Note 99 — SCENE II.
Reading edition
The state.] This was a raised platform, on which was placed a chair with a canopy over it. The word occurs perpetually in our old writers. It is used by Dryden, but seems to have been growing obsolete while he was writing: in the first edition of Mac Fleckno, the monarch is placed on a state; in the subsequent ones, he is seated like his fellow kings, on a throne: it occurs also, and I believe for the last time, in Swift: "As she affected not the grandeur of a state with a canopy, she thought there was no offence in an elbow chair."—Hist. of John Bull, c. i.—Gifford.