written by Don Alonzo Fernandez de Avellanada, and afterwards
translated, or rather imitated and new-modelled, by no less an Author
than the celebrated Le Sage. "But, Sir, quoth the Bachelor, if you would
have me adhere to Aristotle's rules, I must omit the combat. Aristotle,
replied the Knight, I grant was a man of some parts; but his capacity
was not unbounded; and, give me leave to tell you, his authority does
not extend over combats in the list, which are far above his narrow
rules. Believe me the combat will add such grace to your play, that all
the rules in the universe must not stand in competition with it. Well,
Sir Knight, replied the Bachelor, for your sake, and for the honour of
chivalry, I will not leave out the combat. But still one difficulty
remains, which is, that our common theatres are not large enough for it.
There must be one erected on purpose, answered the Knight; and in a
word, rather than leave out the combat, the play had better be acted in
a field or plain."--WARTON.
[146] In all editions till the quarto of 1743,
As e'er could D----s of the laws o' th' stage.
[147] In the manuscript the reply of the knight is continued through
another couplet:
In all besides let Aristotle sway,
But knighthood's sacred, and he must give way.
[148] The phrase "curious not knowing," is from Petronius, and Pope has
written the words of his original on the margin of the manuscript: Est
et alter, non quidem doctus, sed curiosus, qui plus docet quam scit.
[149] The conventionalities of foppery and ceremony are always changing,
and what Pope says of manners may have been extensively true of his own
generation. At present bad manners commonly proceed either from
defective sensibility, or from men having more regard to themselves than
to their company.
[150] This had been the practice of some artists. "Their heroes," says
Reynolds, speaking of the French painters in 1752, "are decked out so
nice and fine that they look like knights-errant just entering the lists
at a tournament in gilt armour, and loaded most unmercifully with silk,
satin, velvet, gold, jewels, &c." Pope had in his mind a passage of
Cowley's Ode on Wit:
Yet 'tis not to adorn, and gild each part;
That shows more cost than art.
Jewels at nose and lips but ill appear;
Rather than all things wit, let none be there.
[151] Naturam intueamur, hanc sequamur: id facillimè accipiunt animi
quod agnoscunt. Quint. lib. 8, c. 3.--POPE.
Dryden's preface to the State of Innocence: "The definition of wit,
which has been so often attempted, and ever unsuccessfully, by many
poets, is only this, that it is a propriety of thoughts and words."
[152] Pope's account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous; he depresses it
below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to
happiness of language.--JOHNSON.
The error was in stating a partial as an universal truth; for the second
line of the couplet correctly describes the quality which gives the
charm to numberless passages both in prose and verse. Instead of "ne'er
so well," the reading of the first edition was "ne'er before," which was
not equally true. But Pope followed the passage in Boileau, from which
the line in the Essay on Criticism was derived: "Qu'est-ce qu'une pensée
neuve, brillante, extraordinaire? Ce n'est point, comme se le persuadent
les ignorants, une pensée que personne n'a jamais eu, ni dû avoir. C'est
au contraire une pensée qui a dû venir à tout le monde, et que quelqu'un
s'avise le premier d'exprimer. Un bon mot n'est bon mot qu'en ce qu'il
dit une chose que chacun pensoit, et qu'il la dit d'une manière vive,
fine et nouvelle."
[153] Light "sweetly recommended" by shades, is an affected form of
speech. "Does 'em good," in the next couplet, offends in the opposite
direction, and is meanly colloquial.
[154] Two lines, which follow in the manuscript, are, from such a poet,
worth quoting as a curiosity, since in the ruggedness of the metre, the
badness of the rhyme, and the grossness of the metaphor, they are among
the worst that were ever written:
Justly to think, and readily express,
A full conception, and brought forth with ease.
[155] "Let us," says Mr. Webb, in a passage quoted by Warton,
"substitute the definition in the place of the thing, and it will stand
thus: 'A work may have more of nature dressed to advantage than will do
it good.' This is impossible, and it is evident that the confusion
arises from the poet having annexed different ideas to the same word."
[156] "Take upon content" for "take upon trust" was a form of speech
sanctioned by usage in Pope's day. Thus Rymer says of Hart the actor,
"What he delivers every one takes upon content. Their eyes are
prepossessed and charmed by his action."
[157] Nothing can be more just, or more ably and eloquently expressed
than this observation and illustration respecting the character of false
eloquence. Fine words do not make fine poems, and there cannot be a
stronger proof of the want of real genius than those high colours and
meretricious embellishments of language, which, while they hide the
poverty of ideas, impose on the unpractised eye with a gaudy semblance
of beauty.--BOWLES.
[158] "Decent" has not here the signification of modest, but is used in
the once common sense of becoming, attractive.
[159] Dryden's preface to All for Love: "Expressions are a modest
clothing of our thoughts, as breeches and petticoats are for our
bodies." Pope's couplet should have been more in accordance with his
precept. "Still" is an expletive to piece out the line, and upon this
superfluous word, he has thrown the emphasis of the rhyme, which, in its
turn, is mean and imperfect.
[160] Abolita et abrogata retinere, insolentiæ cujusdam est, et frivolæ
in parvis jactantiæ. Quint. lib. i. c. 6.
Opus est, ut verba a vetustate repetita neque crebra sint, neque
manifesta, quia nil est odiosius affectatione, nec utique ab ultimis
repetita temporibus. Oratio cujus summa virtus est perspicuitas, quam
sit vitiosa, si egeat interprete? Ergo ut novorum optima erunt maxime
vetera, ita veterum maxime nova. Idem.--POPE.
[161] See Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour.--POPE.
Dryden's Dedication to the Assignation: "He is only like Fungoso in the
play, who follows the fashion at a distance."
[162] If Pope's maxim was universally obeyed no new word could be
introduced. Dryden was more judicious. "When I find," he said, "an
English word significant and sounding, I neither borrow from the Latin
nor any other language; but when I want at home I must seek abroad."
[163]
Quis populi sermo est? quis enim? nisi carmina molli
Nunc demum numero fluere, ut per læve severos
Effundat junctura ungues: scit tendere versum
Non secus ac si oculo rubricam dirigat uno.--Pers., Sat. i.--POPE.
Garth in the Dispensary:
Harsh words, though pertinent, uncouth appear;
None please the fancy who offend the ear.
[164] "There" is a feeble excrescence to force a rhyme.
[165] Fugiemus crebras vocalium concursiones, quæ vastam atque hiantem
orationem reddunt. Cic. ad Heren. lib. iv. Vide etiam Quintil. lib. ix.
c. 4.--POPE.
Vowels were said to open on each other when two words came together of
which the first ended, and the second commenced with a vowel. Pope has
illustrated the fault by crowding three consecutive instances into his
verse. The poets diminished the conflict of vowels by a free recourse to
elisions. The most usual were the cutting off the "e" in "the," as "th'
unlearned," ver. 327; and the "o" in "to," as "t' outlast," ver. 131,
"t' examine," ver. 134, "t' admire," ver. 200. The two words were thus
fused into one, and the old authors combined them in writing as well as
in the pronunciation. The manuscripts of Chaucer have "texcuse," not "t'
excuse;" "thapostle," not "th' apostle." The custom has not kept its
ground. Whatever might be supposed to be gained in harmony by the
conversion of "to examine" into "texamine," or of "the unlearned" into
"thunlearned" was more than lost by the departure from the common forms
of speech.
[166] "The characters of bad critic and bad poet are grossly confounded;
for though it be true that vulgar readers of poetry are chiefly
attentive to the melody of the verse, yet it is not they who admire, but
the paltry versifier who employs monotonous syllables, feeble
expletives, and a dull routine of unvaried rhymes." Essays Historical
and Critical.--WARTON.
[167] "Low" in contradistinction to lofty. The phrase would now mean
coarse and vulgar words.
[168] From Dryden. "He creeps along with ten little words in every line,
and helps out his numbers with _for_, _to_, and _unto_, and all the
pretty expletives he can find, while the sense is left half-tired behind
it." Essay on Dram. Poetry.--WARBURTON.
A collection of monosyllables when it arises from a correspondence of
subject is highly meritorious. Let a single example from Milton suffice:
O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death.
How successfully does this range of little words represent to our
imaginations,
The growing labours of the lengthened way.--WAKEFIELD.
"It is pronounced by Dryden," says Johnson, "that a line of
monosyllables is almost always harsh. This is evidently true, because
our monosyllables commonly begin and end with consonants." As Dryden
expressed it, "they are clogged with consonants," and "it seldom," he
says, "happens but a monosyllable line turns verse to prose, and even
that prose is rugged and inharmonious." The authority of Dryden has led
many persons to mistrust their own ears, and imagine, like Johnson and
Wakefield, that monosyllables were only fitted at best to produce some
special effect. Numerous examples in Dryden's poetry contradict his
criticism, and Milton abounds in sweet and sonorous monosyllabic lines,
as Par. Lost, v. 193:
His praise, ye winds, that from four quarters blow
Breathe soft or loud; and wave your tops, ye pines,
With ev'ry plant, in sign of worship wave.
And ver. 199:
ye birds,
That singing up to heaven gate ascend,
Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.
Melodious lines, such as the first verse in the first of these passages,
which have the monosyllables relieved but by a single dissyllable, are
past counting up. Addison praised Pope for exemplifying the faults in
the language which condemned them. "The gaping of the vowels in the
second line, the expletive 'do' in the third line, and the ten
monosyllables in the fourth, give such a beauty to this passage, as
would have been very much admired in an ancient poet." The feat was too
easy to call for much admiration. There was more difficulty in eschewing
than in mimicking the vicious style of bad versifiers. Pope himself has
not avoided the frequent use of "low words" and "feeble expletives."
[169] Atterbury's Preface to Waller's Poems: "He had a fine ear, and
knew how quickly that sense was cloyed by the same round of chiming
words still returning upon it."
[170] Hopkins's translation of Ovid's Met., book xi.:
No tame nor savage beast dwells there; no breeze
Shakes the still boughs, or whispers thro' the trees:
Here easy streams with pleasing murmurs creep,
At once inviting and assisting sleep.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope uses these trite ideas and "unvaried chimes" himself. In the fourth
Pastoral we have "gentle breeze, trembling trees, whispering breeze,
dies upon the trees," and in Eloisa we have "the curling breeze, panting
on the trees."--CROKER.
Pope took the idea from Boileau:
Si je louois Philis "en miracles féconde,"
Je trouverois bientôt, "à nulle autre seconde;"
Si je voulois vanter un objet "nonpareil,"
Je mettrois à l'instant, "plus beau que le soleil;"
Enfin, parlant toujours d' "astres" et de "merveilles,"
De "chefs-d'oeuvres des cieux," de "beautés sans pareilles."
[171] Dryden in his Annus Mirabilis, stanza 123:
So glides the trodden serpent on the grass,
And long behind his wounded volume trails.--WAKEFIELD.
[172] Boileau's Art of Poetry translated by Soame and Dryden:
Those tuneful readers of their own dull rhymes.
[173] The construction might be for anything that the composition shows
to the contrary, "leave such to praise," which is subversive of the
poet's meaning.--WAKEFIELD.
[174] Sufficient justice is not done to Sandys, who did more to polish
and tune the English versification by his Psalms and his Job, than those
two writers, who are usually applauded on this subject.--WARTON.
Bowles adds his testimony to "the extraordinary melody and vigour" of
the versification of Sandys. Ruffhead, in his life of Pope, having
called the Ovid of Sandys an "indifferent translation," Warburton has
written on the margin, "He was not an indifferent, but a very fine
translator and versifier."
