exists and retains thought and power,’ Plato represents him as suggesting: Not the sharpest censor ‘could say that in now discussing such matters, I am dealing with what does not concern me.’ ]

[Footnote 3: The bitter attack upon Caesar and his parasite Mamurra was notwithdrawn, but remains to us as No. 29 of the Poems of Catullus. The doubtful authority for Caesar’s answer to it is the statement in the Life of Julius Caesar by Suetonius that, on the day of its appearance, Catullus apologized and was invited to supper; Caesar abiding also by his old familiar friendship with the poet’s father. This is the attack said to be referred to in one of Cicero’s letters to Atticus (the last of Bk. XIII.), in which he tells how Caesar was

‘after the eighth hour in the bath; then he heard De Mamurra; did not change countenance; was anointed; lay down; took an emetic.’ ]

[Footnote 4: Claude Quillet published a Latin poem in four books, entitled ‘Callipaedia, seu de pulchrae prolis habenda ratione,’ at Leyden, under the name of Calvidius Laetus, in 1655. In discussing unions harmonious and inharmonious he digressed into an invective against marriages of Powers, when not in accordance with certain conditions; and complained that France entered into such unions prolific only of ill, witness her gift of sovereign power to a Sicilian stranger.

‘Trinacriis devectus ab oris advena.’

Mazarin, though born at Rome, was of Sicilian family. In the second edition, published at Paris in 1656, dedicated to the cardinal Mazarin, the passages complained of were omitted for the reason and with the result told in the text; the poet getting ‘une jolie Abbaye de 400 pistoles,’ which he enjoyed until his death (aged 59) in 1661.]

[Footnote 5: Pasquino is the name of a torso, perhaps of Menelaus supporting the dead body of Patroclus, in the Piazza di Pasquino in Rome, at the corner of the Braschi Palace. To this modern Romans affixed their scoffs at persons or laws open to ridicule or censure. The name of the statue is accounted for by the tradition that there was in Rome, at the beginning of the 16th century, a cobbler or tailor named Pasquino, whose humour for sharp satire made his stall a place of common resort for the idle, who would jest together at the passers-by. After Pasquino’s death his stall was removed, and in digging up its floor there was found the broken statue of a gladiator. In this, when it was set up, the gossips who still gathered there to exercise their wit, declared that Pasquino lived again. There was a statue opposite to it called Marforio–perhaps because it had been brought from the Forum of Mars–with which the statue of Pasquin used to hold witty conversation; questions affixed to one receiving soon afterwards salted answers on the other. It was in answer to Marforio’s question, Why he wore a dirty shirt? that Pasquin’s statue gave the answer cited in the text, when, in 1585, Pope Sixtus V. had brought to Rome, and lodged there in great state, his sister Camilla, who had been a laundress and was married to a carpenter. The Pope’s bait for catching the offender was promise of life and a thousand doubloons if he declared himself, death on the gallows if his name were disclosed by another.]

[Footnote 6: The satirist Pietro d’Arezzo (Aretino), the most famous among twenty of the name, was in his youth banished from Arezzo for satire of the Indulgence trade of Leo XI. But he throve instead of suffering by his audacity of bitterness, and rose to honour as the Scourge of Princes, il Flagello de’ Principi. Under Clement VII. he was at Rome in the Pope’s service. Francis I of France gave him a gold chain. Emperor Charles V gave him a pension of 200 scudi. He died in 1557, aged 66, called by himself and his compatriots, though his wit often was beastly, Aretino ‘the divine.’]

[Footnote 7: From the ‘Fables of AEsop and other eminent Mythologists, with ‘Morals and Reflections. By Sir Roger l’Estrange.’ The vol. contains Fables of AEsop, Barlandus, Anianus, Abstemius, Poggio the Florentine, Miscellany from a Common School Book, and a Supplement of Fables out of several authors, in which last section is that of the Boys and Frogs, which Addison has copied out verbatim. Sir R. l’Estrange had died in 1704, aged 88.]

[Footnote 8: Easter Day in 1711 fell on the 1st of April.]