"An allusion perhaps, to that verse of Virgil,
"'Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem.'"
Instead of Virgil, I suspect that Gray was thinking of the first Nemean
Ode of Pindar, wherein the infant Hercules is described as strangling
the snakes sent to destroy him by Juno:
"[Greek: ho d' orthon
men anteinen kara,
peirato de prôton machas,
dissaisi doious auchenôn
marpsas aphyktois chersin heais ophias.]"
Let me give a portion of Cowley's translation:
"The big-limb'd babe in his huge cradle lay,
Too weighty to be rock'd by nurse's hands,
Wrapt in purple swaddling bands;
When, lo! by jealous Juno's fierce commands,
Two dreadful serpents come.
"All naked from her bed the passionate mother lept
To save, or perish with her child,
She trembled, and she cry'd; the mighty infant smiled:
The mighty infant seem'd well pleased
At his gay gilded foes,
And as their spotted necks up to the cradle rose,
_With his young warlike hands on both he seiz'd_."
The stretching forth of the child's hands he found in Pindar and Cowley;
his "smiling" in Cowley alone, for there is no trace of it in the
original. While speaking of Gray, one scarcely likes alluding to that
great _whetstone_, Dr. Johnson; for certainly the darkest shade on his
well-merited literary reputation arises from his unjust, ill-natured,
and unscholarlike criticisms upon a poet whose sole transgression was to
have been his cotemporary. But Johnson eulogises Shakspeare, as did
Gray, and I cannot help thinking that he, as well as Gray, was indebted
to Cowley: _e.g._ Johnson writes:
"When Learning's triumph o'er her barb'rous foes
First rear'd the stage, immortal Shakspeare rose;
Each change of many-colour'd life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new:
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
_And panting Time toil'd after him in vain_."
_Prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick at the opening of the Theatre
Royal, Drury Lane, 1747._
"He did the utmost bounds of knowledge find;
He found them not so large as was his mind,
But, like the large Pellaean youth, did mone
Because that art had no more worlds than one.
And when he saw that he through all had past,
He dy'd, lest he should idle grow at last."
Cowley, _On the Death of Sir Henry Wooton_, page 6.: Lond. 1668,
fol.