[Footnote 7: The 'Rehearsal' was a witty burlesque upon the heroic dramas of Davenant, Dryden, and others, written by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the Zimri of Dryden's 'Absalom and Achitophel,' 'that life of pleasure and that soul of whim,' who, after running through a fortune of L50,000 a year, died, says Pope, 'in the worst inn's worst room.' His 'Rehearsal', written in 1663-4, was first acted in 1671. In the last act the poet Bayes, who is showing and explaining a Rehearsal of his play to Smith and Johnson, introduces an Eclipse which, as he explains, being nothing else but an interposition, &c.

'Well, Sir, then what do I, but make the earth, sun, and moon, come
out upon the stage, and dance the hey' ... 'Come, come out, eclipse,
to the tune of 'Tom Tyler'.'[Enter Luna.]'Luna': Orbis, O Orbis! Come to me, thou little rogue, Orbis.[Enter the Earth.]'Orb.' Who calls Terra-firma pray?

...

[Enter Sol, to the tune of Robin Hood, &c.]While they dance Bayes cries, mightily taken with his device,'Now the Earth's before the Moon; now the Moon's before
the Sun: there's the Eclipse again.']

[Footnote 8: The elector of Hanover, who, in 1714, became King George I.]

[Footnote 9: In the year after the foundation of the Bank of England, Mr. Charles Montague,--made in 1700 Baron and by George I., Earl of Halifax, then (in 1695) Chancellor of the Exchequer,--restored the silver currency to a just standard. The process of recoinage caused for a time scarcity of coin and stoppage of trade. The paper of the Bank of England fell to 20 per cent. discount. Montague then collected and paid public debts from taxes imposed for the purpose and invented (in 1696), to relieve the want of currency, the issue of Exchequer bills. Public credit revived, the Bank capital increased, the currency sufficed, and. says Earl Russell in his Essay on the English Government and Constitution,

'from this time loans were made of a vast increasing amount with great
facility, and generally at a low interest, by which the nation were
enabled to resist their enemies. The French wondered at the prodigious
efforts that were made by so small a power, and the abundance with
which money was poured into its treasury... Books were written,
projects drawn up, edicts prepared, which were to give to France the
same facilities as her rival; every plan that fiscal ingenuity could
strike out, every calculation that laborious arithmetic could form,
was proposed, and tried, and found wanting; and for this simple
reason, that in all their projects drawn up in imitation of England,
one little element was omitted, _videlicet_, her free constitution.'

That is what Addison means by his allegory.]

* * * * *

No. 4. Monday, March 5, 1711. Steele.

... Egregii Mortalem altique silenti!Hor.