Chapter XXX: Appendix (6)

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.