[175] Writers who seem to have composed with the greatest ease have
exerted much labour in attaining this facility. It is well known that
the writings of La Fontaine were laboured into that facility for which
they are so famous, with repeated alterations and many erasures. Moliere
is reported to have passed whole days in fixing upon a proper epithet or
rhyme, although his verses have all the flow and freedom of
conversation. I have been informed that Addison was so extremely nice in
polishing his prose compositions that when almost a whole impression of
a Spectator was worked off he would stop the press to insert a new
preposition or conjunction.--WARTON.
[176] Lord Roscommon says:
The sound is still a comment to the sense.--WARBURTON.
The whole of this passage on the adaptation of the sound to the sense is
imitated, and, as may be seen by the references of Warburton, is in part
translated, from Vida's Art of Poetry.
[177]
Tum is læta canunt, &c. Vida, Poet. 1. iii. ver. 403.--WARBURTON.
[178]
Tum longe sale saxa sonant, &c. Vida, Poet. 1. iii. v. 388.--WARBURTON.
[179]
Atque ideo si quid geritur molimine magno,
Adde moram et pariter tecum quoque verba laborent
Segnia. Vida, ib. 417.--WARBURTON.
[180]
At mora si fuerit damno, properare jubebo, &c. Vida, ib.
420.--WARBURTON.
[181] Our poet here endeavours to fasten on Virgil a most insufferable
absurdity, which no poetical hyperbole will justify, namely, the reality
of these wonderful performances, a flight over the unbending corn, and
across the sea with unbathed feet. Virgil only puts the supposition, and
speaks of her extraordinary velocity in the way of comparison, that she
seemed capable of accomplishing so much had she made the attempt. She
could fly, if she had chosen, nor would have injured, in that case, the
tender blades of corn.--WAKEFIELD.
[182] The verse intended to represent the whisper of the vernal breeze
must surely be confessed not much to excel in softness or volubility;
and the smooth stream runs with a perpetual clash of jarring consonants.
The noise and turbulence of the torrent is, indeed, distinctly imaged;
for it requires very little skill to make our language rough. But in the
lines which mention the effort of Ajax, there is no particular heaviness
or delay. The swiftness of Camilla is rather contrasted than
exemplified. Why the verse should be lengthened to express speed, will
not easily be discovered. In the dactyls, used for that purpose by the
ancients, two short syllables were pronounced with such rapidity, as to
be equal only to one long; they therefore naturally exhibit the act of
passing through a long space in a short time. But the Alexandrine, by
its pause in the midst, is a tardy and stately measure; and the word
"unbending," one of the most sluggish and slow which our language
affords, cannot much accelerate its motion.--JOHNSON.
Wakefield says that "the tripping word _labours_, in ver. 371, is
unhappy," and Aaron Hill contended that three at least of the five
concluding words of the line "danced away upon the tongue with a
tripping and lyrical lightness."
[183] See Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Music; an Ode by Mr.
Dryden.--POPE.
[184] This resembles a line in Hughes's Court of Neptune:
Beholds th' alternate billows all and rise.--WAKEFIELD.
[185]
And now and then, a sigh he stole,
And tears began to flow. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.
[186] Pope confounds vocal and instrumental with poetical harmony.
Timotheus owed his celebrity to his music, and Dryden never wrote a
note.
[187] Creech's translation of Horace's Art of Poetry:
men of sense retire,
The boys abuse, and only fools admire.
Aaron Hill says, that Pope was very fond of the line in the text, and
often repeated it. Hill, who "abhorred the sentiment," once asked him if
he still adhered to the opinion of Longinus, that the true sublime
thrilled and transported the reader. On Pope replying in the
affirmative, his interrogator pressed him with the contradiction, and
the perplexed poet, according to Hill's report, took refuge in nonsense,
and made this unintelligible answer,--"that Longinus's remark was truth,
but that, like certain truths of more importance, it required assent
from faith, without the evidence of demonstration." It must be evident
that Shakespeare, Milton, and scores besides, are worthy of admiration;
and no man would show his sense by protesting that he did not admire but
only approved of them. Pope is inconsistent, for at ver. 236 he speaks
of "_rapture_ warming the mind," and of "the generous pleasure to be
_charmed_ with wit."
[188] In all editions before the quarto of 1743, "Some the French
writers."
[189] This was directed against Pope's co-religionists, and greatly
annoyed them. The offence was not that he had misrepresented their
views, but that he had denounced a doctrine which all zealous papists
maintained. "Nothing," he said, when writing in vindication of the
passage to Caryll, "has been so much a scarecrow to our opponents as
that too peremptory and uncharitable assertion of an utter impossibility
of salvation to all but ourselves. I own to you I was glad of any
opportunity to express my dislike of so shocking a sentiment as those of
the religion I profess are commonly charged with, and I hoped a slight
insinuation, introduced by a casual similitude only, could never have
given offence, but on the contrary, must needs have done good in a
nation wherein we are the smaller party, and consequently most
misrepresented, and most in need of vindication." The Roman Catholics
took to themselves the couplet "Meanly they seek," which followed the
simile, but Pope pointed out that the plural "some," and not the
singular "each man," was the antecedent to "they." The comparison was
not kept up throughout the paragraph, and the lines after ver. 397 refer
solely to the critics.
[190] The word "enlights" is, I believe, of our poet's coinage,
analogically formed from "light," as "enlighten" from
"lighten."--WAKEFIELD.
[191] Sir Robert Howard's poem against the Fear of Death:
And neither gives increase, nor brings decay.
[192] There is very little poetical expression from this line to ver.
450. It is only mere prose fringed with rhyme. Good sense in a very
prosaic style; reasoning, not poetry.--WARTON.
[193] "Joins with quality" for "joins with men of rank" is a vulgar
colloquialism.
[194]
In sing-song Durfey, Oldmixon or me,
was the original reading of the manuscript.
[195] This couplet is succeeded by two more lines in the manuscript:
And while to thoughts refined they make pretence,
Hate all that's common, ev'n to common sense.
[196] In the first edition the reading was "dull believers," which Pope
in the second edition altered to "plain." The change was occasioned by
the outcry against the couplet. "An ordinary man," he wrote to Caryll,
"would imagine the author plainly declared against these schismatics for
quitting the true faith out of contempt of the understanding of some few
of its believers. But these believers are called 'dull,' and because I
say that these schismatics think some believers dull, therefore these
charitable well-disposed interpreters of my meaning say that I think all
believers dull." There is a culpable levity in the language of Pope's
lines, but he could not intend to espouse the cause of the sceptics when
he selects them as an instance of people who "purposely go wrong"
because "the crowd go right."
[197] If this couplet is interpreted by the grammatical construction,
the "unfortified towns daily changed their sides" in consequence of
vacillating "betwixt sense and nonsense." Of course Pope only meant that
in war weak towns frequently changed sides, but not for the same reason
that weak heads changed their opinions.
[198] The Book of Sentences was a work of Peter Lombard, which consisted
of subtle disquisitions on theology. Thomas Aquinas wrote a commentary
upon it.
[199] St. Thomas Aquinas died in 1274. Scotus, who died in 1308,
disputed the doctrines of his predecessor, and their respective
disciples divided for a century the theological world.--CROKER.
[200] Cowley speaks of "the cobwebs of the schoolmen's trade," and says
in a note, "the distinctions of the schoolmen may be likened to cobwebs
either because of the too much fineness of the work, or because they
take not the materials from nature, but spin it out of themselves."
[201] A place where old and second-hand books were sold formerly, near
Smithfield.--POPE.
[202] Between this and verse 448:
The rhyming clowns that gladded Shakespear's age,
No more with crambo entertain the stage.
Who now in anagrams their patron praise,
Or sing their mistress in acrostic lays?
Ev'n pulpits pleased with merry puns of yore;
Now all are banished to th' Hibernian shore!
[And thither soon soft op'ra shall repair,
Conveyed by Sw----y to his native air.
There, languishing awhile, prolong its breath,
Till like a swan it sings itself to death.]
Thus leaving what was natural and fit,
The current folly proved their ready wit:
And authors thought their reputation safe,
Which lived as long as fools were pleased to laugh.--POPE.
The lines between brackets are from the manuscript, and were not printed
by Pope. The whole passage was probably written after the poem was first
published, since the topics seem to have been suggested by Addison's
papers upon false wit in the Spectator of May, 1711, where the anagrams,
acrostics, and punning sermons of the reign of James I. are all
enumerated. Swiney was the director of the Italian opera, which, at the
commencement of 1712, failed to meet with adequate support, and he
withdrew, not to Ireland, but to the continent. "He remained there,"
says Cibber, "twenty years, an exile from his friends and country."
[203] An additional couplet follows in the manuscript:
To be spoke ill of, may good works befall,
But those are bad of which none speak at all.
[204] The parson alluded to was Jeremy Collier; the critic was the Duke
of Buckingham; the first of whom very powerfully attacked the
profligacy, and the latter the irregularity and bombast of some of
Dryden's plays. These attacks were much more than merry jests.--WARTON.
[205] Dryden himself, Virg. Geor. iv. 729:
But she returned no more to bless his longing eyes.--WAKEFIELD.
[206] Blackmore's attack upon Dryden occurs in a poem which appeared in
1700, called a Satire against Wit. The author treats wit as money, and
proposes that the whole should be recoined for the purpose of separating
the base metal from the pure.
Into the melting pot when Dryden comes
What horrid stench will rise, what noisome fumes!
How will he shrink when all his lewd allay
And wicked mixture shall be purged away!
When once his boasted heaps are melted down,
A chestful scarce will yield one sterling crown.
This is exaggerated, but the censure is directed against the indecency
which was really infamous. The invectives of Milbourne in his Notes on
Dryden's Virgil, 1698, had not the same excuse. The strictures are
confined to the translation of the Eclogues and Georgics, and are
throughout rabid, insolent, coarse, and contemptible. To demonstrate his
own superiority, Milbourne inserted specimens of a rival translation,
which is on a par with his criticisms. He was in orders, and
acknowledges that one of his reasons for not sparing Dryden was that
Dryden never spared a clergyman. "I am only," replied the poet, with
exquisite sarcasm, "to ask pardon of good priests, and am afraid his
part of the reparation will come to little." Dryden retaliated upon both
antagonists together in the couplet,
Wouldst thou be soon dispatched, and perish whole?
Trust Maurus with thy life, and Milbourne with thy soul.
Pope's line in the first edition was
New Bl----s and new M----s must arise.
In the second edition he substituted S----s, which meant Shadwells, for
Bl----s, but in the quarto of 1717 he again coupled Blackmore with
Milbourne, and printed both names at full length. Blackmore was living,
and the changes indicate Pope's varying feelings towards him.
[207] In the fifth book of Vitruvius is an account of Zoilus's coming to
the court of Ptolemy at Alexandria, and presenting to him his virulent
and brutal censures of Homer, and begging to be rewarded for his work;
instead of which, it is said, the king ordered him to be crucified, or,
as some said, stoned. His person is minutely described in the eleventh
book of Ælian's various History.--WARTON.
Boileau's Art of Poetry, translated by Soame and Dryden:
Let mighty Spenser raise his reverend head,
Cowley and Denham start up from the dead.
[208] A beautiful and poetical illustration. Pope has the art of
enlivening his subject continually by images and illustrations drawn
from nature, which by contrast have a particularly pleasing effect, and
which are indeed absolutely necessary in a didactic poem.--BOWLES.
The passage originally stood thus in the manuscript:
Wit, as the sun, such pow'rful beams displays,
It draws up vapours that obscures its rays,
But, like the sun eclipsed, makes only known
The shadowing body's grossness, not its own;
And all those clouds that did at first invade
The rising light, and interposed a shade,
When once transpierced with its prevailing ray
Reflect its glories, and augment the day.
[209] His instance refuted his position that "bare threescore" was the
duration of modern fame. "It is now a hundred years," said Dennis in
1712, "since Shakespeare began to write, more since Spenser flourished,
and above three hundred years since Chaucer died. And yet the fame of
none of these is extinguished." Another century and a half has elapsed,
and the reputation of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare is greater than
ever. The notion of the "failing language" is not more sound. Though it
is a hundred and fifty years since the Essay on Criticism was published,
there is not a line which has an antiquated air.
[210]
The treach'rous colours in few years decay.--POPE.
The next line is from Addison:
And all the pleasing landscape fades away.
[211] That is, of which those, who do not possess it, form an erroneous
estimate, as productive of more happiness and enjoyment to the owner,
than he really receives from it.--WAKEFIELD.
[212] In the previous paragraph Pope admitted that the fame of a modern
might last three-score years. Here, contradicting himself and the facts,
he limits its duration to the youth of the author. He applies to poets
in general what was only true of inferior writers. The ephemeral
versifiers were examples of deficient "wit," and not of the unhappy
consequences of genuine poetic power.
[213]
Like some fair flow'r that in the spring does rise.--POPE.
This line was an example both of the "feeble expletive" and of the "ten
low words." "Supplies" in the amended version is, as Wakefield observes,
a poor expression.
[214] The Duke of Buckingham's Vision:
The dearest care that all my thought employs.
[215] Wakefield objects to the "slovenly superfluity of words," and asks
"to whom can a wife possibly belong but the owner?" He misunderstood
Pope, who, by "the wife of the owner," meant the wife of the owner of
the wit. The metaphor is coarse, and out of keeping with the theme.
[216] Thus in the first edition:
The more his trouble as the more admired,
Where wanted scorned, and envied where acquired.
Against this Pope wrote, "To be altered. See Dennis, p. 20." "How," said
Dennis, "can wit be scorned where it is not? The person who wants this
wit may indeed be scorned, but such a contempt declares the honour that
the contemner has for wit." Pope, in a letter to Caryll, admitted that
he had been guilty of a bull, and the reading in the second edition was,
'Tis most our trouble when 'tis most admired,
The more we give, the more is still required.
[217] In the first edition,
Maintained with pains, but forfeited with ease;
and in the second edition,
The fame with pains we gain, but lose with ease.
The original version appears better than the readings which successively
replaced it.
[218] Another couplet follows in the manuscript:
Learning and wit were friends designed by heav'n;
Those arms to guard it, not to wound, were giv'n.
[219] Dryden's Prologue to the University of Oxford:
Be kind to wit, which but endeavours well,
And, where you judge, presumes not to excel.
The feelings of antiquity were doubtless represented truly by Horace
when he said that indifferent poets were not tolerated by anybody. There
is not the least foundation for Pope's statement that it was the habit
of old to praise bad authors for endeavouring well, and if it had been,
the authors would not have cared for commendations on their abortive
industry to the disparagement of their intellect.
[220] Wakefield remarks upon the unhappy effect of "crowns" and "crown"
in consecutive lines, and thinks the phrase "some others" in the next
verse too mean and elliptical. Soame and Dryden, in their translation of
Boileau's Art of Poetry, speak of the "base rivals" who
aspire to gain renown
By standing up and pulling others down.
[221] Mr. Harte related to me, that being with Mr. Pope when he received
the news of Swift's death, Harte said to him, he thought it a fortunate
circumstance for their friendship, that they had lived so distant from
each other. Pope resented the reflection, but yet, said Harte, I am
convinced it was true.--WARTON.
[222] That is, all the unsuccessful authors maligned the successful. The
unsuccessful writers never said anything more slanderous.
[223] Boileau's Art of Poetry, translated by Soame and Dryden:
Never debase yourself by treach'rous ways
Nor by such abject methods seek for praise.
Pope's own life is the strongest example upon record of the degradation
he deplores.
[224] In the margin of the manuscript Pope has written the passages of
Virgil from which he took his expressions. Æn. iii. 56:
quid non mortalia pectora cogis
Auri sacra fames?
Geor. i. 37:
Nec tibi regnandi veniat tam dira cupido,
which Dryden translates,
Nor let so dire a thirst of empire move.
[225] Such a manly and ingenuous censure from a culprit in this way, as
in the case of Pope, is entitled to great praise.--WAKEFIELD.
If his indecorums had been the failing of youth and thoughtlessness, and
he had publicly recanted his errors, his self-condemnation would be
meritorious. The larger portion of his offences were, on the contrary,
committed after he had declared indecency to be unpardonable. Any man,
however persistently reprobate, might earn "great praise" on terms like
these.
[226] No one has expressed himself upon this subject so pithily as
Cowley:
'tis just
The author blush, there where the reader must.
[227] Hamlet:
And duller shoulds't thou be than the fat weed.--BOWLES.
[228] Wits, says he, in Charles the Second's reign had pensions, when
all the world knows that it was one of the faults of that reign that
none of the politer arts were then encouraged. Butler was starved at the
same time that the king had his book in his pocket. Another great wit
[Wycherley] lay seven years in prison for an inconsiderable debt, and
Otway dared not to show his head for fear of the same fate.--DENNIS.
[229] "The young lords who had wit in the court of Charles II. were,"
says Dennis, "Villiers Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Mulgrave,
afterwards Sheffield Duke of Buckingham, Lord Buckhurst afterwards Earl
of Dorset, the Marquess of Halifax, the Earl of Rochester, Lord Vaughan,
and several others." The jilts who ruled the state were the mistresses
of the king. The Duke of Buckingham and his Rehearsal are chiefly aimed
at in the expression "statesmen farces writ."--CROKER.
[230] Pepys, under the date of June 12, 1663, notices that wearing masks
at the theatre had "of late become a great fashion among the ladies."
Cibber states that the immorality of the plays was the cause of the
usage. When he wrote in 1739 the custom had been abolished for many
years in consequence of the ill effects which attended it.
[231] He must mean in everyday life. There was no use for the "modest
fan" at the theatre after the ladies had adopted the more effectual plan
of wearing masks. Pope, ver. 535, ascribes the introduction of
"obscenity" to the Restoration. In the theatre the grossness was a
legacy from the older drama, and particularly from the plays of Beaumont
and Fletcher, which were the most popular pieces on the stage.
[232] The author has omitted two lines which stood here as containing a
national reflection, which in his stricter judgment he could not but
disapprove, on any people whatever.--POPE.
The cancelled couplet was as follows:
Then first the Belgian morals were extolled,
We their religion had, and they our gold.
This sneer was dictated by the poet's dislike to William III. and the
Dutch, for displacing the popish king James II.--CROKER.
This ingenious and religious author seems to have had two particular
antipathies--one to grammatical and verbal criticism, the other to false
doctrine and heresy. To the first we may ascribe his treating Bentley,
Burman, Kuster, and Wasse with a contempt which recoiled upon himself.
To the second we will impute his pious zeal against those divines of
king William, whom he supposed to be infected with the infidel, or the
socinian, or the latitudinarian spirit, and not so orthodox as himself,
and his friends Swift, Bolingbroke, etc. Thus he laid about him, and
censured men of whose literary, or of whose theological merits or
defects, he was no more a judge than his footman John Searle.--DR.
JORTIN.
[233] Jortin asserted that by the "unbelieving priests" Pope alluded to
Burnet. If Jortin is right, the passage was not satire but falsehood.
That there was, however, much infidelity and socinianism during the
reign of William III. is proved by an address of the House of Commons to
the king, quoted by Bowles, "beseeching his majesty to give effectual
orders for suppressing all pernicious books and pamphlets which
contained impious doctrines against the Holy Trinity, and other
fundamental articles of the protestant faith, tending to the subversion
of the christian religion." This address was presented in February 1698.
[234] In this line he had Kennet in view, who was accused of having
said, in a funeral sermon on some nobleman, that converted sinners, if
they were men of parts, repented more speedily and effectually than dull
rascals.--JORTIN.
[235] The published sermons of the reign of William III. do not answer
to this description, which is certainly a calumny.
[236] So Lucretius, iv. 333:
Lurida præterea fiunt quæcunque tuentur
Arquati.
Besides, whatever jaundice-eyes do view,
Looks pale as well as those, and yellow too.--Creech.
This notion of the transfusion of the colour to the object from a
jaundiced eye, though current in all our authors, is, I believe, a mere
vulgar error.--WAKEFIELD.
It is still a disputed point whether jaundice ever affects the eye in a
degree to permit only the passage of the yellow rays. The instances are
at least very rare; but popular belief is a sufficient ground for a
poetical comparison. Pope had just exemplified his simile; for
everything looked yellow to him in the reign of William III.
[237] In the first edition,
Speak when you're sure, yet speak with diffidence.
Dennis objected that a man when sure should speak "with a modest
assurance," and Pope wrote on the margin of the manuscript, "Dennis, p.
21. Alter the inconsistency."
Pope's maxim was commended by Franklin. He found that his overbearing,
dictatorial manner roused needless opposition, and he resolved never "to
use a word that imported a fixed opinion," but he employed instead the
qualifying phrases, "I conceive," "I imagine," or "it so appears to me
at present." "To this," he says, "after my character of integrity, I
think it principally owing that I had early so much weight with my
fellow citizens when I proposed new institutions or alterations in the
old; for I was but a bad speaker, subject to much hesitation, and yet I
generally carried my point." He admits that his humility was feigned.
Had it been real there would have been no need for "I conceive," "I
imagine," which are implied without a tiresome, superfluous repetition.
Unless the dogmatism is in the mind opinions have not the tone of
decrees.
[238] Warton praises Pope for practising the precept in correcting the
poems of Wycherley, and condemned Wycherley for ungenerously resenting
the candour of his critic. Bowles extenuates the conduct of Wycherley,
and says that "the superannuated bard" bore the corrections with "great
temper till Pope seriously advised him to turn the whole into prose."
Warton and Bowles were deceived by the printed correspondence of Pope
and Wycherley, and were not aware that the letters were garbled in the
very particulars which relate to the cause of the quarrel,--a quarrel so
discreditable to Pope that he had recourse to forgery to shield himself
and throw the blame upon Wycherley. It is certain that "the
superannuated bard" did not take offence at the advice to turn his works
into prose, and there is no reason to doubt the contemporaneous report
that his anger arose from discovering that Pope, while professing
unlimited friendship, had made him the subject of some satirical verses.
[239] This picture was taken to himself by John Dennis, a furious old
critic by profession, who, upon no other provocation, wrote against this
Essay and its author in a manner perfectly lunatic: for, as to the
mention made of him in ver. 270, he took it as a compliment, and said it
was treacherously meant to cause him to overlook this abuse of his
person.--POPE.
