[Footnote 1: Our author's friendship with this gentleman commenced at
very unequal years; he was under sixteen, but Sir William above sixty,
and had lately resigned his employment of secretary of state to King
William.--POPE.
This amiable old man, who had been a fellow of All Souls College,
Oxford, and doctor of civil law, was sent by Charles II. judge advocate
to Tangier, and afterwards in a public character to Florence, to Turin,
to Paris; and by James II. ambassador to Constantinople; to which city
he went through the continent on foot. He was afterwards a lord of the
treasury, and secretary of state, with the Duke of Shrewsbury, which
office he resigned 1697, and retiring to East Hampstead, died there in
December, 1716, aged seventy-seven. Nothing of his writing remains but
an elegant character of Archbishop Dolben.--WARTON.
Pope says that Sir William Trumbull had "lately" resigned his office at
the period of their acquaintance, but seven years had elapsed after the
date of Sir William's retirement, before Pope had reached the age of
sixteen.]
[Footnote 2:
Prima Syracusio dignata est ludere versu,
Nostra nec erubuit sylvas habitare Thalia.
Ecl. vi. 1.
This is the general exordium and opening of the Pastorals, in imitation
of the sixth of Virgil, which some have therefore not improbably thought
to have been the first originally. In the beginnings of the other three
Pastorals, he imitates expressly those which now stand first of the
three chief poets in this kind, Spenser, Virgil, Theocritus.
A shepherd's boy (he seeks no better name)--
Beneath the shade a spreading beech displays,--
Thyrsis, the Music of that murm'ring Spring,--
are manifestly imitations of
"--A shepherd's boy (no better do him call)."
"--Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi."
"--[Greek: Hadu ti to psithyrisma kai ha pitys, aitole, tena.]"--POPE.]
[Footnote 3: Pope not only imitated the lines he quotes from Virgil,
but, as Wakefield points out, was also indebted to Dryden's translation
of them.
I first transferred to Rome Sicilian strains:
Nor blushed the Doric muse to dwell on Mantuan plains.
Originally Pope had written,
First in these fields I sing the sylvan strains,
Nor blush to sport in Windsor's peaceful plains.
Upon this he says to Walsh, "Objection that the letter is hunted too
much--_sing the sylvan_--_peaceful plains_--and that the word _sing_ is
used two lines afterwards, _Sicilian muses sing_." He proposed to read
"try" in the place of "sing;" "happy" instead of "peaceful," and adds,
"Quaere. If _try_ be not properer in relation to _first_, as we first
attempt a thing; and more modest? and if _happy_ be not more than
_peaceful_?" Walsh replies, "_Try_ is better than _sing_. _Happy_ does
not sound right, the first syllable being short. Perhaps you may find a
better word than _peaceful_ as _flow'ry_." Pope rejected all three
epithets, and substituted "blissful."]
[Footnote 4: Evidently imitated from Spenser's Prothalamion: