[Footnote 110: This was certainly Dr Robert Wild; an allusion to whose "_Iter Boreale_" occurs a little below. It is written in a harsh and barbarous style, filled with "clenches and carwhichets," as the time called them; which having been in fashion in the reign of James I. and his unfortunate son, now revived after the Restoration. One of these poets would perhaps have told us, in rugged verse, that the Muse having been long in mourning, it was no wonder that her gayer dress should appear unfashionable when resumed. The other scribbler, Mr Malone thinks, might be Flecnoe. Or it may have been Samuel Holland, a great scribbler on public occasions.] [Footnote 111: Cleiveland, being a violent cavalier, had a sort of claim to become a model after the Restoration. He has such notable conceits as the following comparison of a weeping mistress, to the angel in the scripture, who moved the pool of Bethesda, the first passage which occurred at opening the book: ----pious Julia, angel-wise, Moves the Bethesda of her trickling eyes, To cure the spittal world of maladies. _Cleveland's Vindiciæ_, 1677, p. 10. ] [Footnote 112: This was an absurd and cruel doctrine of the English lawyers of the time, who had begun to disbelieve in witchcraft, and were yet willing to justify the execution of witches. One of them says, that if a man firmly believes that, by whirling his hat round his head, and crying _bo_, he could occasion the death of an enemy, he becomes, by performing that ceremony, guilty of murder. Observe that, unless in virtue of special statute, he could not be capitally punished, if, instead of this whimsical device, he had actually fired a gun, and missed the person he aimed at.] [Footnote 113: A voluminous author of the reign of Charles I.] [Footnote 114: The _Iter Boreale_.] [Footnote 115: One mode of sale by auction.] [Footnote 116: If CRITES be really Sir Robert Howard, as there is every reason to believe, Dryden here represents him as supporting a point which he gives up in his preface; for he censures both the plots and diction of the ancients, and concludes, that upon Horace's rules, "our English plays may justly challenge the pre-eminence." See Preface to his Plays in folio, 1665.]