Pope's acrimonious note on his early antagonist first appeared in the
edition of 1743, when Dennis had been some years dead. "His book against
me," the poet wrote to Caryll, Nov. 19, 1712, "made me very heartily
merry in two minutes' time," and here we find him still smarting with
resentment after thirty years and upwards had gone by, and his enemy was
in the grave. The original reading in the manuscript of ver. 585 was
"But D---- reddens." The substituted name is taken from Dennis's tragedy
of "Appius and Virginia," which appeared in 1709. The stare was one of
his characteristics. "He starts, stares, and looks round him at every
jerk of his person forward," says Sir Richard Steele, when describing
his walk. The "tremendous" was not only a sarcasm on his appearance, but
on his partiality for the epithet, which was an old topic of ridicule.
"If," said Gildon, in 1702, "there is anything of tragedy in the piece,
it lies in the word 'tremendous,' for he is so fond of it he had rather
use it in every page than slay his beloved Iphigenia." Gay, in 1712,
jeeringly dedicated his Mohocks to Mr. D[ennis], and assigned, among the
reasons for the selection, that his theme was "horrid and tremendous."
[240] This thought occurs also in Donne's fourth Satire, which our poet
has modernised:
And though his face be as ill
As theirs, which in old hangings whip Christ, still
He strives to look worse.--WAKEFIELD.
[241] It may not be known to every reader that noblemen and the sons of
noblemen are admitted of course at our universities to the degree of
M.A., after keeping the terms of two years.--WAKEFIELD.
The privilege is now abolished.
[242] If Cibber was the dull fellow Pope would have had him thought, no
conduct could have been more proper towards him than that which Pope
here recommends. Pope seems to have anticipated Colley's subsequent
resolution "to write as long" as Pope "could rail."--BOWLES.
[243] Duke of Buckingham's Essay on Satire,
But who can rail so long as he can sleep?
[244] Pope may have derived this comparison from the "Epilogue, written
by a person of honour," to Dryden's Secret Love:
But t'other day I heard this rhyming fop
Say critics were the whips, and he the top:
For as a top spins best the more you baste her,
So ev'ry lash you give, he writes the faster,
The author of the Epilogue was more exact than Pope, whose application
of the simile is inaccurate, for the top is in full spin when it is
popularly said to be asleep.
[245] Dryden's Aurengzebe:
The dregs and droppings of enervate love.--STEEVENS.
It has been suggested that he alludes to Wycherley.--WARTON.
Whom else could the lines suit at that period, when Pope says, "Such
bards we _have_?" If Wycherley was intended, what must we think of Pope,
who could wound, in this manner, his old friend, for whom he professed
so much kindness, and who first introduced him to notice and
patronage.--BOWLES.
The application was too obvious for Pope to have ventured on the lines
unless he had designed to expose his former ally. The original reading
of ver. 610 in the manuscript was,
But if incorrigible bards we view,
Know there are mad, &c.
And the alteration turned an unappropriated description into a
particular censure on living men. Wycherley would be the last person to
detect the likeness, and relaxing, some months after the Essay appeared,
in his indignation against Pope, "he praised the poem," according to a
letter of Cromwell, dated Oct. 26, 1711, but which rests on the
authority of Pope alone.
[246] In allusion to this class of pedants Gray said, "Learning never
should be encouraged; it only draws out fools from their obscurity."
[247] A common slander at that time in prejudice of that deserving
author. Our poet did him this justice, when that slander most prevailed;
and it is now (perhaps the sooner for this very verse) dead and
forgotten.--POPE.
The accusation from which he defended Garth was brought against Pope
himself. "This poem," says Johnson, of Cooper's Hill, "had such
reputation as to excite the common artifice by which envy degrades
excellence. A report was spread that the performance was not Denham's
own, but that he had bought it of a vicar for forty pounds. The same
attempt was made to rob Addison of his Cato and Pope of his Essay on
Criticism." The story told was that Wycherley sent the Essay to Pope for
his revision, and that Pope published it as his own. Authors are not the
only persons who are exposed to such calumnies. The victories of a great
general are almost invariably imputed to some subordinate officer, and
it was long a favourite theory of the malignant that Napoleon owed his
successes to Berthier, and the Duke of Wellington to Sir George Murray.
[248] There is an ellipse of "that" after "sacred," and of "it" after
"fops," or the line is not English, and when the omitted words are
supplied the inversion is intolerable.
[249] The propriety of the specification in this proverbial remark is
founded on a circumstance no longer existing in our poet's time, and
derived, therefore, by him from older writers. "In the reigns of James
I. and Charles I.," says Pennant, "the body of St. Paul's cathedral was
the common resort of the politicians, the newsmongers, and the idle in
general. It was called Paul's Walk, and the frequenters known by the
name of Paul's walkers."--WAKEFIELD.
[250] Between this and ver. 624--
In vain you shrug and sweat and strive to fly:
These know no manners but in poetry.
They'll stop a hungry chaplain in his grace,
To treat of unities of time and place.--POPE.
[251] This stroke of satire is literally taken from Boileau:
Gardez-vous d'imiter ce rimeur furieux,
Qui, de ses vains écrits, lecteur harmonieux,
Aborde en récitant quiconque le salue,
Et poursuit de ses vers les passants dans la rue.
Il n'est temple si saint, des anges respecté,
Qui soit contre sa muse un lieu de sûreté.
Which lines allude to the impertinence of a French poet called Du
Perrier, who finding Boileau one day at church, insisted upon repeating
to him an ode during the elevation of the host.--WARTON.
Boileau tells the incident of an individual poetaster. Pope generalises
the exceptional trait, and represents it to have been the usual practice
of foppish critics to talk criticism at the altar. The probability is
that he had never known an instance. The line "For fools rush in," is
certainly fashioned, says Bishop Hurd, on Shakespeare, Richard iii. Act
1, Sc. 3:
Wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.
[252] Virgil, Geo. iv. 194:
Excursusque breves tentant.
Nor forage far, but short excursions make. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.
[253] "Humanly" is improperly put for humanely. The only authorised
sense of the former is belonging to man; of the latter, kindly,
compassionately.--DR. GEORGE CAMPBELL.
[254] "Love to praise" means "a love of bestowing praise," but, as
Wakefield says, it is an "obscure expression, and repugnant to usage."
[255] This is followed by two additional lines in the manuscript:
Such did of old poetic laws impart,
And what till then was fury turned to art.
[256] Between ver. 646 and 647, I have found the following lines, since
suppressed by the author:
That bold Columbus of the realms of wit,
Whose first discovery's not exceeded yet.
Led by the light of the Mæonian star,
He steered securely, and discovered far.
He, when all nature was subdued before,
Like his great pupil, sighed and longed for more;
Fancy's wild regions yet unvanquished lay,
A boundless empire, and that owned no sway.
Poets, &c.--WARBURTON.
[257] Dr. Knightly Chetwood to Lord Roscommon:
Hoist sail, bold writers! search, discover far;
You have a compass for a polar star.--WAKEFIELD.
[258] After ver. 648, in the first edition, came this couplet:
Not only nature did his laws obey,
But fancy's boundless empire owned his sway.
Dennis denied that nature obeyed the laws of Aristotle. "The laws of
nature," he said, "are unalterable but by God himself." Pope's language
is inaccurate.
[259] The obvious interpretation of this passage would be that poets,
Homer excepted, indulged in "savage liberty" till they were restrained
by the laws of Aristotle, which is inconsistent with ver. 92-99, where
Pope says that the Greek critics framed their laws from the practice of
the poets.
[260] He presided over wit by his Rhetoric and Poetics, and gave proofs
by his Physics that he had "conquered nature." Pope's panegyric on the
dominion exercised by Aristotle is far inferior to Dryden's celebration
of the deliverance from it.
The longest tyranny that ever swayed
Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed
Their free-born reason to the Stagyrite,
And made his torch their universal light.
Had we still paid that homage to a name,
Which only God and nature justly claim,
The western seas had been our utmost bound,
Where poets still might dream the sun was drowned,
And all the stars that shine in southern skies
Had been admired by none but savage eyes.
[261] Oldham--
Each strain a graceful negligence does wear.--WAKEFIELD.
[262] "Before he goes ten lines further," said Dennis, "he forgets
himself, and commends Longinus for the very contrary quality for which
he commended Horace. He commends Horace for judging coolly in verse, and
extols Longinus for criticising with fire in prose." With very little
faith in the traits he had ascribed to Horace, Pope was tempted in the
manuscript to reverse the characteristic, and write
He judged with spirit as he sung with fire.
He subsequently affixed to the original reading the note, "Not to be
altered. Horace judged with coolness as Longinus with fire."
[263] Dennis notices that this couplet is borrowed from Roscommon's
Essay on Translated Verse:
Thus make the proper use of each extreme,
And write with fury, but correct with phlegm.
[264] In all Pope's works there cannot be found a couplet so paltry and
impertinent as this.--WAKEFIELD.
The construction of the last line is deplorably faulty. "Horace does not
suffer more by wits than he suffers by critics" is Pope's meaning, but
interpreted by his language, he would be read as asserting that Horace
did not suffer more by wrong translations than critics suffered by wrong
quotations.
[265] Dionysius of Halicarnassus.--POPE.
These prosaic lines, this spiritless eulogy, are much below the merit of
the critic whom they are intended to celebrate.--WARTON.
A most meagre account of a very excellent and judicious critic. But what
can we expect when men overstep the limit of their enquiries, and rush
in where learning has not authorised them to tread.--WAKEFIELD.
The lines first appeared in the second edition. In a pretended letter to
Addison, dated October 10, 1714, Pope speaks of having found a
particular remark in one of the treatises of the Greek critic, but he
had probably never looked into the original when this couplet was
written, and seems to have falsely inferred from chance quotations that
the comments upon Homer were the special characteristic of the works of
Dionysius. Pope was indebted for the leading phrase in his couplet to a
passage of Rochester, quoted by Wakefield:
Compare each phrase, examine ev'ry line,
Weigh ev'ry word, and ev'ry thought refine.
[266] This dissolute and effeminate writer little deserved a place among
good critics for only two or three pages on the subject of
criticism.--WARTON.
It is to be suspected that Pope had never read Petronius, and mentioned
him on the credit of two or three sentences which he had often seen
quoted, imagining that where there was so much, there must necessarily
be more. Young men, in haste to be renowned, too frequently talk of
books which they have scarcely seen.--JOHNSON.
If Pope had been acquainted with the general tenor of the fragments
which remain of Petronius, he would not have celebrated the most corrupt
and disgusting writer of antiquity for an unalloyed combination of
charming qualities.
[267] To commend Quintilian barely for his method, and to insist merely
on this excellence, is below the merit of one of the most rational and
elegant of Roman writers. Considering the nature of Quintilian's
subject, he afforded copious matter for a more appropriate and poetical
character. No author ever adorned a scientifical treatise with so many
beautiful metaphors.--WARTON.
[268] In the early editions,
Nor thus alone the curious eye to please,
But to be found, when need requires, with ease.
[269]
The Muses sure Longinus did inspire.--POPE.
The taste and sensibility of Longinus were exquisite; but his
observations are too general, and his method too loose. The precision of
the true philosophical critic is lost in the declamation of the florid
rhetorician. Instead of showing for what reason a sentiment or image is
sublime, and discovering the secret power by which they affect a reader
with pleasure, he is ever intent on producing something sublime himself,
and strokes of his own eloquence.--WARTON.
[270] This verse is ungrammatical. With respect to the thought, Boileau,
whose translation of Longinus our poet had most probably read, has said,
in his preface to that work, exactly the same thing: "Souvent il fait la
figure qu'il enseigne; et, en parlant du sublime, il est lui-même
très-sublime." Pope's couplet seems indebted also to the Prologue of
Dryden's Tempest, speaking of Shakespeare:
He, monarch-like, gave those his subjects law;
And is that nature, which they paint and draw.--WAKEFIELD.
