notes in particular, and the various advantages which Dryden suspected Tonson of attempting in the course of the transaction, he seems to have been particularly affronted at a presumptuous plan of that publisher (a keen Whig, and secretary of the Kit-cat club) to drive him into inscribing the translation of Virgil to King William.  With this view, Tonson had an especial care to make the engraver aggravate the nose of Aeneas in the plates into a sufficient resemblance of the hooked promontory of the Deliverer’s countenance;[12] and, foreseeing Dryden’s repugnance to this favourite plan, he had recourse, it would seem, to more unjustifiable means to further it; for the poet expresses himself as convinced that, through Tonson’s means, his correspondence with his sons, then at Rome, was intercepted.[13] I suppose Jacob, having fairly laid siege to his author’s conscience, had no scruple to intercept all foreign supplies, which might have confirmed him in his pertinacity.  But Dryden, although thus closely beleaguered, held fast his integrity; and no prospect of personal advantage, or importunity on the part of Tonson, could induce him to take a step inconsistent with his religious and political sentiments.  It was probably during the course of these bickerings with his publisher, that Dryden, incensed at some refusal of accommodation on the part of Tonson, sent him three well-known coarse and forcible satirical lines, descriptive of his personal appearance: 

  “With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
  With two left legs, and Judas-coloured hair,
  And frowzy pores, that taint the ambient air.”

“Tell the dog,” said the poet to the messenger, “that he who wrote these can write more.”  But Tonson, perfectly satisfied with this single triplet, hastened to comply with the author’s request, without requiring any further specimen of his poetical powers.  It would seem, however, that when Dryden neglected his stipulated labour, Tonson possessed powers of animadversion, which, though exercised in plain prose, were not a little dreaded by the poet.  Lord Bolingbroke, already a votary of the Muses, and admitted to visit their high priest, was wont to relate, that one day he heard another person enter the house.  “This,” said Dryden, “is Tonson:  you will take care not to depart before he goes away:  for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue."[14] But whatever occasional subjects of dissension arose between Dryden and his bookseller appears always to have brought them together, after the first ebullition of displeasure had subsided.  There might, on such occasions, be room for acknowledging faults on both sides; for, if we admit that the bookseller was penurious and churlish, we cannot deny that Dryden seems often to have been abundantly captious, and irascible.  Indeed, as the poet placed, and justly,