29.  The motto to Hunt’s pamphlet.

30. Tantivi was a cant phrase for furious tories and high-flyers.  In
   one of College’s unlucky strokes of humour, he had invented a print
   called Mac Ninny, in which the Duke of York was represented
   half-jesuit half-devil; and a parcel of tories, mounted on the
   church of England, were driving it at full gallop, tantivy, to
   Rome.  Hickeringill’s poem, called “The Mushroom,” written against
   our author’s “Hind and Panther,” is prefaced by an epistle to the
   tories and tantivies.

31.  This passage is inaccurately quoted.  Mr Hunt wrote, “Such monsters
   as Theseus and Hercules are, renowned throughout all ages for
   destroying.”  The learned gentleman obviously meant that Dryden’s
   heroes (whom he accounted tyrants) resembled not the demi-gods, but
   the monsters whom they destroyed.  But the comma is so unhappily
   placed after are, as to leave the sense capable of the malicious
   interpretation which Dryden has put upon it.

32.  Shadwell, as he resembled Ben Jonson in extreme corpulence, and
   proposed him for the model of dramatic writing, seems to have
   affected the coarse and inelegant debauchery of his prototype.  He
   lived chiefly in taverns, was a gross sensualist in his habits, and
   brutal in his conversation.  His fine gentlemen all partake of their
   parent’s grossness and vulgarity; they usually open their dialogue,
   by complaining of the effects of last night’s debauch.  He is
   probably the only author, who ever chose for his heroes a set of
   riotous bloods, or scowerers, as they were then termed, and
   expected the public should sympathise in their brutal orgies.  True
   it is, that the heroes are whig scowerers; and, whilst breaking
   windows, stabbing watchmen, and beating passengers, do not fail to
   express a due zeal for the Protestant religion, and the liberty of
   the subject.  Much of the interest also turns, it must be allowed,
   upon the Protestant scowerers aforesaid baffling and beating,
   without the least provocation, a set of inferior scowerers, who
   were Jacobites at least, if not Papists.  Shadwell is thus described
   in the “Sessions of the Poets:” 

     Next into the crowd Tom Shadwell does wallow,
     And swears by his guts, his paunch, and his tallow,
     ’Tis he that alone best pleases the age,
     Himself and his wife have supported the stage. 
     Apollo, well pleased with so bonny a lad,
     To oblige him, he told him he should be huge glad,
     Had he half so much wit as he fancied he had. 
     However, to please so jovial a wit,
     And to keep him in humour, Apollo thought fit
     To bid him drink on, and keep his old trick
     Of railing at poets—­

   Those, who consult the full passage, will see good reason to think
   Dryden’s censure on Shadwell’s brutality by no means too severe.