Wakefield calls ver. 680 "ungrammatical," because, literally construed,
it reads, "And whose own example is himself, etc."
[271] "Felt" is a flat, insipid word in this place.--WAKEFIELD.
[272] "Rome," as invariably pronounced by Pope's contemporaries had the
same sound with "doom," and the pronunciation is not quite obsolete in
our own time among persons who were born in the last century. In the
previous part of the poem he had made Rome rhyme to "dome," which itself
was often pronounced like "doom."
[273] "The superstition of some ages after the subversion of the Roman
Empire," wrote Pope to Caryll, July 19, 1711, "is too manifest a truth
to be denied, and does in no sort reflect upon the present catholics,
who are free from it. Our silence on these points may, with some reason,
make our adversaries think we allow and persist in those bigotries,
which in reality all good and sensible men despise, though they are
persuaded not to speak against them." Most of Pope's associates were men
of letters or men of the world, and he could know little of the spirit
of the church to which he nominally belonged, when he was simple enough
to believe that the Romanists of his day would sanction a sweeping
denunciation of the ignorance and superstition of the monks.
[274]
All was believed, but nothing understood.--POPE.
[275] Between ver. 690 and 691, the author omitted these two:
Vain wits and critics were no more allowed,
When none but saints had licence to be proud.--POPE.
[276] Here he forms the tenses wrong.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope told Caryll that he did not speak in this couplet "of learning in
general, but of polite learning,--criticism, poetry, etc.--which was the
only learning concerned in the subject of the Essay." He at the same
time confessed his belief that the learning which the monks possessed
"was barely kept alive by them." The explanation would not contribute to
conciliate the offended catholics.
[277] The "glory" from his own greatness, the "shame" from the rancour
with which some of his brother priests assailed him.--CROKER.
Oldham in his Satire:
On Butler, who can think without just rage,
The glory and the scandal of the age.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope avowed his conviction to Caryll that the priests had openly accused
him of heterodoxy in other passages of his poem, because they were
secretly exasperated at his eulogy upon Erasmus. "What in their own
opinion," he said, "they are really angry at is that a man whom their
tribe oppressed and persecuted should be vindicated after a whole age of
obloquy by one of their own people, who is free and bold enough to utter
a generous truth in behalf of the dead, whom no man sure will flatter,
and few do justice to."
[278] If the restoration of learning consisted in recovering the works
and reviving the spirit of the ancients, it had been in a great degree
accomplished before the time of Erasmus.--ROSCOE.
[279] Genius is here personified, and this person is said by Pope to
have been "spread over the ruins of Rome." The poet has evidently mixed
up genius considered as a quality of the remains of antiquity with
genius considered as a presiding being.
[280] For the expression in the last half of this verse, Wakefield
quotes Addison on sculpture in the letter from Italy,
Or teach their animated rocks to live.
And for the expression in the first half, he quotes Dryden's Religio
Laici:
Or various atoms, interfering dance,
Leaped into form.
Wakefield ascribes the origin of the phrase to the fable that the stones
of Thebes moved into their places at the music of Amphion, and it is
thus used by Waller in his poem upon his Majesty's Repairing of St.
Paul's:
He like Amphion makes those quarries leap
Into fair figures from a confused heap.
[281] Leo was not only an admirer of music, but a skilful performer, and
we are informed by Pietro Aaron that "though he had acquired a
consummate knowledge in most arts and sciences, he seemed to love,
encourage, and exalt music more than any other." To sacred music he paid
a more particular attention, and sought throughout Europe for the most
celebrated performers, both vocal and instrumental.--ROSCOE.
[282] M. Hieronymus Vida, an excellent Latin poet, who writ an Art of
Poetry in verse. He flourished in the time of Leo X.--POPE.
But Vida was by no means the most celebrated poet that adorned the age
of Leo X. His merits seem not to have been particularly attended to in
England till Pope had bestowed this commendation upon him, although the
Poetics had been correctly published at Oxford by Basil Kennet some time
before. They are perhaps the most perfect of his compositions; they are
excellently translated by Pitt.--WARTON.
[283] "The ancients," says the writer of the Supplement to the Profound,
"always gave ivy to the poets, as may appear from numberless places in
the classics, nor was it ever applied to patrons or critics, in
contradistinction to poets, by any but this ingenious author."
[284] Alluding to
"Mantua, væ miseræ, nimium vicina Cremonæ." Virg.--WARBURTON.
This application is made in Kennet's edition of Vida.--WARTON.
To say that the birth-place of Vida would be next in fame to the
birth-place of Virgil was to rank him before all the other poets that
Italy had produced--before Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, and Ariosto. The
antithesis is marred by its want of truth.
[285] This, Warburton says, refers to the sack of Rome by the Duke of
Bourbon, which Pope assumed had driven poetry out of Italy. The assigned
cause is inadequate to account for the effect.
[286] The "born to serve" is a sarcasm on the readiness with which the
French submitted to the despotism of Louis XIV.
[287] May I be pardoned for declaring it as my opinion, that Boileau's
is the best Art of Poetry extant? The brevity of his precepts, the
justness of his metaphors, the harmony of his numbers, as far as
Alexandrine lines will admit, the exactness of his method, the
perspicacity of his remarks, and the energy of his style, all duly
considered, may render this opinion not unreasonable. It is scarcely to
be conceived, how much is comprehended in four short cantos. He that has
well digested these, cannot be said to be ignorant of any important rule
of poetry.--WARTON.
Boileau is said by Pope to sway in right of Horace because the Frenchman
avowed that he based his Art of Poetry on that of the Roman. The English
poet has been indebted to both.
[288] The comparison fails. The Romans of old subdued the Britons, and
ruled over them for centuries.
[289] Essay on Poetry, by the Duke of Buckingham. Our poet is not the
only one of his time who complimented this Essay and its noble author.
Mr. Dryden had done it very largely in the Dedication to his Translation
of the Æneid; and Dr. Garth, in the first edition of his Dispensary,
says:
The Tyber now no courtly Gallus sees,
But smiling Thames enjoys his Normanbys;
though afterwards omitted, when parties were carried so high in the
reign of Queen Anne, as to allow no commendation to an opposite in
politics. The duke was all his life a steady adherent to the church of
England party, yet an enemy to the extravagant measures of the court in
the reign of Charles II. On which account, after having strongly
patronized Mr. Dryden, a coolness succeeded between them on that poet's
absolute attachment to the court, which carried him some length beyond
what the duke could approve of. This nobleman's true character had been
very well marked by Mr. Dryden before:
The muse's friend,
Himself a muse. In Sanadrin's debate
True to his prince, but not a slave of state.
Abs. and Achit.
Our author was more happy; he was honoured very young with his
friendship, and it continued till his death in all the circumstances of
a familiar esteem.--POPE.
The Duke of Buckingham, in his Essay, has followed the method of
Boileau, in discoursing on the various species of poetry in their
different gradations, to no other purpose than to manifest his own
inferiority. His reputation was owing to his rank. In reading his poems
one is apt to exclaim with our author, "What woeful stuff this madrigal
would be," &c.--WARTON.
Pope must have been well aware that, amongst all the poetic triflers of
the day, there was not one more ripe for the Dunciad. The fact, I fear,
is that Pope admired him, in spite of his verses, as a man rich and
prosperous.--DE QUINCEY.
The couplet in which the duke is mentioned was first inserted in the
quarto of 1717, and the note on him in the edition of 1743. In the
original manuscript Pope had made the same character serve for him and
Lord Roscommon:
Such learn'd and modest, not more great than good,
With manners gen'rous as his noble blood,
E'er saints impatient snatched him to the sky,
Roscommon was, and such is Normanby.
[290] An Essay on translated Verse seems, at first sight, to be a barren
subject; yet Roscommon has decorated it with many precepts of utility
and taste. It is indisputably better written, in a closer and more
vigorous style, than the last-mentioned essay.--WARTON.
When Warton wrote, some traditional reputation still lingered round the
poems of Roscommon. His feeble platitudes are now forgotten.
[291] Rochester's Poems:
to her was known
Every one's fault or merit but her own.--CUNNINGHAM.
[292] Walsh was in general a flimsy and frigid writer. The Rambler calls
his works pages of inanity. His three letters to Pope, however, are well
written. His remarks on the nature of pastoral poetry, on borrowing from
the ancients, and against florid conceits, are worthy perusal.--WARTON.
In the manuscript, the eulogy on Walsh was at first somewhat different:
Such late was Walsh--nor can'st thou, Muse, offend,
Next these to name the Muse's judge and friend;
Who free from envious censure, partial praise,
Showed ancient candour in malicious days
To frailties mild, &c.
The Muse did offend notwithstanding. After speaking of the irritation he
excited by his commendations of Erasmus, Pope thus continued in his
letter to Caryll of July 19, 1711:--"Others, you know, were as angry
that I mentioned Mr. Walsh with honour, who as he never refused to any
one of merit of any party the praise due to him, so honestly deserved it
from all others of never so different interests or sentiments." The
objections seem to have come from the Roman Catholics, and to have been
made on religious or political grounds, from which it may be inferred
that Walsh was an active opponent of the exiled family. Neither the
laudation of Dryden, who said he was "the best critic of our nation,"
nor the poetical tribute of Pope, could do more than preserve the bare
name of an author whose literary qualifications were of the most trivial
kind. Dennis, who was acquainted with him, and who admits that he was an
indifferent poet, adds that "he was learned, candid and judicious, and a
man of a very good understanding in spite of his being a beau." He was a
country gentlemen of fortune, and a member of parliament, which were the
principal circumstances that conferred lustre upon his small talents in
the eyes of the wits.
[293] Pope fell into the prevalent vice of uttering extravagant,
insincere compliments; for it is impossible to believe that he "no more
attempted to rise" in verse because he had lost the guidance of Walsh.
The guide had not done much towards directing Pope's flight, and
"teaching him to sing." The Pastorals were his only work, antecedent to
the Essay on Criticism, which had a nominal originality, and three of
these Pastorals were written before he and Walsh were acquainted.
[294] The hint for the first verse in this couplet seems to have been
supplied by Dryden's conclusion of the Religio Laici:
Yet neither praise expect, nor censure fear.
The second verse of the couplet seems to be an adaptation of a line in
Prior's Henry and Emma:
Joyful to live yet not afraid to die.
[295] These concluding lines bear a great resemblance to Boileau's
conclusion of his Art of Poetry, but are perhaps superior:
Censeur un peu fâcheux, mais souvent nécessaire;
Plus enclin à blâmer, que savant à bien faire.--WARTON.
[296] By Bishop Hurd.
[297] Warburton's remarks on the quotation from Addison's paper in the
Spectator, originally ran thus: "Whereas nothing can be more unlike, in
this respect, than these two poems--the Essay on Criticism having, as we
shall show, all the regularity that method can demand, and the Art of
Poetry all the looseness and inconnection that a familiar conversation
would indulge. Neither, were it otherwise, would this excellent author's
observation excuse our poet, who, writing in the formal way of a
discourse, was obliged to observe the method of such compositions, while
Horace in an easy epistle needed no apology for want of it. For it is
the nature of the composition that makes method proper or unnecessary."
