37 This “Memorial to Mr. Harley about the First-Fruits” is dated Oct. 7, 171O.

38 Henry St. John, created Viscount Bolingbroke in July 1712.  In the quarrel between Oxford and Bolingbroke in 1714, Swift’s sympathies were with Oxford.

39 I.e., it is decreed by fate.  So Tillotson says, “These things are fatal and necessary.”

40 See Letter 3, note 8.

41 Obscure.  Hooker speaks of a “blind or secret corner.”

42 Ale served in a gill measure.

43 Scott suggests that the allusion is to The Tale of a Tub.

44 An extravagant compliment.

45 See Letter 8.

46 L’Estrange speaks of “trencher-flies and spungers.”

47 See Letter 1, note 10.

48 Samuel Garth, physician and member of the Kit-Cat Club, was knighted in 1714.  He is best known by his satirical poem, The Dispensary, 1699.

49 Gay speaks of “Wondering Main, so fat, with laughing eyes” (Mr. Pope’s Welcome from Greece, st. xvii.).

50 See Letter 5, note 10.

51 See the letter of Oct. 10, 1710, to Archbishop King.

52 See Letter 1.

53 Seventy-three lines in folio upon one page, and in a very small hand.”  (Deane Swift).

Letter 6.

1.  I.e., Lord Lieutenant.

2 Tatler, No. 238.

3 See Letter 1, note 12.

4 Charles Coote, fourth Earl of Mountrath, and M.P. for Knaresborough.  He died unmarried in 1715.

5 Henry Coote, Lord Mountrath’s brother.  He succeeded to the earldom in 1715, but died unmarried in 172O.

6 The Devil Tavern was the meeting-place of Ben Jonson’s Apollo Club.  The house was pulled down in 1787.

7 Addison was re-elected M.P. for Malmesbury in Oct. 171O, and he kept that seat until his death in 1719.

8 Captain Charles Lavallee, who served in the Cadiz Expedition of 1702, and was appointed a captain in Colonel Hans Hamilton’s Regiment of Foot in 1706 (Luttrell, v. 175, vi. 64O; Dalton’s English Army Lists, iv. 126).

9 See Letter 5.

10 The Tatler, No. 23O, Sid Hamet’s Rod, and the ballad (now lost) on the Westminster Election.

11 The Earl of Galway (1648-172O), who lost the battle of Almanza to the Duke of Berwick in 1707.  Originally the Marquis de Ruvigny, a French refugee, he had been made Viscount Galway and Earl of Galway successively by William iii.

12 William Harrison, the son of a doctor at St. Cross, Winchester, had been recommended to Swift by Addison, who obtained for him the post of governor to the Duke of Queensberry’s son.  In Jan. 1711 Harrison began the issue of a continuation of Steele’s Tatler with Swift’s assistance, but without success.  In May 1711, St. John gave Harrison the appointment of secretary to Lord Raby, Ambassador Extraordinary at the Hague, and in Jan. 1713 Harrison brought the Barrier Treaty to England.  He died in the following month, at the age of twenty-seven, and Lady Strafford says that “his brother poets buried him, as Mr. Addison, Mr. Philips, and Dr. Swift.”  Tickell calls him “that much loved youth,” and Swift felt his death keenly.  Harrison’s best poem is Woodstock Park, 1706.