The daring artist
Explored the pangs that rend the royal breast,
_Those wounds that lurk beneath the tissued vest_.
T. WARTON on Shakspeare.
Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Defence of Poesie," has the same image. He
writes, "Tragedy openeth the greatest _wounds_, and showeth forth the
_ulcers_ that are _covered with tissue_."
The same appropriation of thought will attach to the following lines of
Tickell:
While the charm'd reader with thy thought complies,
And views thy _Rosamond_ with _Henry's_ eyes.
TICKELL to ADDISON.
Evidently from the French Horace:
En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue;
Tout Paris, pour _Chimene_, a les yeux de _Rodrigue_.
BOILEAU.
Oldham, the satirist, says in his satires upon the Jesuits, that had
Cain been of this black fraternity, he had not been content with a
quarter of mankind.
Had he been Jesuit, _had he but put on
Their savage cruelty, the rest had gone!_
Satire ii.
Doubtless at that moment echoed in his poetical ear the energetic and
caustic epigram of Andrew Marvel, against Blood stealing the crown
dressed in a parson's cassock, and sparing the life of the keeper:
With the Priest's vestment _had he but put on
The Prelate's cruelty--the Crown had gone!_
The following passages seem echoes to each other, and it is but justice
due to Oldham, the satirist, to acknowledge him as the parent of this
antithesis:
On Butler who can think without just rage,
_The glory and the scandal of the age_?
_Satire against Poetry_.
It seems evidently borrowed by Pope, when he applies the thought to
Erasmus:--
At length Erasmus, that great injured name,
The _glory of the priesthood_ and the _shame_!
Young remembered the antithesis when he said,
Of some for _glory_ such the boundless rage,
That they're the blackest _scandal_ of the age.
Voltaire, a great reader of Pope, seems to have borrowed part of the
expression:--
_Scandale_ d'Eglise, et des rois le modèle.
De Caux, an old French poet, in one of his moral poems on an hour-glass,
inserted in modern collections, has many ingenious thoughts. That this
poem was read and admired by Goldsmith, the following beautiful image
seems to indicate. De Caux, comparing the world to his hour-glass, says
beautifully,
_C'est un verre qui luit,
Qu'un souffle peut détruire, et qu'un souffle a produit._