Note 33 — AN ESSAY UPON SATIRE.

Aston is mentioned as a sort of half wit in some of the lampoons of the day; but I have not been able to trace any thing of his history, except that he seems to have been a courtier of the period; perhaps the same Colonel Aston, whom the reader will find in a subsequent note, acting as Mulgrave's second, in an intended duel with Rochester. If this be so, from the slight with which he is here mentioned, there may have been a coolness in their friendship, although, indeed, the mere want of morals was not considered as an insufferable stigma in the reign of Charles II., and might pass for a good-natured joke, were the epithet dull omitted. The name Aston is mentioned in the "Epistle to Julian."