Page:An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.djvu/160

140 30. Mustapha was a popular tragedy of the day, by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. There was an earlier play of the same name by Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke.

91. 27. Hor. A. P. 90; and below, ib. 231.

95. 11. This simple avowal of the true poetic workman, that his work does not appear to him perfect till he has clothed it in rhyme, is highly instructive; it is a chapter in the ' Natural History of Poetry.'

96. 2. The Water-poet, John Taylor, was so called from his having been long a waterman on the Thames. He seems to have been a rhymester of the same order as 'Poet Close,' a character well known to all who visit Windermere. Wood gives an account of him in the Athenae, and Hazlitt devotes rather a lengthy article to him in his edition of Johnson's Lives. Taylor enjoyed a great popularity. 'If it were put to the question,' says Ben Jonson (Discoveries, Routledge, p. 746), 'of the water-rhymer's works against Spenser's, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages; because the most favour common vices, out of a prerogative the vulgar have to lose their judgments, and like that which is naught.'

7. Cicero in his Brutus (cap. 73) quotes this as a maxim laid down by Caesar in his work 'on the method of speaking in Latin,' to which the name 'De Analogia' was given.

13. Seneca's tragedy of Hippolytus, 1. 863.

97. 28. Sir Robert Howard, in the Preface to his Plays, before referred to.

99. 22. 'Somerset House,' says Stow in his History of London (ed. Strype, 1720), 'hath been used as the Palace or Court of the Queen Dowagers; it belong'd of late to Katharine Queen Dowager, the wife of King Charles the Second. At the entrance into this Court out of the Strand is a spacious square court garnished on all sides with rows of freestone buildings, and at the Front is a Piazza, with stone Pillars which support the buildings, and a pavement of freestone.' He goes on to say that there were steps down to the river, and a 'most pleasant garden which runs to the water side.' This way from the river bank up into Somerset House has long been closed.