The passage was altered out of compliment to the commentary of his
friend Hurd on the Art of Poetry, and Warburton, who had previously
contended that method was needless in Horace, now maintained that there
was no "prerogative in verse to dispense with regularity." It was common
with him to regulate his critical opinions by his personal partialities
or aversions.
[298] The author of this work, in which some of Warburton's opinions
were attacked, was John Gilbert Cooper. He was a vain man, with a slight
tincture of learning, and very small abilities. Burke called him an
insufferable coxcomb.
[299] Upton published Critical Observations upon Shakespeare, and says
that he offended Warburton by omitting to mention him. After Warburton
had attacked him Upton retaliated.
[300] When Warburton published his Shakespeare in 1747, Edwards exposed,
in his Canons of Criticism, the dogmatism and absurdity of many of the
comments and conjectures. His book was unanswerable, and Warburton was
reduced to display his spleen in such sneers as the present.
[301] The work which Warburton vaunts as the only honest piece of modern
criticism, was by his friend and flatterer Hurd. Personal partiality
might excuse the undue exaltation of a feeble production, but is no
apology for calumniating men who were quite as candid and far more able.
[302] The objector was Warton. He justly intimated that the character
which Pope had given of Petronius, conveyed an erroneous idea of the
nature of his writings.
[303] Dennis's Remarks on the Rape of the Lock were written in 1714, and
published in 1728. "To cure the little gentleman of his wretched
conceitedness, by giving him a view of his ignorance, his folly, and his
natural impotence," Dennis, in 1717, brought out a critical pamphlet on
three of his works, and kept back the exposure of the Rape of the Lock
"_in terrorem_, which had so good an effect, that the author endeavoured
for a time to counterfeit humility, and a sincere repentance, but no
sooner did he believe that time had caused these things to be forgot,
than he relapsed into ten times the folly and the madness that ever he
had shown before." The fresh provocation was the Dunciad, and the
treatise on the Profound, and poor Dennis printed his awe-inspiring
Remarks on the Rape of the Lock, to give "the little gentleman" another
lesson in humility.
[304] Joseph Warton.
[305] In his Observations on the Poetic character of Pope, Bowles
reiterates that the Rape of the Lock is "a composition to which it will
be in vain to compare anything of the kind,--that it stands alone,
unrivalled, and possibly never to be rivalled." "The Muse," he adds,
"has no longer her great characteristic attributes, pathos or sublimity;
but she appears so interesting that we almost doubt whether the garb of
elegant refinement is not as captivating, as the most beautiful
appearances of nature."
[306] "The small edition of Pope," writes Warburton to Hurd, June 30,
1753, "is the correctest of all; and I was willing you should always see
the best of me." Warburton refers to his 12mo. ed. 1753, and in this
corrected edition Pope's initial is omitted.
[307] Rape of the Lock, cant. i. ver. 3; Singer's Spence, p. 147.
[308] Johnson's Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, vol. iii., p. 19;
Boswell's Life of Johnson, I vol. ed., p. 462. Johnson's conversation
with the Abbess took place in 1775. "She knew Pope, and thought him
disagreeable."
[309] Warburton's Pope, ed. 1760, vol. iv. p. 27.
[310] Pope's Poetical Works, ed. Elwin, vol. i. p. 327. Pope told Spence
that he gave the advice, but this was a false pretence. He may have had
a two-fold motive for the misrepresentation,--first, the wish to exalt
his critical perspicacity, since it was then acknowledged that Cato was
unfitted for the stage, and had owed its success to party passion;
secondly, the desire of appearing to have adopted a manly tone towards
Addison in the infancy of their acquaintance.
[311] Macaulay's Essays, 1 vol. ed., p. 717.
[312] "In mock heroic poems," said Addison, Spectator, No. 523, "the use
of the heathen mythology is not only excusable but graceful, because it
is the design of such compositions to divert by adapting the fabulous
machines of the ancients to low subjects, and at the same time by
ridiculing such kinds of machinery in modern writers." Pope's projected
machinery was not to be burlesque, and did not come under Addison's
exception.
[313] Warburton's Pope, vol. iv. p. 26.
[314] Dennis's Remarks on Pope's Rape of the Lock, preface, p. ix.;
Dennis's Remarks upon the Dunciad, p. 41; Pope's Correspondence, ed.
Elwin, vol. i. p. 398, note.
[315] Pope's Correspondence, vol. i. p. 400. The disclaimer of Addison
is in a letter which he directed Steele to write to Lintot. Steele says
that the pamphlet "was offered to be communicated" to Addison before it
was published, and Dennis concluded that the offer came from Pope. It
doubtless came from the bookseller, for Pope was anxious to preserve his
incognito. He assured Cromwell and Caryll, that he was not the author,
and to have avowed the satire would have betrayed his double-dealing to
Lintot, and proclaimed to the public that the rancour towards Dennis was
dictated by revenge. When the Narrative of Dennis's Frenzy was offered
to Addison, he answered, that "he could not in honour and conscience be
privy to such treatment, and was sorry to hear of it." If this reply was
communicated to Pope, zeal for Addison could not be the motive for
persevering in a publication which was thoroughly distasteful to him,
let alone the absurdity of the supposition that Addison's interests
could have weighed with the person who had instigated the attack.
Accordingly, Pope in his pamphlet scoffed at Dennis, but did not reply
to his criticisms upon Cato.
[316] Pope's Correspondence, vol. i. p. 398.
[317] Spence, p. 35.
[318] Spence, p. 178.
[319] De Quincey's Works, vol. vii. p. 66; xv. p. 98.
[320] De Quincey's Works, vol. xv. p. 116.
[321] Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets, 3rd ed., p. 140.
[322] Remarks on Mr. Pope's Rape of the Lock, p. 27.
[323] Ruffhead's Life of Pope, p. 113.
[324] Dennis's Remarks, p. 24.
[325] Dennis's Remarks, p. 40.
[326] Dennis's Remarks, p. 8, 9.
[327] A fragment of Pope's writing has been cut away by the binder, and
the words in brackets are conjectural.
[328] Dennis's Remarks, Preface, p. v. vii.
[329] Memoirs of Wordsworth, vol. ii. p. 221.
[330] Cowper's Works, ed. Southey, 1854, vol. i. p. 313.
[331] Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, ed. 1847, vol. i. p. 39.
[332] Cowper's Works, vol. ii. p. 399.
[333] Dennis's Remarks, p. 33, 47.
[334] Lives of the Poets, vol. i. p. 74.
[335] Historical Rhapsody on Mr. Pope, 2nd ed., p. 89.
[336] Lectures on the British Poets, by Henry Reed. Philadelphia, 1857,
vol. i. p. 314.
[337] De Quincey's Works, vol. xii. p. 17.
[338] Midsummer Night's Dream, Act ii. sc. 1.
[339] Moore's Life of Byron, 1 vol. ed., p. 695.
[340] Bowles's Pope, vol. x. p. 364.
[341] Moore's Life of Byron, p. 696.
[342] Bowles's Pope, vol. x. p. 363; Bowles's Letters to Campbell, 2nd
ed., p. 22
[343] Campbell's Specimens of British Poets, 1 vol. ed., p. lxxxvii.
[344] Moore's Life of Byron, p. 693.
[345] Moore's Life of Byron, p. 693.
[346] Lectures on the English Poets, p. 389.
[347] Moore's Life of Byron, p. 694.
[348] Moore's Life of Byron, p. 697.
[349] Bowles's Pope, vol. x. p. 371.
[350] Warburton's Pope, vol. iv. p. 16.
[351] Warton's Essay on the Genius of Pope, 5th ed., vol. ii. p. 404;
Bowles's Letters to T. Campbell, 2nd ed., p. 28.
[352] Johnson's Lives of the Poets, vol. iii. p. 116; Cowper to Unwin,
Jan. 5, 1782.
[353] Johnson's Lives of the Poets, vol. iii. p. 137; Hazlitt's Lectures
on the English Poets, p. 133.
[354] Byron's Works, 1 vol. ed., p. 804.
[355] Memoirs of Wordsworth, vol. ii. p. 215, 225, 470.
[356] Lectures on the English Poets, p. 137.
[357] Pope's Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 4.
[358] Prologue to the Satires, ver. 28, 342; Essay on Man, Ep. i. ver.
16.
[359] Hurd's Horace, 5th ed., vol. iii. p. 148.
[360] Memoirs of Wordsworth, vol. i. p. 339, 342.
[361] The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, chap. 3.
[362] Advancement of Learning, ed. Montagu, p. 127. A sentence from the
passage is quoted by Hurd, who concludes that "pleasure in the idea of
Lord Bacon is the ultimate and appropriate end of poetry." Hurd could
not have looked into the original, and must have been deceived by
trusting to second-hand extracts.
[363] Advancement of Learning, p. 127.
[364] The Recluse, Book v.
[365] The title of Mrs. continued in Pope's early time to be applied
indifferently to all grown up ladies, whether married or single. The
contracted form Miss was appropriated to young girls and women of loose
character.
[366] Pope never, I think, is so unsuccessful as when he is writing to
the ladies. He talks of the impropriety of using hard words before a
lady. He must bring "her acquainted with the Rosicrucians," and explain
what is meant by "machinery." This is done with such an air of conceited
superiority, and of affected condescension, that it appears to me as
pedantic as the pedantry he pretended to despise. The latter part of the
epistle is certainly urbane, elegant and unaffected.--BOWLES.
[367] C---- or C----l in all the impressions which appeared in Pope's
lifetime. "In this more solemn edition," Pope wrote to Caryll, Feb. 25,
1714, when the poem was about to be published in its enlarged shape, "I
was strangely tempted to have set your name at length, as well as I have
my own; but I remembered the desire you formerly expressed to the
contrary, besides that it may better become me to appear as the offerer
of an ill present, than you as the receiver of it."
[368] Roscommon in his Essay:
Or Gallus song, so tender and so true,
As e'en Lycoris might with pity view.--WAKEFIELD.
[369] This is formed from Virgil, Geor. iv. 6. Sedley's version of the
passage imitated:
The subject's humble, but not so the praise,
If any muse assists the poet's lays.
Dryden's Translation:
Slight is the subject, but the praise not small
If heav'n assist, and Phœbus hear my call.--WAKEFIELD.
[370] "_Compel_," says Dennis, "is a botch for the sake of the rhyme.
The word that should naturally have been used was either _induce_ or
_provoke_." _Impel_ would have fitted both the rhyme and the sense.
[371] "Belinda was Mrs. Arabella Fermor; the Baron was Lord Petre, of
small stature, who soon after married a great heiress, Mrs. Warmsley,
and died, leaving a posthumous son; Thalestris was Mrs. Morley; Sir
Plume was her brother, Sir George Brown, of Berkshire." Copied from a
MS. in a book presented by R. Lord Burlington, to Mr. William
Sherwin.--WARTON.
All these persons were Roman Catholics. The marriage of Lord Petre to
Miss Warmsley took place in March, 1712, and he died the year after in
March, 1713, at the age of 22. Miss Fermor married Mr. Perkins, of Ufton
Court, near Reading, in 1714. Her husband died in 1736, and she herself
in 1738.--CROKER.
[372] This passage is a palpable imitation of the exordium of the Æneis,
and particularly the last line.
----tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ?
And dwell such passions in cœlestial minds?--WAKEFIELD.
It was in the first editions:
And dwells such rage in softest bosoms then,
And lodge such daring souls in little men?--POPE.
The second line of the rejected reading was from Addison's translation
of the fourth Georgic:
Their little bodies lodge a mighty soul.
