[184] This resembles a line in Hughes's Court of Neptune:

Beholds th' alternate billows all and rise.—Wakefield.

[185]

[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:

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:

[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 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:

[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.

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,

Pope's line in the first edition was

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:

[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:

[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:

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,

[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:

[219] Dryden's Prologue to the University of Oxford:

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

[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:

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:

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:

[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:

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:

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:

[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:

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,

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—

[251] This stroke of satire is literally taken from Boileau:

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.

[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:

[256] Between ver. 646 and 647, I have found the following lines, since suppressed by the author:

[257] Dr. Knightly Chetwood to Lord Roscommon:

[258] After ver. 648, in the first edition, came this couplet:

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.

[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:

[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:

[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,

[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:

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:

[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:

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:

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:

[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:

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:

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:

[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:

[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:

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:

[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.

[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:

[369] This is formed from Virgil, Geor. iv. 6. Sedley's version of the passage imitated:

Dryden's Translation:

[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.

It was in the first editions:

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:

[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:

And Garth, in the Dispensary, speaking of a deceased young lady, says:

[380] Epilogue to Dryden's Tyrannick Love:

[381]

To Dryden's version of which passage our poet was indebted:

[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:

[383] The idea and the phraseology are both from Paradise Lost, i. 423:

[384] Parody of Homer.—Warburton.

Dryden, Hind and Panther, 3rd part:

[385] That is, too sensible of their beauty.—Warburton.

[386] The gnomes who prompt the disdain of the nymphs predestined to disappointment.—Croker.

[387]

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:

[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:

So Dryden's version of Ceyx & Alcyone, Ovid. Met. x.:

[399] Dryden, Æn. vii. 10:

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:

[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

[403] Milton of the wings of Raphael, Par. Lost, v. 283:

[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:

[407] A compliment to Queen Anne, whom he lavishly commends in his Windsor Forest.—Wakefield.

The angel in Addison's Rosamond, Act 3, says,

[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:

[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,

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,

[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 manoeuvres, 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:

[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.

[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:

[439]

Dryden's Translation, x. 698:

[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:

[445] In the first edition it was thus,

As o'er the fragrant steams she bends her head.—Ver. 134.

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:

[447] See Milton, lib. vi. 330, of Satan cut asunder by the Angel Michael.—Pope.

[448]

[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 100l. 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:

[455]

[456]

At regina gravi, &c.—Virg. Æn. iv. 1.—Pope.

[457] The thought and turn of these lines is imitated from the Dispensary, Canto iii.:

[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:

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

[461] In this description our poet seems to have had before him the Cave of Envy in Ovid, Met. ii. 760:

[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:

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.

[469] See Hom. Iliad, xviii., of Vulcan's walking tripods.—Pope.

Van Swieten, in his Commentaries on Boerhaave, relates that he knew a man who had studied till he fancied his legs to be of glass. His maid bringing wood to his fire threw it carelessly down. Our sage was terrified for his legs of glass. The girl, out of patience with his megrims, gave him a blow with a log on the parts affected. He started up in a rage, and from that moment recovered the use of his glass legs.—Warton.

[470] Alludes to a real fact; a lady of distinction imagined herself in this condition.—Pope.

[471] The fanciful person, here alluded to, was Dr. Edward Pelling, chaplain to several successive monarchs. Having studied himself into hypochondriasis between the age of forty and fifty, he imagined himself to be pregnant, and forbore all manner of exercise lest motion should prove injurious to his ideal burden.—Steevens.

[472] This is adopted from the Loyal Subject of Beaumont and Fletcher.—Steevens.

[473] In imitation of the golden branch which Æneas carried as a passport when he visited the infernal regions. Spleenwort is a species of fern. "Its virtues," says Cowley, "are told in its name." He makes it compare itself with "painted flowers," and exclaim,

The plant has lost the little credit it once possessed as a remedy for hypochondriacal affections.

[474] Bishop Lowth notices Pope's frequent violation of grammar in joining a pronoun in the singular to a verb in the plural. Thus when he says in the Messiah,

either "thou" should be "you," or else "touched" should be "touchedst, didst touch." Pope has committed the same error in this speech to the Queen of Spleen; for that "thou," and not "you," is, or ought to be, the pronoun understood follows from the expression "thy power" at ver. 65. Hence "who rule" should be "who rulest," or "who dost rule," and so with the other verbs in the second person.

[475] The disease was probably named from the atmospheric vapours which were reputed to be a principal cause of English melancholy. Cowper says of England in his Task, Bk. v. ver. 462,

[476] Citron-water was a cordial distilled from a mixture of spirit of wine with the rind of citrons and lemons. There are numerous allusions in the literature of Pope's day to the fondness of women of fashion for this drink, as in Swift's Journal of a Modern Lady, where he says that "to cool her heated brains" when she wakes at noon she

Takes a large dram of citron-water.

[477] The curl papers of ladies' hair used to be fastened with strips of pliant lead.—Croker.

[478] That is, at whose shrine all our sex resign ease, pleasure, and virtue. "Honour" means female reputation.

[479] A parody of Virgil, Ecl. i. 60.—Wakefield.

Garth, Dispensary, Canto iii.:

[480] Sir George Brown. He was angry that the poet should make him talk nothing but nonsense: and in truth one could not well blame him.—Warburton.

This is one instance out of many in which Pope took unwarrantable liberties with private character. Spence had been told that the description "was the very picture of the man."

[481] A cane diversified with darker spots.—Wakefield.

The "nice conduct" of canes is ridiculed by Addison in No. 103 of the Tatler. A man of fashion, with "a cane very curiously clouded, and a blue ribbon to hang it on his wrist," protests that the "knocking it upon his shoe, leaning one leg upon it, or whistling with it on his mouth are such great reliefs to him in conversation that he does not know how to be good company without it." A second beau is warned that his cane must be forfeited if "he walks with it under his arm, brandishes it in the air, or hangs it on a button."

[482] In allusion to Achilles's oath in Homer, Il. i.—Pope.

[483] Dryden's Æn. i. 770:

If yet he lives and draws this vital air.

[484] Borrowed from Dryden's Epistle to Mr. Granville:

The long contended honours of the field.—Holt White.

[485] These two lines are additional; and assign the cause of the different operation on the passions of the two ladies. The poem went on before without that distinction, as without any machinery, to the end of the Canto.—Pope.

At ver. 91, Umbriel empties the bag which contains the angry passions over the heads of Thalestris and Belinda. At ver. 142 he breaks the phial of sorrow over Belinda alone, whence Belinda's anger is turned to grief, and Thalestris remains indignant.

[486] A parody of Virg. Æn. iv. 657:

[487] Pope originally wrote:

'Twas this the morning omens did foretell.

He altered the verse, together with one or two others of the same kind, to get rid of the "did".

[488] Butler, the poet, says that the object of black patches was to make the complexion look fairer by the contrast. Dryden has a similar idea in Palamon and Arcite:

[489] Prior's Henry and Emma:

[490] Sir William Bowles on the Death of Charles II.:

And in their rulers fate bewail their own.

[491] Translated from Virgil, Æn. iv. 440:

[492] The entreaties to stay which Dido's sister, Anna, addressed to Æneas.—Croker.

Virgil says that the pathetic entreaties to stay sent a thrill of grief through the mighty breast of Æneas, but that his resolution was unshaken. Pope's couplet supposes that he inwardly wavered.

[493] A new character introduced in the subsequent editions, to open more clearly the moral of the poem, in a parody of the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus in Homer.—Pope.

The parody first appeared when the Rape of the Lock was inserted in the quarto of 1717. In the previous enlarged editions, which contained the machinery, the sixth verse was followed by what is now verse thirty-seven:

To arms, to arms! the bold Thalestris cries.

[494] Homer.

The passage quoted by Warburton is from Pope's own translation of the Episode of Sarpedon, which appeared in Dryden's Miscellany, in 1710.

[495] Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel:

The young men's vision, and the old men's dream.—Wakefield.

[496] Denham, in his version of the speech of Homer parodied by our poet:

[497] Gay, in the Toilette:

[498] The ladies at this time always sat in the front, the gentlemen in the side-boxes.—Nichols.

In Steele's Theatre, No. 3, January 9, 1720, his "representatives of a British audience" are "three of the fair sex for the front boxes, two gentlemen of wit and pleasure for the side-boxes, and three substantial citizens for the pit." "The virgin ladies," he said, in the Guardian, No. 29, April 14, 1713, "usually dispose themselves in the front of the boxes, the young married women compose the second row, while the rear is generally made up of mothers of long standing, undesigning maids, and contented widows."—Cunningham.

[499] It is a verse frequently repeated in Homer after any speech,

——So spoke—and all the heroes applauded.—Pope.

[500] From hence the first edition goes on to the conclusion, except a very few short insertions added to keep the machinery in view to the end of the poem.—Pope.

[501] Æneid. v. 140:

[502] Homer, Il. xx.—Pope.

[503] This verse is an improvement on the original, Æneid. viii. 246:

The concluding line of the paragraph is from Addison's translation of a passage in Silius Italicus:

There is more of bathos than of humour from ver. 43 to ver. 52. The exaggeration is carried so far that even the similitude of caricature is lost.

[504] These four lines added, for the reason before mentioned.—Pope.

[505] Minerva in like manner, during the battle of Ulysses with the suitors in the Odyssey, perches on a beam of the roof to behold it.—Pope.

[506] Like the heroes in Homer when they are spectators of a combat.—Warton.

[507] This idea is borrowed from a couplet in the Duke of Buckingham's Essay on Poetry where he ridicules the poetical dialogues of the dramatis personÆ in the reign of Charles II.

[508] Wakefield quotes passages from Sir Philip Sidney, Drummond, and Milton, in which the phrase "living death" occurs.

[509] The words of a song in the Opera of Camilla.—Pope.

"Here," said Dennis, speaking of the death of the beau and witling, "we have a real combat, and a metaphorical dying," and he did the lines no injustice when he added that they were but a "miserable pleasantry."

[510]

[511] Vid. Homer, Il. viii. and Virg. Æn. xii.—Pope.

The passage in Homer to which the poet refers is where Jupiter, before the conflict between Hector and Achilles, weighs the issue in a pair of scales.

[512] These two lines added for the above reason.—Pope.

[513] In imitation of the progress of Agamemnon's sceptre in Homer, Il. ii.—Pope.

[514] Pins to adorn the hair were then called bodkins, and Sir George Etherege, in Tonson's Second Miscellany, traces the genealogy of some jewels through the successive stages of the ornament of a cap, the handle of a fan, and ear-rings, till they became, like the gold seal rings, in the Rape of the Lock,

[515] "Who," asked Dennis, "ever heard of a dead man that burnt in Cupid's flames?" Pope had originally written,

And still burn on, in Cupid's flames, alive.

[516] Dryden's Alexander's Feast:

[517] Vide Ariosto, Canto xxxiv.—Pope.

From the catalogue which follows it appears that, by "all things lost on earth," Pope meant only such things as, in his opinion, were hypocritical, foolish, and frivolous. These mounted to the lunar sphere when they had finished their course here below,—a career very short in instances like the "tears of heirs," and, perhaps, very long in instances like the butterflies preserved in the cabinets of collectors.

[518] Apparently Pope had the erroneous idea that distinguished soldiers were men of dull and ponderous minds.

[519] The alms would not be "lost on earth," however unprofitable they might be to the alms-givers, from whom they had been extorted by fear instead of proceeding from a benevolent disposition.

[520] Dryden's Œdipus, act 2:

[521] Denham, in Cooper's Hill, gave him a hint:

[523] These two lines added, for the same reason, to keep in view the machinery of the poem.—Pope.

Dryden's Æneis, v. 691:

[524] The promenades in the Mall lasted till the middle of the reign of George III., and it would appear from this line that they were enlivened by music.—Croker.

[525] Rosamond's lake was a small oblong piece of water near the Pimlico Gate of St. James's Park. When it was done away with, about the middle of the last century, the public, unwilling to lose the romantic name, transferred it to the dirty pond in the Green Park, which has, in its turn, been filled up.—Croker.

[526] John Partridge was a ridiculous stargazer, who in his almanacks every year never failed to predict the downfall of the Pope, and the King of France, then at war with the English.—Pope.

He had been made the subject of ridicule by Swift, Steele, Addison and others.—Croker.

[527] Milton, Par. Lost, v. ver. 261, calls the telescope "the glass of Galileo," who first employed it to observe the heavens.

[528] Phebe in As You Like It, Act iii. Sc. 5, says to her despised and despairing lover,

Thou tell'st me there is murder in mine eye.

[529] The compliment was meant to be serious, but is marred by its extravagance. "Millions" is too hyperbolical.

[530] Spenser in his 75th Sonnet:

And Cowley, in his imitation of Horace, Ode iv. 2:

[531] Wakefield says "there is an affectation and ambiguity in this account which he does not comprehend." The uncertainty with which Pope speaks, refers to his doubt of the identity of the lady celebrated by the duke. Enough of "ambiguity and affectation" remains, which would have been no mystery to Wakefield if he had been aware that Pope's object was to deceive.

[532] The Memoirs by Ayre appeared in 1745, without the name of the publisher. In a pamphlet which was printed the same year, under the title of Remarks on Squire Ayre's Memoirs, it is stated that the work was put together, and published by Curll, who being notorious for the manufacture of vapid, lying biographies, suppressed a name which would have been fatal to the sale of his trash.

[533] Warton's Essay, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 329.

[534] Pope's Correspondence, ed. Elwin, vol. i., pp. 144, 158-160, 162.

[535] "Pray in your next," writes Caryll to Pope, July 16, 1717, "tell me who was the unfortunate lady you address a copy of verses to. I think you once gave me her history, but it is now quite out of my head." Pope, in his reply does not allude to the subject, and Caryll says to him on Aug. 18, "You answer not my question who the unfortunate lady was that you inscribe a copy of verses to in your book. I long to be re-told her story, for I believe you already told me formerly; but I shall refer that, and a thousand other things more, to chat over at our next meeting, which I hope draws near." This letter was answered by Pope on Aug. 22, but there is still not a word on the unfortunate lady.

[536] Dr. Morell, in his notes to Seneca's Epistles, says, "I remember when I was a boy at Eton that an old almswoman, Mrs. Pain, having been cut down alive, gave this reason for hanging herself, that she was afraid of dying." To rush into death from the fear of death is not uncommon, and shows how far suicide is from being an evidence of superior courage. Acute philosophers have not always reasoned better than Pope. M. Lerminier, a French writer of repute, eulogises, in his Philosophie du Droit, the suicide of Cato for "a pure and majestic act." "In the Memoirs of the Emperor's Valet," he says in the next sentence, "we learn that Napoleon tried to destroy himself at Fontainebleau in 1814. He took poison; remedies were applied, and he recovered. He was not to die thus. Would you wish that Napoleon's end should have been that of an amorous sub-lieutenant, or a ruined banker?" But this was the veritable end of Cato. He died the death of "amorous sub-lieutenants and ruined bankers." The question of M. Lerminier revealed his consciousness that suicide was not heroism, or, in justification of the attempt of the Emperor, he would have asked, "Would you not have wished that Napoleon's end should have been the pure and majestic end of Cato?"

[537] Comus, ver. 205.

[538] I Viaggi di Marco Polo, ed. Pasini, 1847, p. 45.

[539] A belief akin to that which grew up in deserts prevailed in England. Hamlet doubts whether his father's ghost is a "spirit of health or goblin damned," and Horatio attempts to dissuade Hamlet from following it lest it should prove to be an impostor. A "goblin damned" may have put on the "fair and warlike form" of the King of Denmark, may "tempt" Hamlet to the "dreadful summit of the cliff," may "there assume some other horrible form which might draw him into madness," and impel him to commit suicide. The radical idea is the same in Shakespeare and Marco Polo. Fiends personate the relations or friends of an intended victim that they may decoy him to his death.

[540]

[541] Elements of Criticism, 6th ed., vol. i. p. 477.

[542] Ben Jonson's Elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester:

[543] Johnson gives two meanings for "to gore,"—"to stab," "to pierce;" and "to pierce with a horn." The second, or special signification, has since superseded the general sense in popular usage, though, as with many other words, a sense which has become obsolete in conversation is occasionally revived in books. Formerly, the general sense of "to pierce," without reference to the mode of piercing, was the predominant meaning, and Milton, Par. Lost, vi. 386, employed the word to denote the gaps made in the ranks of a defeated army:

[544] The third Elegy of Crashaw:

[545] Shakespeare, Henry VIII. Act iii. Sc. 2:

[546] Dryden, To the Duchess of Ormond:

[547] Cowley has a couplet not unlike his, Davideis, i. 80:

[548] Duke's translation of Juvenal, Sat. iv.:

Without one virtue to redeem his fame.—Wakefield.

[549] Dryden, Ovid's Amor. ii. 19:

But thou dull husband of a wife too fair.—Wakefield.

[550] Lord Kames objects to the false antithesis between cold flesh and mental warmth.

[551] Milton, Comus, ver. 753:

Love-darting eyes or tresses like the morn.—Wakefield.

[552] Rolling eyes are contrary to the English idea of feminine refinement. Pope admired them. He had previously said in the Rape of the Lock, Cant. v. 33,

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll.

[553] Wakefield mentions that the phrase "unknowing how to yield" is used by Dryden, Æneis, xi. 472, and that the entire couplet is almost identical with two passages in Pope's own translation of the Iliad. The first is at Book ix. 749. The second is at Book xxii. 447, and runs thus:

[554] From a fragment of Sir Edward Hungerford, according to a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1764:

[555] Dryden, Æneis, ix. 647, where the mother of Euryalus laments her son, whose body remains with the enemy:

The cruelties of the lady's relations, the desolation of the family, the being deprived of the rights of sepulture, the circumstance of dying in a country remote from her relations, are all touched with great tenderness and pathos, particularly the four lines from the 51st, "By foreign hands," &c.—Warton.

[556] The anonymous translator of Ariadne to Theseus:

So Gay in his Dione, Act ii. Sc. 1:

De Quincey assumes that the term "decent limbs" refers to the lady's shape, and he remarks that the language "does not imply much enthusiasm of praise." Pope had perhaps the same idea in his mind as the translator he imitated, and "thy decent limbs were composed" may be put inaccurately for "thy limbs were composed decently."

[557] The poet in the previous couplet has employed the word "mourn" to signify genuine regret. In this verse it is put for the act of wearing mourning,—the appearing in the "sable weeds," which are, "the mockery of woe" when the sorrow is not real.

[558] Dryden, Virg. Ecl. x. 51:

How light would lie the turf upon my breast.

A. Philips in his third Pastoral:

The flow'ry turf lie light upon thy breast.

This thought was common with the ancients.—Wakefield.

[559] Tasso's description of an angel in the translation of Fairfax, i. 14:

[560] The expression has reference to ver. 61. "No sacred earth allowed her room," but her remains have "made sacred" the common earth in which she was buried.

[561] Such a poem as Pope's Elegy, deeply serious and pathetic, rejects with disdain all fiction. Upon that account the passage from ver. 59 to ver. 68 deserves no quarter; for it is not the language of the heart, but of the imagination indulging its flights at ease, and by that means is eminently discordant with the subject. It would be a still more severe censure if it should be ascribed to imitation, copying indiscreetly what has been said by others.—Lord Kames.

The ghost of the injured person appears to excite the poet to revenge her wrongs. He describes her character, execrates the author of her misfortunes, expatiates on the severity of her fate, the rites of sepulture denied her in a foreign land. Then follows, "What though no weeping," &c. Can anything be more naturally pathetic? Yet the critic tells us he can give no quarter to this part of the poem. Well might our poet's last wish be to commit his writings to the candour of a sensible and reflecting judge, rather than to the malice of every short-sighted and malevolent critic.—Warburton.

[562] When Pope describes the retribution which is to fall upon the imperious relatives of the unfortunate lady, he says,

Thus unlamented pass the proud away;

and it is to these same relations, whose pride was their vice, that he reverts in the line,

'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.

The persecutors who have hunted you into the grave, shall one day share your fate.

[563] R. Herrick, in a Meditation for his Mistress:

[564] Dean Milman, in his History of Latin Christianity, says that Heloisa "was distinguished for her surpassing beauty." There is no authority for this assertion, which is one of the embellishments of later romancers.

[565] "She knew Latin," says M. RÉmusat, "and wrote it with facility and talent. As to Greek and Hebrew I can hardly believe that she was acquainted with more than the alphabet, and a few words which were quoted habitually in theology or in philosophy." The treatises of Abelard prove that he could read neither Greek nor Hebrew, and it is not likely that Heloisa was more learned than her master. Latin was the literary language of the day.

[566] The sentiments which Warton imagined to be borrowed from Madame Guion and Fenelon were taken from the English translation of the Letters of Heloisa and Abelard. Kindred thoughts may be found in the works of almost any devotional writer.

[567] M. RÉmusat, who accepts the letters without misgiving, acknowledges that the form of the Historia Calamitatum "appears to be an artificial frame to the picture." He assumes that the avowed purpose is a pretext, and that the repentant philosopher commences his narrative with a misstatement. The fiction which M. RÉmusat is obliged to admit, does not ward off the strongest objection to the genuineness of the letters, and is the hypothesis least favourable to the reputation of Abelard; for his treachery to Heloisa is immensely aggravated by the admission that his narrative was meant for the public, and not for the eye alone of a friend.

[568] Essai Historique sur Abailard et Heloise, ed. 1861, p. xxvi.

[569] Essai Historique, p. lxiii.

[570] As You Like It, Act iv. sc. 3.

[571] History of Latin Christianity, vol. iii. p. 363.

[572] Philosophie du Moyen Age, ed. 1856, p. 3.

[573] Vie d'Abelard, Tome 1. p. 262.

[574] Hist. de France, tom. iii. 317.

[575] Horne's Works, vol. i. p. 248.

[576] Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 33. Fox, the statesman, was one of those who thought "Eloisa much greater in her letters than Pope had made her."

[577] Mason's Life of Whitehead, p. 35.

[578] The letter which Abelard addressed to his friend, and which had fallen into the hands of Eloisa.

[579] Dryden's Don Sebastian:

[580] That is, a lively representation of his person was retained in her mind. So Drayton where he speaks of his departed love:

[581] Claudian, De Nupt. Honor. et Mar. ver. 9:

[582] Drayton's Heroical Epistle of Rosamond to Henry:

[583] Some of these circumstances have perhaps a little impropriety when introduced into a place so lately founded as was the Paraclete; but are so well imagined and so highly painted, that they demand excuse.—Warton.

[584] This is borrowed from Milton's Comus, ver. 428:

By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades.—Wakefield.

[585] A suspected poem of the Duke of Wharton on the Fear of Death:

[586] A puerile conceit from the dew which runs down stone and metals in damp weather.—Wakefield.

A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for October, 1836, quotes a parallel couplet from a poem by the Duke of Wharton:

[587] He followed Milton in the Penseroso:

Forget thyself to marble.—Wakefield.

Heloisa to Abelard: "O vows! O convent! I have not lost my humanity under your inexorable discipline. You have not made me marble by changing my habit." With the exception of a passage or two quoted by Wakefield, all the extracts in the notes are from Pope's chief text-book, the English work of Hughes, which is very unfaithful to the Latin original.

[588] In every edition till that of Warburton the reading was,

Heav'n claims me all in vain while he has part.

[589] Heloisa to Abelard: "By that melancholy relation to your friend you have awakened all my sorrows."

[590] Dryden's Æneis, v. 64:

A day for ever sad, for ever dear.—Wakefield.

[591] Heloisa to Abelard: "Shall my Abelard be never mentioned without tears? Shall the dear name be never spoken but with sighs?"

[592] Heloisa to Abelard: "I met with my name a hundred times. I never saw it without fear; some heavy calamity always followed it. I saw yours too equally unhappy."

[593] Pomfret in his Vision:

Steevens quotes from Dryden's State of Innocence the expression "sad variety of hell," and the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes from Yalden's Force of Jealousy the expression "a large variety of woe."

[594] Dryden, Palamon and Arcite:

Now warm in love, now with'ring in the grave.—Wakefield.

[595] Fame is not a passion.—Warton.

Ambition is the passion, and fame is the object of the passion.

[596] Heloisa to Abelard: "Let me have a faithful account of all that concerns you. I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sorrows less."

[597] Heloisa to Abelard: "We may write to each other. Let us not lose through negligence the only happiness which is left us, and the only one perhaps which the malice of our enemies can never ravish from us."

[598] Heloisa to Abelard: "Tell me not by way of excuse you will spare our tears; the tears of women shut up in a melancholy place, and devoted to penitence, are not to be spared."

[599] Denham of Prudence:

To live and die is all we have to do.—Wakefield.

Prior's Celia to Damon:

[600] Heloisa to Abelard: "Be not then unkind, nor deny me that little relief. All sorrows divided are made lighter."

[601] Heloisa to Abelard: "Letters were first invented for comforting such solitary wretches as myself."

[602] Heloisa to Abelard: "What cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions; they can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present; they have all the softness and delicacy of speech, and sometimes a boldness of expression even beyond it."

[603] Otway's translation of PhÆdra to Hippolytus:

[604] This is the most exquisite description of the first commencement of passion that our language, or perhaps any other, affords.—Bowles.

