some headless statue which Bufo insisted was a genuine classic figure of Pindar, the famous Greek lyric poet.
Dryden died in 1700. He had been poor and obliged to work hard for a living in his last years, but hardly had to starve. Halifax offered to pay the expenses of his funeral and contribute five hundred pounds for a monument, and Pope not unreasonably suggests that some of this bounty might have been bestowed on Dryden in his lifetime.
When a politician wants a writer to put in a day's work in defending him. Walpole, for example, who cared nothing for poetry, spent large sums in retaining writers to defend him in the journals and pamphlets of the day.
John Gay, the author of some very entertaining verses, was an intimate friend of Pope. On account of some supposed satirical allusions his opera 'Polly' was refused a license, and when his friends, the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry (see l. 260) solicited subscriptions for it in the palace, they were driven from the court. Gay died in 1732, and Pope wrote an epitaph for his tomb in Westminster Abbey. It is to this that he alludes in l. 258.
Balbus is said to mean the Earl of Kinnoul, at one time an acquaintance of Pope and Swift.
Sir William Yonge, a Whig politician whom Pope disliked. He seems to have written occasional verses. Bubo is Bubo Doddington (see note on l 230).
In the Fourth Moral Essay, published in 1731 as an 'Epistle to the Earl of Burlington', Pope had given a satirical description of a nobleman's house and grounds, adorned and laid out at vast expense, but in bad taste. Certain features of this description were taken from Canons, the splendid country place of the Duke of Chandos, and the duke was at once identified by a scandal-loving public with the Timon of the poem. In the description Pope speaks of the silver bell which calls worshipers to Timon's chapel, and of the soft Dean preaching there "who never mentions Hell to ears polite." In this passage of the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot' he is protesting against the people who swore that they could identify the bell and the Dean as belonging to the chapel at Canons.
a favorite of Nero, used here for Lord Hervey. See introduction to this poem, p. 128.
Hervey was obliged by bad health to keep a strict diet, and a cup of ass's milk was his daily drink.