Pope probably altered the couplet in consequence of an objection of the
author of the Supplement to the Profound, who remarked upon the mean
effect which resulted from throwing the rhyme upon "then;" "for the
rhyme," says Dr. Trapp, "draws out the sound of little and ignoble
words, and makes them observed."
[373] By _timorous_ I understand _feeble_, from the medium through which
it passed.--WAKEFIELD.
[374] Verse 13, &c., stood thus in the first edition:
Sol through white curtains did his beams display,
And ope'd those eyes which brighter shine than they:
Shock just had giv'n himself the rousing shake,
And nymphs prepared their chocolate to take;
Thrice the wrought slipper knocked against the ground,
And striking watches the tenth hour resound.--POPE.
[375] Belinda rung a hand-bell, which not being answered, she knocked
with her slipper. Bell-hanging was not introduced into our domestic
apartments till long after the date of the Rape of the Lock. There are
no bells at Hampton Court, nor were there any in the first quarter of
the present century at Chatsworth and Holkham. I myself, about the year
1790, remember that it was still the practice for ladies to summon their
attendants to their bedchambers by knocking with a high-heeled shoe.
Servants, too, were accustomed to wait in ante-rooms, whence they were
summoned by hand-bells, and this explains the extraordinary number of
such rooms in the houses of the last century.--CROKER.
[376] All the verses from hence to the end of this canto were added
afterwards.--POPE.
And, as Mr. Croker observes, Pope, in adding them, did not perceive that
he introduced an inconsistency. At ver. 14 Belinda is represented as
waking, and at ver. 20 we have her still sleeping.
[377] The frequenters of the court appeared in clothes of unusual
splendour on the birth-day of King, Queen, Prince or Princess of Wales.
There are innumerable allusions in the writings of the time to the
magnificence of the dresses at the birth-night balls.
[378] "The silver token" alludes to the silver pennies which fairies
were said to drop at night into the shoes of maids who kept the house
clean and tidy. "The circled green" refers to those rings of grass of a
deeper hue than the surrounding pasture, which were formerly believed to
be caused by the midnight dances "of airy elves." This was the lore
taught by the nurse. The priest infused the legends of "virgins visited
by angel-powers."--CROKER.
[379] The drive in Hyde Park is still called the ring, though the site
and shape have been changed.--CROKER.
The box at the theatre, and the ring in Hyde Park, are frequently
mentioned as the two principal places for the public display of beauty
and fashion. Thus Lord Dorset, in his lines on Lady Dorchester:
Wilt thou still sparkle in the box
Or ogle in the ring.
And Garth, in the Dispensary, speaking of a deceased young lady, says:
How lately did this celebrated thing
Blaze in the box, and sparkle in the ring.
[380] Epilogue to Dryden's Tyrannick Love:
For after death we sprites have just such natures
We had, for all the world, when human creatures.--STEEVENS.
[381]
Quæ gratia currûm
Armorumque fuit vivis, quæ cura nitentes
Pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure repostos.
Virg. Æneid, vi.--POPE.
To Dryden's version of which passage our poet was indebted:
The love of horses which they had alive,
And care of chariots, after death survive.--WAKEFIELD.
[382] Dryden, Æn. i. 196:
The realms of ocean and the fields of air.--WAKEFIELD.
In Le Comte de Gabalis the salamanders who dwelt in fire, the nymphs who
peopled the seas and rivers, the gnomes who filled the earth almost to
the centre, and the sylphs who in countless multitudes floated in the
air, are said to be formed of the purest portion of the elements they
respectively inhabit. But their moral and mental natures are not, as in
the Rape of the Lock, the counter-part of their corporeal qualities, and
they are a race of beings distinct from man, and not deceased mortals,
as with Pope, who was indebted for this circumstance to the account of
the fairy train in Dryden's Flower and Leaf:
And all those airy shapes you now behold
Were human bodies once, and clothed with earthly mould.
[383] The idea and the phraseology are both from Paradise Lost, i. 423:
For spirits when they please
Can either sex assume, or both....
... In what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their aery purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfill.
[384] Parody of Homer.--WARBURTON.
Dryden, Hind and Panther, 3rd part:
Immortal pow'rs the term of conscience know,
But int'rest is her name with men below.--HOLT WHITE.
[385] That is, too sensible of their beauty.--WARBURTON.
[386] The gnomes who prompt the disdain of the nymphs predestined to
disappointment.--CROKER.
[387]
Jam clypeus clypeis, umbone repellitur umbo.
Ense minax ensis, pede pes, et cuspide cuspis, &c.
Statius.--WARBURTON.
To drive a coach has an exclusive technical meaning, which renders
Pope's phrase improper for expressing that the thought of a second coach
obliterates from the minds of belles the thought of a previous coach.
[388] "Claim thy protection" signifies "I claim to be protected by
thee," whereas the sense here is, "I claim to protect thee."
[389] The language of the Platonists, the writers of the intelligible
world of Spirits, &c.--POPE.
[390] It cannot be that Belinda then saw for the first time a
billet-doux. The meaning no doubt is that a billet-doux was the first
thing she saw that morning.--CROKER.
[391] Evidently from Addison's Spectator, No. 69, May, 1711. "The single
dress of a woman of quality is often the product of an hundred climates.
The muff and the fan come together from the different ends of the earth.
The scarf is sent from the torrid zone, and the tippet from beneath the
pole. The brocade petticoat arises out of the mines of Peru, and the
diamond necklace out of the bowels of Indostan."--WARTON.
[392] Ancient traditions of the Rabbis relate, that several of the
fallen angels became amorous of women, and particularize some; among the
rest Asael, who lay with Naamah, the wife of Noah, or of Ham; and who,
continuing impenitent, still presides over the women's toilets. Bereshi
Rabbi, in Genes, vi. 2.--POPE.
[393] A comparison pressed too far loses its beauty in departing from
truth. When Pope makes Belinda equal, in the glory of her appearance, to
the sun,--"the rival of his beams" who was "of this great world both eye
and soul," he falls into an insipid hyperbole. When Chaucer, in his
Knight's Tale, says,
Up rose the sun, and up rose Emily,
everyone feels the matchless charm of the allusion.
[394] From hence the poem continues, in the first edition, to ver. 46:
"The rest, the winds dispersed in empty air;"
all after, to the end of this Canto, being additional.--POPE.
[395] Wakefield remarks, that this line is marred by the abbreviation,
_you'll_, and he suggests that a better reading would be,
Look on her face and _you_ forget them all.
[396] Sandys's Paraphrase of the Song of Solomon, 1641:
One hair of thine in fetters ties.
Buchanan, Epigram, lib. i. xiv.:
Et modo membra pilo vinctus miser abstrahoruno.--STEEVENS.
Dryden's Persius, v. 247:
She knows her man, and when you rant and swear,
Can draw you to her with a single hair.
[397] An imitation, or a translation rather, of Æneid, ii. 390:
----dolus, an virtus, quis in hoste requirat?--WAKEFIELD.
[398] Virgil, Æneid, xi. 798.--POPE.
Dryden's Translation:
Apollo heard, and granting half his pray'r,
Shuffled in winds the rest, and tossed in empty air.
So Dryden's version of Ceyx & Alcyone, Ovid. _Met._ x.:
This last petition heard of all her pray'r
The rest dispersed by winds were lost in air.--WAKEFIELD.
[399] Dryden, Æn. vii. 10:
the moon was bright
And the sea trembled with her silver light.--HOLT WHITE.
Pope, says Wakefield, has put "tides" in the plural "merely to
accommodate the rhyme." The tides are the ebb and the flow, and cannot
be applied to only one of the two.
[400] Dryden's Virgin Martyr:
And music dying in remoter sounds.--STEEVENS.
[401] A parody on the beginning of the second and tenth books of the
Iliad.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope's own translation of the commencement of the tenth book has a close
resemblance to the lines in the Rape of the Lock:
All night the chiefs before their vessels lay,
And lost in sleep the labours of the day:
All but the king; with various thoughts oppressed
His country's cares lay rolling in his breast.
[402] The gossamer, which is spun in autumn by a species of spider that
has the power of sailing in the air, was formerly supposed to be the
product of sun-burnt dew. Thus Spenser speaks of
----The fine nets which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew.
[403] Milton of the wings of Raphael, Par. Lost, v. 283:
And colours dipped in heav'n;
Sky-tinctured grain.--WAKEFIELD.
[404] The comets.
[405] "Did you ever," says Dennis, "hear before that the planets were
rolled by the _aerial_ kind?" and Pope writes on the margin "expressly
otherwise." He states that the "ethereal" kind are described down to
ver. 80, and that the "aerial kind" are the "less refined" beings who
dwell "beneath the moon." Clearly the distinction had not occurred to
him when he wrote the poem, for he calls both kinds "aerial" at ver. 76.
[406] In the first edition:
Hover, and catch the shooting stars by night.
Dryden's Flower and Leaf:
At other times we reign by night alone,
And posting through the skies pursue the moon.
[407] A compliment to Queen Anne, whom he lavishly commends in his
Windsor Forest.--WAKEFIELD.
The angel in Addison's Rosamond, Act 3, says,
In hours of peace, unseen, unknown
I hover o'er the British throne.
[408] Sir T. Browne, Relig. Med. Part I. 31; "I do think that many
mysteries ascribed to our own inventions have been the courteous
revelations of spirits; for those noble essences in heaven bear a
friendly regard unto their fellow natures on earth." The comparative
inferiority of Pope's mimic subject is strongly felt when we bring the
diminutive ideas into immediate contrast with their elevated originals.
[409] That is, her ear-drops set with brilliants.--WAKEFIELD.
[410] To crisp in our earlier writers is a common word for curl, from
the Latin _crispo_.--WAKEFIELD.
[411] "This," says Warburton, in a manuscript note, "was a fine stroke
of satire to insinuate that the lapdog is often the concern of the fair,
superior to all the charities, as Milton calls them, of parental
relation."
[412] Ovid, Met. xiii, 2: Clypei dominus _septemplicis_
Ajax.--WARBURTON.
Sandys's Translation:
Uprose the master of the seven-fold Shield.
[413] The hoop petticoat, in spite of the notion of Addison, that "a
touch of his pen would make it contract itself like the sensitive
plant," continued in fashion as an ordinary dress for upwards of
threescore years, and remained the court costume till the death of Queen
Charlotte.--CROKER.
[414] Many modern editions read _shrivelled_, but Pope took his epithet,
now obsolete, from Dryden's Flower and Leaf:
Then drooped the fading flow'rs, their beauty fled,
And rivelled up with heat, lay dying in their bed.--WAKEFIELD.
[415] Chocolate was made in a kind of mill.--CROKER.
[416] The anonymous translator of Ariadne to Theseus:
And trembling at the waves which roll below.--WAKEFIELD.
[417] The first edition continues from this line to ver. 24 of this
Canto.--POPE.
[418] The modern portion of Hampton Court, and the East and South
fronts, were built by William III., who frequently resided there. Queen
Anne only went there occasionally.--CROKER.
[419] Originally in the first edition,
In various talk the cheerful hours they passed,
Of who was bit, or who capotted last.--POPE.
When one party has won all the tricks of cards at picquet, he is said to
have _capotted_ his antagonist.--JOHNSON.
Dryden's Æn. vi. 720:
While thus in talk the flying hours they pass.
[420] Japan screens, as appears from the Spectator, were then the rage,
and in the Woman of Taste, 1733, we have the couplet,
Ne'er chuse a screen, and never touch a fan,
Till it has sailed from India or Japan.
