When a man is once buried, the question, under what he is buried, is easily decided. He forgot that though he wrote the epitaph in a state of uncertainty, yet it could not be laid over him till his grave was made. Such is the folly of wit when it is ill employed. The world has but little new; even this wretchedness seems to have been borrowed from the following tuneless lines: Ludovici Areosti humantur ossa Sub hoc marmore, vel sub hac humo, seu Sub quicquid voluit benignus haeres, Sive haerede benignior comes, seu Opportunius incidens viator; Nam scire haud potuit futura, sed nec Tanti erat vacuum sibi cadaver Ut urnam cuperet parare vivens; Vivens ista tamen sibi paravit, Quae inscribi voluit suo sepulchro Olim siquod haberet is sepulchrum. Surely Ariosto did not venture to expect that his trifle would have ever had such an illustrious imitator. ----- [Footnote 108: This weakness was so great that he constantly wore stays, as I have been assured by a waterman at Twickenham, who, in lifting him into his boat, had often felt them. His method of taking the air on the water was to have a sedan chair in the boat, in which he sat with the glasses down. H.] [Footnote 109: This opinion is warmly controverted by Roscoe, in his Life of Pope; and, perhaps, with justice; for, to adopt the words of D'Israeli, "Pope's literary warfare was really the wars of his poetical ambition more, perhaps, than of the petulance and strong irritability of his temper." See also sir Walter Scott's Swift, i. 316. ED.] [Footnote 110: This is incorrect; his ordinary hand was certainly neat and elegant. I have some of it now before me. M.] [Footnote 111: Pope's first instructor is repeatedly mentioned by Spence under the name of Banister, and described as the family priest. Spence's Anecd. 259. 283. Singer's edit. Roscoe's Pope, i. 11. ED.] [Footnote 112: Dryden died May 1, 1700, a year earlier than Johnson supposed. M.] [Footnote 113: No. 253. But, according to Dr. Warton, Pope was displeased at one passage, in which Addison censures the admission of "some strokes of ill-nature."] [Footnote 114: See Gent. Mag. vol. li. p. 314. N. See the subject very fully discussed in Roscoe's Life of Pope, i. 86, and following pages.] [Footnote 115: What eye of taste ever beheld the dancing fawn or the immortal Canova's dancing girl, and doubted of this power? Pindar long ago assigned this to sculpture, and was never censured for his poetic boldness:[Greek: Erga de zooisin erpon--tessi th' omoia kelenthoi pheron.] Olym. vii. 95. ED.] [Footnote 116: Pope never felt with Eloisa, and, therefore, slighted his own affected effusions. He had little intense feeling himself, and all the passionate parts of the epistle are manifestly borrowed from Eloisa's own Latin letters. ED.] [Footnote 117: It is still at Caen Wood. N.] [Footnote 118: Spence.]