He is not, however, the only satirist who has been thus capricious and changeable in his judgments.  The variations of this nature in Pope’s Dunciad are well known; and the Abbe Cotin, it is said, owed the “painful pre-eminence” of his station in Boileau’s Satires to the unlucky convenience of his name as a rhyme.  Of the generous change from censure to praise, the poet Dante had already set an example; having, in his “Convito,” lauded some of those persons whom, in his Commedia, he had most severely lashed.]

[Footnote 102:  In another letter to Mr. Harness, dated February, 1809, he says, “I do not know how you and Alma Mater agree.  I was but an untoward child myself, and I believe the good lady and her brat were equally rejoiced when I was weaned; and if I obtained her benediction at parting, it was, at best, equivocal.”]

[Footnote 103:  The poem, in the first edition, began at the line,

“Time was ere yet, in these degenerate days.” ]

[Footnote 104:  Lady Byron, then Miss Milbank.]

[Footnote 105:  In the MS. remarks on his Satire, to which I have already referred, he says, on this passage—­“Yea, and a pretty dance they have led me.”]

[Footnote 106:  “Fool then, and but little wiser now.”—­MS. ibid.]

[Footnote 107:  Dated, in his original copy, Nov. 2. 1808.]

[Footnote 108:  Entitled, in his original manuscript, “To Mrs. ——­, on being asked my reason for quitting England in the spring.”  The date subjoined is Dec. 2. 1808.]

[Footnote 109:  In his first copy, “Thus, Mary.”]

[Footnote 110:  Thus corrected by himself in a copy of the Miscellany now in my possession;—­the two last lines being, originally, as follows:—­

    “Though wheresoe’er my bark may run,
    I love but thee, I love but one.”
]

[Footnote 111:  I give the words as Johnson has reported them;—­in Swift’s own letter they are, if I recollect right, rather different.]

[Footnote 112:  There is, at least, one striking point of similarity between their characters in the disposition which Johnson has thus attributed to Swift:—­“The suspicions of Swift’s irreligion,” he says, “proceeded, in a great measure, from his dread of hypocrisy; instead of wishing to seem better, he delighted in seeming worse than he was.”]

[Footnote 113:  Another use to which he appropriated one of the skulls found in digging at Newstead was the having it mounted in silver, and converted into a drinking-cup.  This whim has been commemorated in some well-known verses of his own; and the cup itself, which, apart from any revolting ideas it may excite, forms by no means an inelegant object to the eye, is, with many other interesting relics of Lord Byron, in the possession of the present proprietor of Newstead Abbey, Colonel Wildman.]

[Footnote 114:  Rousseau appears to have been conscious of a similar sort of change in his own nature:—­“They have laboured without intermission,” he says, in a letter to Madame de Boufflers, “to give to my heart, and, perhaps, at the same time to my genius, a spring and stimulus of action, which they have not inherited from nature.  I was born weak,—­ill treatment has made me strong.”—­Hume’s Private Correspondence.]