[Footnote 143:  A very coarse play by Edward Ravenscroft, produced in 1682, and often acted on Lord Mayors’ days and other holidays.]

[Footnote 144:  Charles Le Brun, who was born in 1619, and died in 1690, was the son of a sculptor, of Scotch extraction.  Under Colbert’s patronage he founded the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, at Paris, and he received many honours from Louis XIV.  Le Brun’s painting of the Defeat of Porus is 16 feet high and 39 feet 5 inches long.]

[Footnote 145:  Porus was an Indian king who was defeated and put to death by Alexander the Great.  See Q. Curtius, viii. 12, 14.]

[Footnote 146:  “Bell.  Catil.” cap. 61.]

[Footnote 147:  Steele seems to have forgotten that he was Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., and had only an old maid-servant. (Nichols.)]

[Footnote 148:  Prince George of Denmark, the consort of Queen Anne, died on October 21, 1708, after a few days’ illness.  This dream gives a picture of the state of England from his death until the conclusion of the negotiations at the Hague in 1709.]

[Footnote 149:  The mourning of Queen Anne was so long that the manufacturers remonstrated, and secured a limit to the duration of public mournings.]

[Footnote 150:  About this time the D[uke]. of M[arlborough]. returned from Holland with the preliminaries of a peace.—­(Steele.)]

[Footnote 151:  “Mr. Bickerstaff thanks Mr. Quarterstaff for his kind and instructive letter dated the 26th instant” (folio).]

No. 9. [STEELE.

From Thursday, April 28, to Saturday, April 30, 1709.

* * * * *

Will’s Coffee-house, April 28.

This evening we were entertained with “The Old Bachelor,"[152] a comedy of deserved reputation.  In the character which gives name to the play, there is excellently represented the reluctance of a battered debauchee to come into the trammels of order and decency:  he neither languishes nor burns, but frets for love.  The gentlemen of more regular behaviour are drawn with much spirit and wit, and the drama introduced by the dialogue of the first scene with uncommon, yet natural conversation.  The part of Fondlewife is a lively image of the unseasonable fondness of age and impotence.  But instead of such agreeable works as these, the town has this half age been tormented with insects called “easy writers,” whose abilities Mr. Wycherley one day described excellently well in one word:  “That,” said he, “among these fellows is called easy writing, which any one may easily write.”  Such jaunty scribblers are so justly laughed at for their sonnets on Phillis and Chloris, and fantastical descriptions in them, that an ingenious kinsman of mine,[153] of the family of the Staffs, Mr. Humphrey Wagstaff by name, has, to avoid their strain, run into a way perfectly new, and described things exactly as they happen:  he never forms fields, or nymphs, or groves, where they are not, but makes the incidents just as they really appear.  For an example of it; I stole out of his manuscript the following lines:  they are a Description of the Morning, but of the morning in town; nay, of the morning at this end of the town, where my kinsman at present lodges.