The Devil's Details Read Online Free PDF Page B

shrilly, “The Lord would have the Cherubims covered and not to appeare naked.” A cigar is sometimes a cigar but this kind of excess of decorum registers as almost certainly more than merely an excess of decorum. See John Weemes,
An Exposition of the Lawes of Moses
(no city given: J. Dawson, F. J. Bellamie, 1632), p. 36.

* Cowley’s biographer, Thomas Sprat, betrays some annoyance with Cowley’s failure to employ his gardening skills “for Practice and Profit” but instead “presently digested it into the Form which we behold ….” The bottom line, though, is that his spying remained a secret. See Janet Todd, ed.,
The Works of Aphra Behn
, vol. 1 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 443.

* Her translation does not include those notes either because her publisher was frightened by the added expense or because her Latin was not up to it. John Dryden questioned her Latin skills. See Janet Todd, ed.,
The Works of Aphra Behn
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 443.

* Anyone may be tempted to extend the analysis of this ingenious “reversal of the hero’s fortune.” The tabernacle is often thought of as the “temporary abode of the soul,” a notion that Behn’s two-directional asterisk makes nicely ambiguous. The tabernacle was crucial during the Israelites’ years of wandering; Behn’s displeasure that the “brother” for whom she obviously has affection “went wandering” is evident. The attentive reader will notice that this critic has put such perhaps salacious speculations down here rather than in the “body” of the text. For uses of the word tabernacle see Stuart Berg Flexnor, editor in chief,
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 1933.

* There is no need for flow charts if the convenience of the reader is kept firmly in mind. The present writer has used reference marks to indicate explanatory notes; he has used numerals to indicate notes that are wholly or in large part references. Thus these later can be easily skipped should the reader be uninterested in checking the author’s scholarship. Also for the convenience of the reader, ibid. is used but not op. cit. or loc. cit. A cluster of ibids is decorative and alerts the reader to a cluster of references to the same title. However, op. cit. and loc. cit. often entail a frustrating retreat back through pages already read in order to find the necessary reference.,

* Layabouts may strike some as too harsh a term for Pope’s coterie. They did some writing certainly, and took long walks, but spent an awful lot of their time lying around Pope’s living room gossiping and joking.

* The count was achieved in the following manner. A page was found to have 7¼ inches of usable space. Seventy-nine pages provide 572 inches of usable space. Each inch of page space can accommodate four lines of verse; the 358 lines of the poem, therefore, take 89½ inches, which was rounded to 90, leaving 482 inches for the notes. The notes in smaller print and double columns fit sixteen lines into an inch. Four hundred eighty-two inches of page space could house up to 7,712 lines of notes; this has been rounded off to account for the unused space between notes. A precise count would be of interest but seems beyond this present writer’s patience.

* Commentators have, of course, always paid attention to the use of the footnote in The Dunciad Variorum as a satirical weapon employed against certain scholars, writers, and publishers. Peter W. Cosgrove, in 1991, is the first to properly emphasize that Pope was using the footnote against itself. “Pope’s real intent may be seen, … not as a defense of individual word but as a defense of poetry in general against textual criticism.” P. W. Cosgrove, “
Undermining the Text: Edward Gibbon, Alexander Pope, and the Anti-Authenticating