[Footnote 4:  Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, author of the Essay on Translated Verse, was nephew and godson to Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.  He was born in Ireland, in 1633, educated at the Protestant University of Caen, and was there when his father died.  He travelled in Italy, came to England at the Restoration, held one or two court offices, gambled, took a wife, and endeavoured to introduce into England the principals of criticism with which he had found the polite world occupied in France.  He planned a society for refining our language and fixing its standard.  During the troubles of King James’s reign he was about to leave the kingdom, when his departure was delayed by gout, of which he died in 1684.  A foremost English representative of the chief literary movement of his time, he translated into blank verse Horace’s Art of Poetry, and besides a few minor translations and some short pieces of original verse, which earned from Pope the credit that

  in all Charles’s days
  Roscommon only boasts unspotted lays,

he wrote in heroic couplets an Essay on Translated Verse that was admired by Dryden, Addison, and Pope, and was in highest honour wherever the French influence upon our literature made itself felt.  Roscommon believed in the superior energy of English wit, and wrote himself with care and frequent vigour in the turning of his couplets.  It is from this poem that we get the often quoted lines,

  Immodest words admit of no Defence: 
  For Want of Decency is Want of Sense.]

[Footnote 5:  The other piece with which Addison ranks Popes Essay on Criticism, was by John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, who was living when the Spectator first appeared.  He died, aged 72, in the year 1721.  John Sheffield, by the death of his father, succeeded at the age of nine to the title of Earl of Mulgrave.  In the reign of Charles II he served by sea and land, and was, as well as Marlborough, in the French service.  In the reign of James II. he was admitted into the Privy Council, made Lord Chamberlain, and, though still Protestant, attended the King to mass.  He acquiesced in the Revolution, but remained out of office and disliked King William, who in 1694 made him Marquis of Normanby.  Afterwards he was received into the Cabinet Council, with a pension of L3000.  Queen Anne, to whom Walpole says he had made love before her marriage, highly favoured him.  Before her coronation she made him Lord Privy Seal, next year he was made first Duke of Normanby, and then of Buckinghamshire, to exclude any latent claimant to the title, which had been extinct since the miserable death of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the author of the Rehearsal.  When the Spectator appeared John Sheffield had just built Buckingham House—­now a royal palace—­on ground granted by the Crown, and taken office as Lord Chamberlain.  He wrote more verse than Roscommon and poorer verse.  The Essay on Poetry,