text: " For four years--during life--his popularity--in London and the suburbs--was prodigious; for forty--and that is a long time after death--he was a choice classic in the libraries of aging or aged men of wit upon town; and now that nearly a century has elapsed since he "from his horrid hair shook pestilence and war" o'er slaves and Scotsmen tools and tyrants peers poetasters priests pimps and players his name is still something more than a mere dissyllable and seems the shadow of the sound that Mother Dulness was wont to whisper in her children's ears when fretting wakefully on her neglected breasts