[Footnote 203: In these, and in the following beautiful lines, the poet, who had complained of Stillingfleet's having charged him with atheism, expresses his resolution to submit to this reproach with Christian meekness, and without retaliation.]
[Footnote 204: Stillingfleet. See Note XI.]
[Footnote 206: See Introduction, p. 114; also Note VIII.]
[Footnote 207: The penal laws, though suspended by the king's Declaration of Indulgence, were not thereby abrogated.]
[Footnote 209: ----_Sinistra cava prædixit ab ilice Cornix._]
[Footnote 210: Alluding to the table of Icarus:
[Footnote 211: Otherwise called _martlets_. DRYDEN.]
[Footnote 212: A parody on Lee's famous rant in "Œdipus."
"May there not be a glimpse, one starry spark, But gods meet gods, and jostle in the dark." ]
[Footnote 213: An old Saxon word for a village.]
[Footnote 214: It is a vulgar idea, that a dead swallow, suspended in the air, intimates a change of wind, by turning its bill to the point from which it is to blow.]
[Footnote 216: Century White, See Note XV.]
[Footnote 217: The Hind intimates, that, as the sunshine of Catholic prosperity, in the fable, depended upon the king's life, there existed those among her enemies, who would fain have it shortened. But from this insinuation she exempts the church of England, and only expresses her fears, that her passive principles would incline her to neutrality.]
[Footnote 218: Louis XIV. whose revocation of the Edict of Nantes has been so frequently alluded to. As that monarch did not proceed to the extremity of capital punishment against the Huguenots, Dryden contends his edicts were more merciful than the penal laws, by which mass-priests are denounced as guilty of high treason.]
[Footnote 220: The poet alludes to the enchantress Duessa, who, when disrobed by Prince Arthur, was changed from a beautiful woman into
A loathly wrinkled hag, ill-favoured, old, Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told.
SPENSER'S _Fairy Queen_, Book I, canto 8. ]
[Footnote 222: The fiend in the Book of Tobit, who haunted Raguel's daughter, is frighted away, by fumigation, by Tobias her bridegroom. Thus, Milton:
----Better pleased Than Asmodeus with the fishy fume, That drove him, though enamoured, from the spouse Of Tobit's son, and with a vengeance sent From Media post to Egypt, there fast bound.