[605] Prior's Celia to Damon:

[606] The Divinity himself. Dryden, in his 12th Elegy:

[607] Heloisa to Abelard: "That life in your eyes which so admirably expressed the vivacity of your mind; your conversation, which gave everything you spoke such an agreeable and insinuating turn; in short, everything spoke for you."

[608] She says herself, "You had, I confess, two qualities in great perfection with which you could instantly captivate the heart of any woman,—a graceful manner of reading and singing." She mentions in another place also the excellence of his singing.—Wakefield.

[609] He was her preceptor in philosophy and divinity.—Pope.

Dryden, Epistle, 14:

The fair themselves go mended from thy hand.—Wakefield.

[610] Dryden's Œdipus, end of Act iii.:

And backward trod the paths I sought to shun.

[611] Thy holy precepts and the sanctity of thy character had made me conceive of thee as of a being more venerable than man, and approaching the nature of superior existences. But thy personal allurements soon inspired those tender feelings which gradually conducted me from a veneration of the angel to a less pure and dignified sensation—love for the man.—Wakefield.

[612] Dryden, Ovid's Met. x.:

And own no laws but those which love ordains.—Wakefield.

Heloisa to Abelard: "The bonds of matrimony, however honourable, still bear with them a necessary engagement, and I was very unwilling to be necessitated to love always a man who perhaps would not always love me."

[613]

Hudibras, Part iii. Cant. i. 553:

Dryden's Aurengezebe:

The passage cited by Pope from Chaucer is in the Franklin's Tale. Spenser copied and altered the lines, which led Wakefield to imagine that Pope had committed the double error of falsely imputing them to Chaucer, and quoting them incorrectly.

[614] Heloisa to Abelard: "It is not love but the desire of riches and honour which makes women run into the embraces of an indolent husband: ambition, not affection, forms such marriages. I believe indeed they may be followed with some honours and advantages, but I can never think that this is the way to enjoy the pleasures of an affectionate union."

[615] Heloisa to Abelard: "This restless tormenting passion"—ambition—"punishes them for aiming at other advantages by love than love itself."

[617] Heloisa to Abelard: "Though I knew that the name of wife was honourable in the world, and holy in religion, yet the name of your mistress had greater charms because it was more free. I despised the name of wife that I might live happy with that of mistress."

[618] Heloisa to Abelard: "We are called your sisters, and if it were possible to think of any expressions which would signify a dearer relation we would use them."

[619] Denham, Cooper's Hill:

[620] Heloisa to Abelard: "If there is anything which may properly be called happiness here below, I am persuaded it is in the union of two persons who love each other with perfect liberty, who are united by a secret inclination, and satisfied with each other's merit. Their hearts are full, and leave no vacancy for any other passion."

[621] Heloisa to Abelard: "If I could believe you as truly persuaded of my merit as I am of yours, I might say there has been a time when we were such a pair."

[622] Mrs. Rowe in her Elegy:

A dying lover pale and gasping lies.— Wakefield.

[623] Heloisa to Abelard: "Where was I? where was your Heloise then? What joy should I have had in defending my lover. I would have guarded you from violence, though at the expense of my life; my cries and shrieks alone would have stopped the hand."

[624] For "stroke" Pope, in all editions till that of 1736, read "hand," the word in the translation. He had used "hand" in the rhyme of the previous couplet, and it was probably to avoid the repetition that he made the alteration.

[625] Careless readers may misapprehend the sense. "Pain" here means punishment, poena.—Holt White.

Like a verse of Drummond's:

The grief was common, common were the cries.—Wakefield.

Heloisa to Abelard: "You alone expiated the crime common to us both. You only were punished though both of us were guilty."

[626] Heloisa to Abelard: "Oh whither does the excess of passion hurry me! Here love is shocked, and modesty joined with despair deprive me of speech."

[627] A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes Settle's Empress of Morocco:

[628] The altar of Paraclete, says Mr. Berrington, did not then exist. They were not professed at the same time or place; one was at Argenteuil, the other at St. Denys.—-Warton.

[629] Abelard to Heloisa: "I accompanied you with terror to the foot of the altar, and while you stretched out your hand to touch the sacred cloth, I heard you pronounce distinctly those fatal words which for ever separated you from all men."

