"' The lectures began
January 19, 1774, and help to fix the date of the poem.
Goldsmith had little reason for liking this versatile and
unprincipled Ishmaelite of letters, who, only a year before, had
penned a scurrilous attack upon him in 'The London Packet'.
Kenrick died in 1779.
l. 87. -----
"Macpherson". 'David [James] Macpherson, Esq.; who
lately, from the mere 'force of his style', wrote down the first
poet of all antiquity.' (Note to second edition.) This was
'Ossian' Macpherson, 1738-96, who, in 1773, had followed up his
Erse epics by a prose translation of Homer, which brought him
little but opprobrium. 'Your abilities, since your Homer, are
not so formidable,' says Johnson in the knockdown letter which
he addressed to him in 1775. (Birkbeck Hill's 'Boswell', 1887,
ii. 298.)
l. 88. -----
"Our Townshend". See note to line 34.
l. 89. -----
"New Lauders and Bowers".
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