Before again recurring to Gray's partiality for the poems of Cowley, I
will make a remark or two on Mr. Wakefield's edition of Gray.
In his delightful "Ode to Adversity" Gray has written:
"Daughter of Jove, relentless power,
Thou tamer of the human breast,
Whose _iron scourge, and tort'ring hour_,
The bad affright, afflict the best."
Upon which Wakefield gives us this brilliant criticism:
"'Torturing hour.' There seems to be some little impropriety and
incongruity in this. _Consistency_ of figure rather required some
_material_ image, like _iron scourge_ and _adamantine chain_."
Afterwards he seems to speak diffidently of his own judgment, which is
rather an unusual thing in Mr. Wakefield. Well would it have been for
the reputations of Bentley, Johnson, and Wakefield, that, before
improving upon Milton and Gray and Collins, they had remembered the
words of a truly great critic, even Horace himself:
"Sunt delicta tamen quibus ignovisse velimus:
Nam neque chorda sonum reddit quem vult manus et mens,
Poscentique gravem persaepe remittit acutum;
Nec semper feriet quodcunque minabitur arcus.
_Verum ubi plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis
Offendar maculis, quas aut incuria fudit,
Aut humana parum cavit natura._"
_Epist. ad Pisones_, 347.
Not by any means that I am allowing in this case the existence of a
"macula," or an "incuria" either. To D'Israeli's _Curiosities of
Literature_ I think I am indebted for the remark, that Gray borrowed the
expressions from Milton:
"When the _scourge_
Inexorably, and _the torturing hour_
Calls us to penance."
_Par. Lost_, lib. ii. 90.
It is therefore with Milton, and not with Gray, that Mr. Wakefield must
settle the matter. And in proof of my earnest sympathies with him during
the very unequal contest, I will console him with "proprieties,"
"congruities," "consistencies of figure," and "material images," enough.
"The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel,
Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel."
Goldsmith's _Traveller_, ad finem.
Or better for this purpose still:
"Swords, daggers, bodkins, bearded arrows, spears,
Nails, pincers, crosses, gibbets, hurdles, ropes,
Tallons of griffins, paws and teeth of bears,
Tigre's and lyon's mouths, not iron hoops,
Racks, wheels, and trappados, brazen cauldrons which
Boiled with oil, huge tuns which flam'd with pitch."
Beaumonts's _Psyche_, cant. XXII. v. 69. p. 330.
Cambridge, 1702. Folio.
"Torturing hour" is used by Campbell in his _Pleasures of Hope_, Part
I.:
"The martyr smiled beneath avenging power,
And braved the tyrant in his _torturing hour._"
And, indeed, "sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child," had used it before
any of them:
"Is there no play, to ease the anguish of a torturing hour."
_Midsummer Night's Dream_, Act V. Sc. 1.