ah was the _elder_ daughter.

22. Pope omits _tho' as I ... friendship_ and _venture to_ (lines 10-12).

_Caesar did never wrong_, etc. Cf. _Julius Caesar_, iii. 1. 47, 48, when
the lines read:

Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied.

23. Gerard Langbaine in his _Account of the English Dramatick Poets_
(1691) ascribes to Shakespeare "about forty-six plays, all which except
three are bound in one volume in Fol., printed London, 1685" (p. 454). The
three plays not printed in the fourth folio are the _Birth of Merlin, or
the Child has lost his Father_, a tragi-comedy, said by Langbaine to be by
Shakespeare and Rowley; _John King of England his troublesome Reign_; and
the _Death of King John at Swinstead Abbey_. Langbaine thinks that the
last two "were first writ by our Author, and afterwards revised and
reduced into one Play by him: that in the Folio being far the better." He
mentions also the _Arraignment of Paris_, but does not ascribe it to
Shakespeare, as he has not seen it.

_a late collection of poems_,--_Poems on Affairs of State, from the year
1620 to the year 1707_, vol. iv.

_Natura sublimis_, etc. Horace, _Epistles_, ii. 1. 165.

The concluding paragraph is omitted by Pope.

John Dennis.

24. _Shakespear ... Tragick Stage._ Contrast Rymer's _Short View_, p. 156:
"Shakespear's genius lay for Comedy and Humour. In Tragedy he appears
quite out of his element." Cf. Dennis's later statement, p. 40.

25. _the very Original of our English Tragical Harmony._ Cf. Dryden,
Epistle Dedicatory of the _Rival Ladies_, ed. W. P. Ker, i., p. 6, and
Bysshe, _Art of English Poetry_, 1702, p. 36. See Johnson's criticism of
this passage, Preface, p. 140.

_Such verse we make_, etc. Dennis makes these two lines illustrate
themselves.

26. _Jack-Pudding._ See the _Spectator_, No. 47. The term was very common
at this time for a "merry wag." It had also the more special sense of "one
attending on a mountebank," as in Etherege's _Comical Revenge_, iii. 4.

_Coriolanus._ Contrast Dennis's opinion of _Coriolanus_ in his letter to
Steele of 26th March, 1719: "Mr. Dryden has more than once declared to me
that there was something in this very tragedy of _Coriolanus_, as it was
writ by Shakespear, that is truly great and truly Roman; and I more than
once answered him that it had always been my own opinion."

29. _Poetical Justice._ Dennis defended the doctrine of poetical justic