When I behold, etc. Prior compares a passage in Letter xlix of _ The Citizen of the World_, 1762, i. 218, where the Roman senators are spoken of as still flattering the people ‘with a shew of freedom, while themselves only were free.’ Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law. Prior notes a corresponding utterance in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, 1766, i. 206, ch. xix:—‘What they may then expect, may be seen by turning our eyes to Holland, Genoa, or Venice, where the laws govern the poor, and the rich govern the law.’ I fly from petty tyrants to the throne. Cf. Dr. Primrose, _ut supra_, p. 201:—‘The generality of mankind also are of my way of thinking, and have unanimously created one king, whose election at once diminishes the number of tyrants, and puts tyranny at the greatest distance from the greatest number of people.’ Cf. also Churchill, _The Farewell_, ll. 363–4 and 369–70:— Let not a Mob of Tyrants seize the helm, Nor titled upstarts league to rob the realm... Let us, some comfort in our griefs to bring, Be slaves to one, and be that one a King. lines 393–4. Goldsmith’s first thought was— Yes, my lov’d brother, cursed be that hour When first ambition toil’d for foreign power,— an entirely different couplet to that in the text, and certainly more logical. (Dobell’s _Prospect of Society_, 1902, pp. xi, 2, and Notes, v, vi). Mr. Dobell plausibly suggests that this Tory substitution is due to Johnson. Have we not seen, etc. These lines contain the first idea of the subsequent poem of _The Deserted Village_ (_q.v._). Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around. The Oswego is a river which runs between Lakes Oneida and Ontario. In the _Threnodia Augustalis_, 1772, Goldsmith writes:— Oswego’s dreary shores shall be my grave. The ‘desarts of Oswego’ were familiar to the eighteenth-century reader in connexion with General Braddock’s ill-fated expedition of 1755, an account of which Goldsmith had just given in _An History of England, in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son_, 1764, ii. 202–4. marks with murderous aim. In the first edition ‘takes a deadly aim.’ pensive exile. This, in the version mentioned in the next note, was ‘famish’d exile.’ To stop too fearful, and too faint to go. This line, upon Boswell’s authority, is claimed for Johnson (Birkbeck Hill’s _ Boswell_, 1887, ii. 6). Goldsmith’s original ran:— And faintly fainter, fainter seems to go. (Dobell’s _Prospect of Society_, 1902, p. 3).