[16] Lord Grimston.  William Luckyn, first Viscount Grimston (1683-1756), was created an Irish peer with the title Baron Dunboyne in 1719.  The full title of the play to which Swift refers, is “The Lawyer’s Fortune, or, Love in a Hollow Tree.”  It was published in 1705.  Swift refers to Grimston in his verses “On Poetry, a Rhapsody.”  Pope, in one of his satires, calls him “booby lord.”  Grimston withdrew his play from circulation after the second edition, but it was reprinted in Rotterdam in 1728 and in London in 1736.  Dr. Johnson told Chesterfield a story which made the Duchess of Marlborough responsible for this London reprint, which had for frontispiece the picture of an ass wearing a coronet. [T.  S.]

[17] The original edition prints “ministers” instead of “chief governors.” [T.  S.]

[18] In 1720 Bishop Nicholson of Derry, writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, describes the wretched condition of the towns and the country districts, and the misery of their population: 

“Our trade of all kind is at a stand, insomuch as that our most eminent merchants, who used to pay bills of 1,000l. at sight, are hardly able to raise 100l. in so many days.  Spindles of yarn (our daily bread) are fallen from 2s. 6d. to 15d., and everything also in proportion.  Our best beef (as good as I ever ate in England) is sold under 3/4d. a pound, and all this not from any extraordinary plenty of commodities, but from a perfect dearth of money.  Never did I behold even in Picardy, Westphalia, or Scotland, such dismal marks of hunger and want as appeared in the countenances of most of the poor creatures I met with on the road.” (Brit.  Mus.  Add.  MSS. 6116, quoted by Lecky.) [T.  S.]

[19] The “absentee” landlord was an evil to Ireland on which much has been written.  It was difficult to keep the country in order when the landed proprietors took so little interest in their possessions as to do nothing but exact rents from their tenants and spend the money so obtained in England.  Two, and even three, hundred years before Swift’s day “absenteeism” had been the cause of much of the rebellion in Ireland which harassed the English monarchs, who endeavoured to put a stop to the evil by confiscating the estates of such landlords.  Acts were passed by Richard II. and Henry VIII. to this effect; but in later times, the statutes were ignored and not enforced, and the Irish landlord, in endeavours to obtain for himself social recognition and standing in England which, because of his Irish origin, were denied him, remained in England indulging himself in lavish expenditure and display.  The consequences of this were the impoverishment of his estates and their eventual management by rack-renters.  These rack-renters, whose only interest lay in squeezing money out of the impoverished tenants, became the bane of the agricultural holder.