[421] The snuff-box of the beau, and the fan of the woman of fashion,
are frequent subjects of ridicule in the Spectator. The fan was employed
to execute so many little coquettish manœuvres, that Addison ironically
proposed that ladies should be drilled in the use of it, as soldiers
were trained to the exercise of arms.
[422] The fifth Pastoral of A. Philips:
The sun now mounted to the noon of day
Began to shoot direct his burning ray.
[423] From Congreve.--WARTON.
A repulsive and unfounded couplet. Judges never sign sentences, and if a
juryman is in haste to dine it is at least as easy to acquit as to
condemn.--CROKER.
[424] Dryden's Æn. vii. 170:
And the long labours of your voyage end.--WAKEFIELD.
Owing to the change of fashion the particulars in the text no longer
serve to mark the time of the day. From Swift's Journal of a Modern
Lady, written in 1728, we learn that the fashionable dinner-hour, when
"the long labours of the toilet ceased," was four o'clock. Cards were
reserved for after tea; but the holiday-makers, who in the Rape of the
Lock, go by water to Hampton Court, are represented as playing from the
usual dinner-hour till coffee is brought in, which may have been a
common arrangement in these pleasure-parties.
[425] All that follows of the game at ombre, was added since the first
edition, till ver. 105, which connected thus,
Sudden the board with cups and spoons is crowned.--POPE.
[426] Ombre was invented in Spain, and owed its name to the phrase which
was to be used by the person who undertook to stand the game,--"_Yo soy
l'hombre_, I am the man." In the Rape of the Lock Belinda was the ombre,
and hence she is described as encountering singly her two antagonists.
[427] The game could be played with two, three, or five; but three was
the usual number, and nine cards were dealt to each.
[428] From the Spanish _matador_, a murderer, because the matadors in
ombre were the three best cards, and the slayers of all that came into
competition with them.
[429] Knave was the old term for a servant, and Wakefield remarks that
they are represented "in garbs succinct," because, among the ancients,
domestics, when at work, had their flowing robes gathered up to the
girdle about the waist.
[430] The ombre had the privilege of deciding which suit should be
trumps.
[431] The whole idea of this description of a game at ombre is taken
from Vida's description of a game at Chess in his poem intitled
_Scacchia Ludus_.--WARBURTON.
Pope not only borrowed the general conception of representing the game
under the guise of a battle, but he has imitated particular passages of
his Latin prototype. Vida's poem is a triumph of ingenuity, when the
intricacy of chess is considered, and the difficulty of expressing the
moves in a dead language. Yet the original is eclipsed by Pope's more
consummate copy.
[432] Spadillio is from _Espadilla_, the Spanish term for the ace of
spades; and _Basto_ is the Spanish name for the ace of clubs. Whatever
suit was trumps the ace of spades was the first card in power, and the
ace of clubs the third. Manillio, the second in power of the three
Matadores, varied with the trumps. When spades or clubs were trumps
Manillio was the two of trumps, and when hearts or diamonds were trumps
Manillio was the seven of trumps.
[433] Dryden's MacFlecknoe:
The hoary prince in majesty appeared.
[434] Pam, the highest card in loo, is the knave of clubs.
[435] These lines are a parody of several passages in
Virgil.--WAKEFIELD.
[436] Dryden's Æn. vi. 384:
Just in the gate, and in the jaws of hell.--WAKEFIELD.
If either of the antagonists made more tricks than the ombre, the winner
took the pool, and the ombre had to replace it for the next game. This
was called codille.
[437] Unless hearts were trumps the ace of hearts ranked after king,
queen, and knave.
[438] Dryden's Æn. xii. 1344:
With groans the Latins rend the vaulted sky,
Woods, hills, and valleys to the voice reply.
[439]
Nescia mens hominum fati sortisque futuræ;
Et servare modum, rebus sublata secundis!
Turno tempus erit magno cum optaverit emptum
Intactum Pallanta; et cum spolia ista diemque
Oderit. Virg.--WARBURTON.
Dryden's Translation, x. 698:
O mortals! blind of fate; who never know
To bear high fortune, or endure the low!
The time shall come, when Turnus, but in vain,
Shall wish untouched the trophies of the slain:
Shall wish the fatal belt were far away;
And curse the dire remembrance of the day.--WAKEFIELD.
[440] From hence the first edition continues to ver. 134.--POPE.
[441] Coffee it seems was then not only made but ground by the ladies,
and from the expression "the berries crackle" it might almost be
supposed that they roasted it also.--CROKER.
"There was a side-board of coffee," says Pope, in his letter describing
Swift's mode of life at Letcombe in 1714, "which the Dean roasted with
his own hands in an engine for that purpose."
[442] A sarcastic allusion to the pretentious talk of the would-be
politicians who frequented coffee-houses. These oracles were a standing
topic of ridicule.
[443] Vide Ovid's Metamorphoses, viii.--POPE.
Nisus had a purple hair on which depended the safety of himself and his
kingdom. When the Cretans made war upon him, his daughter Scylla fell in
love with their leader Minos, whom she saw from a high tower. Hurried
away by her passion, she plucked out her father's hair as he slept, and
carried it to Minos, who was victorious in consequence, and Scylla was
turned for her crime into a bird. The line of Pope is made up from a
passage in Dryden's translation of the first Georgic, where, having
applied the epithet "injured" to Nisus, he adds,
And thus the purple hair is dearly paid.
[444] Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel:
But when to sin our blessed nature leans
The careful devil is still at hand with means.
[445] In the first edition it was thus,
As o'er the fragrant steams she bends her head.--Ver. 134.
First he expands the glitt'ring forfex wide
T' inclose the lock; then joins it to divide;
The meeting points the sacred hair dissever,
From the fair head, for ever, and for ever.--Ver. 154.
All that is between was added afterwards.--POPE.
[446] This repetition is formed on similar passages in
Virgil.--WAKEFIELD.
As, for instance, Dryden's Æn. vi. 950:
Then thrice around his neck his arms he threw;
And thrice the flitting shadow slipped away.
[447] See Milton, lib. vi. 330, of Satan cut asunder by the Angel
Michael.--POPE.
But th' ethereal substance closed
Not long divisible.
[448]
Dum juga montis aper, fluvios dum piscis amabit,
Semper honos, nomenque tuum, laudesque manebunt. Virg.--POPE.
[449] A famous book written about that time by a woman: full of court
and party scandal; and in a loose effeminacy of style and sentiment,
which well-suited the debauched taste of the better vulgar.--WARBURTON.
Mrs. Manley, the author of it, was the daughter of Sir Roger Manley,
Governor of Guernsey, and the author of the first volume of the famous
Turkish Spy, published from his papers, by Dr. Midgley. She was known
and admired by all the wits of the times. She died in the house of
Alderman Barber, Swift's friend; and was said to have been the mistress
of the alderman.--WARTON.
Her actions were even more infamous than her writings. One Mary Thompson
had been kept by a person named Pheasant, and at his death, in 1705, she
endeavoured to pass herself off for his wife, that she might have a
right of dower out of his estate. According to Mr. Nichols, in a note to
Steele's Letters, Mrs. Manley was bribed by the promise of 100_l._
a-year for life, to aid Mrs. Thompson in getting a forged entry of the
marriage inserted in a register. The case was heard in Doctors' Commons,
and Mrs. Manley's guilt was proved. But neither her profligacy nor her
frauds could deprive her of the countenance of political partisans like
Swift and Prior, or of good-natured men of pleasure like Steele.
[450] Ladies in those days sometimes received visits in their
bed-chambers, when the bed was covered with a richer counterpane, and
"graced" by a small pillow with a worked case and lace edging. Of the
female fashions which Pope pleasantly assumes will be as lasting as the
swimming of fishes or the flight of birds, the greater part have passed
away.--CROKER.
[451] Ogilby, Virg. Ecl. v.:
So long thy honoured name and praise shall last.
Dryden, Æn. i. 857:
Your honour, name, and praise shall never die!--WAKEFIELD.
[452] So Juvenal exactly, x. 146:
Quandoquidem data sunt ipsis quoque fata sepulchris.--WAKEFIELD.
[453] Addison of Troy in his poem to the king:
And laid the labour of the gods in dust.--WAKEFIELD.
[454] Addison's translation of Horace, Ode iii. 3:
Thrice should my favourite Greeks his works confound,
And hew the shining fabric to the ground.--WAKEFIELD.
[455]
Ille quoque eversus mons est, &c.
Quid faciant crines, cum ferro talia cedant?
Catull. de Com. Berenices.--POPE.
[456]
At regina gravi, &c.--Virg. Æn. iv. 1.--POPE.
But anxious cares already seized the queen;
She fed within her veins a flame unseen.
Dryden's Transl.--WAKEFIELD.
[457] The thought and turn of these lines is imitated from the
Dispensary, Canto iii.:
Not beauties fret so much if freckles come,
Or nose should redden in the drawing-room.
[458] All the lines from hence to the 94th verse, that describe the
house of Spleen, are not in the first edition; instead of them followed
only these:
While her racked soul repose and peace requires,
The fierce Thalestris fans the rising fires.
And continued at the 94th verse of this Canto.--POPE.
[459] Garth in the Dispensary, canto iv.:
The bat with sooty wings flits through the grove.
[460] Spleen was thought to be engendered by the east wind. Cowper, in
the Task, Bk. iv. ver. 363, speaks of
the unhealthful east
That breathes the spleen.
[461] In this description our poet seems to have had before him the Cave
of Envy in Ovid, Met. ii. 760:
Protinus Invidiæ nigro squallentia tabo
Tecta petit. Domus est imis in vallibus antri
Abdita, sole carens, non ulli pervia vento.
Shut from the winds and from the wholesome skies,
In a deep vale the gloomy dungeon lies;
Dismal and cold, where not a beam of light
Invades the winter, or disturbs the night.
Addison's Trans.--WAKEFIELD.
[462] For "Megrim," the first edition has "Languor."
[463] "Wait" for "wait on" or "by" is a very harsh ellipse, though it
has the sanction of Dryden.
[464] Hypochondriacal disorders, under the name of vapours or spleen,
were then the fashionable complaint, and as they often presented no
definite bodily symptoms they could be readily feigned. The "gown" and
"night-dress" of Pope are the "dressing-gown" of our day.
[465] Oldham had expressed the same idea in The Dream:
Not dying saints enjoy such ecstacies
When they in visions antedate their bliss.
The ancients believed the spleen to be the seat of mirth, and hence a
disordered spleen was supposed to produce melancholy and moroseness. The
second sense, in modern usage, has driven out the first, and spleen has
become synonymous with surliness and gloom, but Pope in prose as well as
verse gave it a wider range, and appears to ascribe to it those
creations of the imagination which are mistaken for realities.
"Methinks," he writes to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "I am imitating in
my ravings the _dreams of splenetic_ enthusiasts and solitaires, who
fall in love with saints and fancy themselves in favour of angels and
spirits."
[466] Snakes erect on the "rolling spires," or coils of their bodies, as
Milton says that the neck of the serpent was "erect amidst his circling
spires."
[467] In the last century the word "machine" was currently employed to
designate the supernatural agents in a fiction, and their proceedings
when acting in human affairs. Thus, by the expression "angels in
machines" is meant angels interposing on behalf of mankind.
[468] Ovid, Met. i. 1:
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
Corpora.
Of bodies changed to various forms I sing.
--Dryden's Trans.--WAKEFIELD.