58
The Dunciad.
Book I.
Remarks
- ↑ Ver. 147. More solid Learning] Some have objected, that books of this sort suit not so well the library of our Bays, which they imagine consisted of Novels, Plays, and obscene books; but they are to consider, that he furnished his shelves only for ornament, and read these books no more than the Dry bodies of Divinity, which, no doubt, were purchased by his Father when he designed him for the Gown. See the note on v 200.
- ↑ Ver. 149. Caxton] A Printer in the time of Ed. IV, Rich. III, and Hen. VII; Wynkyn de Word, his successor, in that of Hen. VII and VIII. The former translated into prose Virgil's Æneis, as a history; of which he speaks, in his Proeme, in a very singular manner, as of a book hardly known. "Happened that to my hande cam a lytyl book in frenche, whiche late was translated out of latyn by some noble clerke of fraunce, whiche booke is named Encydos (made in latyn by that noble poete & grete clerk Vyrgyle) whiche booke I sawe over and redde therein, How after the general destruccyon of the grete Troy, Æneas departed berynge his olde fader anchises upon his sholdres, his lytyl son yolas on his hande, his wyfe with moche other people followynge, and how he shipped and departed; wyth alle thy storye of his adventures that he had er he came to the atchievement of his conquest of ytalye, as all alonge shall be shewed in this present booke. In whiche booke I had grete playsyr, by cause of the fayr and honest termes & wordes in frenche, whiche I never sawe to fore lyke, ne none so playsaunt ne so well ordred; whiche booke as me semed sholde be moche requysite to noble men to see, as wel for the eloquence as the hystoryes. How wel that many hondred yerys passed was the sayd booke of Eneydos wyth other workes made and lerned dayly in scolis, especyally in ytayle and other places, which historye the sayd Vyrgyle made in metre."
2. Banks was his Rival in Tragedy (tho' more successful in one of his Tragedies, the Earl of Essex, which is yet alive: Anna Boleyn, the Queen of Scots, and Cyrus the Great, are dead and gone. These he drest in a sort of Beggars Velvet, or a happy mixture of the thick Fustian and thin Prosaic; exactly imitated in Perella and Isidora, Cæsar in Ægypt, and the Heroic Daughter. 3. Broome was a serving-man of Ben. Johnson, who once picked up a Comedy from his Betters, or from some cast scenes of his Master, not entirely contemptible.
