No More Learning

'363 Knight of the post':

a slang term for a professional witness ready to, swear to anything for
money. A knight of the shire, on the other hand, is the representative
of a county in the House of Commons.


'367 bit':

tricked, taken in, a piece of Queen Anne slang. The allusion is probably
to the way in which Lady Mary Wortley Montague allowed Pope to make love
to her and then laughed at him.


'369 friend to his distress':

in 1733, when old Dennis was in great poverty, a play was performed for
his benefit, for which Pope obligingly wrote a prologue.


'371'

Colley Gibber, actor and poet laureate. Pope speaks as if it were an act
of condescension for him to have drunk with Gibber. --'Moore': James
Moore Smythe (see note on l. 23), whom Pope used to meet at the house of
the Blounts. He wrote a comedy, 'The Rival Modes', in which he
introduced six lines that Pope had written. Pope apparently had given
him leave to do so, and then retracted his permission. But Moore used
them without the permission and an undignified quarrel arose as to the
true authorship of the passage.


'373 Welsted',

a hack writer of the day, had falsely charged Pope with being
responsible for the death of the lady who is celebrated in Pope's 'Elegy
to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady'.


'374-375'

There is an allusion here that has never been fully explained. Possibly
the passage refers to Teresa Blount whom Pope suspected of having
circulated slanderous reports concerning his relations with her sister.
'376-377'

Suffered Budgell to attribute to his (Pope's) pen the slanderous gossip
of the 'Grub Street Journal',--a paper to which Pope did, as a matter of
fact, contribute--and let him (Budgell) write anything he pleased except
his (Pope's) will. Budgell, a distant cousin of Addison's, fell into bad
habits after his friend's death. He was strongly suspected of having
forged a will by which Dr. Tindal of Oxford left him a considerable sum
of money. He finally drowned himself in the Thames.


'378 the two Curlls':

Curll, the bookseller, and Lord Hervey whom Pope here couples with him
because of Hervey's vulgar abuse of Pope's personal deformities and
obscure parentage.


'380 Yet why':

Why should they abuse Pope's inoffensive parents? Compare the following
lines.


'383'

Moore's own mother was suspected of loose conduct.


'386-388 Of gentle blood . . . each parent':

Pope asserted, perhaps incorrectly, that his father belonged to a
gentleman's family, the head of which was the Earl of Downe. His mother
was the daughter of a Yorkshire gentleman, who lost two sons in the
service of Charles I (cf. l. 386).