[Footnote 15:  Curll is notoriously infamous for publishing the lives, letters, and last wills and testaments of the nobility and ministers of state, as well as of all the rogues who are hanged at Tyburn.  He hath been in custody of the House of Lords, for publishing or forging the letters of many peers, which made the Lords enter a resolution in their journal-book, that no life or writings of any lord should be published, without the consent of the next heir-at-law or license from their House.]

[Footnote 16:  The play by which the dealer may win or lose all the tricks.  See Hoyle on “Quadrille.”—­W.  E. B.]

[Footnote 17:  See post, p. 267.]

[Footnote 18:  A place in London, where old books are sold.]

[Footnote 19:  See ante “On Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet,” p. 192.]

[Footnote 20:  Walpole hath a set of party scribblers, who do nothing but write in his defence.]

[Footnote 21:  Henley is a clergyman, who, wanting both merit and luck to get preferment, or even to keep his curacy in the established church, formed a new conventicle, which he called an Oratory.  There, at set times, he delivereth strange speeches, compiled by himself and his associates, who share the profit with him.  Every hearer payeth a shilling each day for admittance.  He is an absolute dunce, but generally reported crazy.]

[Footnote 22:  See ante, p. 188.—­W.  E. B.]

[Footnote 23:  See ante, p. 188.  There is some confusion here betwixt Woolston and Wollaston, whose book, the “Religion of Nature delineated,” was much talked of and fashionable.  See a letter from Pope to Bethell in Pope’s correspondence, Pope’s Works, edit.  Elwin and Courthope, ix, p. 149.—­W.  E. B.]

[Footnote 24:  Denham’s elegy on Cowley: 
  “To him no author was unknown,
  Yet what he wrote was all his own.”]

[Footnote 25:  See ante, pp. 192 and 252.]

[Footnote 26:  In the year 1713, the late queen was prevailed with, by an address of the House of Lords in England, to publish a proclamation, promising L300 to whatever person would discover the author of a pamphlet called “The Public Spirit of the Whigs”; and in Ireland, in the year 1724, Lord Carteret, at his first coming into the government, was prevailed on to issue a proclamation for promising the like reward of L300 to any person who would discover the author of a pamphlet, called “The Drapier’s Fourth Letter,” etc., writ against that destructive project of coining halfpence for Ireland; but in neither kingdom was the Dean discovered.]

[Footnote 27:  Queen Anne’s ministry fell to variance from the first year after their ministry began; Harcourt, the chancellor, and Lord Bolingbroke, the secretary, were discontented with the treasurer Oxford, for his too much mildness to the Whig party; this quarrel grew higher every day till the queen’s death.  The Dean, who was the only person that endeavoured to reconcile them, found it impossible, and thereupon retired to the country about ten weeks before that event:  upon which he returned to his deanery in Dublin, where for many years he was worryed by the new people in power, and had hundreds of libels writ against him in England.]