[630] Her kissing the veil with "cold lips" strongly marks her want of that fervent zeal and devotion which should influence those votaries who renounce the world. The presages, likewise, which attended the rites are finely imagined,—the trembling of the shrines, and the pallid hue of the lamps as if they were conscious of the reluctant sacrifice she was making.—Ruffhead.

[631] Prior, in Henry and Emma, has a verse of similar pauses, and similar phraseology:

Thy lips all trembling, and thy cheeks all pale.—Wakefield.

[632] Abelard to Heloisa: "I saw your eyes when you spoke your last farewell fixed upon the cross." Heloisa to Abelard: "It was your command only, and not a sincere vocation, as is imagined, that shut me up in these cloisters." The two passages combined suggested the line in the text.

[633] Heloisa to Abelard: "You may see me, hear my sighs, and be a witness of all my sorrows, without incurring any danger, since you can only relieve me with tears and words."

[634] Roscoe remarks that the lines which follow cannot be justified by anything in the letters of Eloisa. Sentiments equally gross are however expressed both in the original Latin and in the adulterated translation which was Pope's authority.

[635] Concannen's Match at Football, Canto iii.:

And drank in poison from her lovely eye.

Creech, at the beginning of his Lucretius:

Smith's PhÆdra and Hippolytus, Act i.:

Drank gorging in the dear delicious poison.—Steevens.

[636] "If thou canst forget me, think at least upon thy flock," says Wakefield, in explanation of the train of thought; and he adds a passage from a letter of Eloisa in which she terms the monastery Abelard's "new plantation," and assures him that frequent watering is essential to the tender plants.

[637] Heloisa to Abelard: "The innocent sheep, tender as they are, would yet follow you through deserts and mountains."

[638] He founded the monastery.—Pope.

Heloisa to Abelard: "You only are the founder of this house. You by inhabiting here have given fame and sanctity to a place known before only for robbers and murderers."

[639] So Dryden says of Absalom,

And Paradise was opened in his face.

The original of the image in the text is in Isaiah li. 3:

Whence Milton derived it, Par. Reg. i. 7:

And Eden raised in the waste wilderness.—Wakefield.

[640] The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes Boileau, Le Moine:

[641] Heloisa to Abelard: "These cloisters owe nothing to public charities; our walls were not raised by the usury of publicans, nor their foundations laid on base extortion. The God whom we serve sees nothing but innocent riches, and harmless votaries whom you have placed here."

[642] There were no benefactors whose praises were celebrated in the services, but the building was vocal only with the praise of the Deity.

[643] Our author imitates Milton:

[644] Dryden had said of his Good Parson:

His eyes diffused a venerable grace.—Wakefield.

[645] Mrs. Rowe on the Creation:

And kindling glories brighten all the skies.—Wakefield.

[646] By pretending that she desires Abelard to visit the Paraclete in obedience to the call of her sister nuns.

[647] Heloisa to Abelard: "But why should I entreat you in the name of your children? Is it possible I should fear obtaining anything of you when I ask in my own name? And must I use any other prayers than my own to prevail upon you?"

[648] From the superscription of Heloisa's letter to Abelard: "To her lord, her father, her husband, her brother; his servant, his child, his wife, his sister, and to express all that is humble, respectful, and loving to her Abelard, Heloisa writes this."

[649] Our poet is indebted to a translation of the Virgilian cento of Ausonius in Dryden's Miscellanies, vi. p. 143:

[650] Mr. Mills, a clergyman, who visited the Paraclete about the year 1765, says, "Mr. Pope's description is ideal. I saw neither rocks, nor pines, nor was it a kind of ground which ever seemed to encourage such objects."

[651] Addison's translation of book iii, of the Æneis:

The hollow murmurs of the winds that blow.

[652] The little river Ardusson glittered along the valley of the Paraclete.—Mills.

[653] Philips, in his fourth Pastoral:

[654] Milton's Penseroso:

[655] Dryden, Virg. Geo. iv. 432:

When western winds on curling waters play.

[656] Dryden, Virg. Æn. iii. 575:

[657] Milton's Penseroso:

To arched walks of twilight groves.—Wakefield.

[658] Waller's version of Æneid iv.:

A death-like quiet, and deep silence fell.

Dryden's AstrÆa Redux:

A dreadful quiet felt.—Wakefield.

Charles Bainbrigg on the death of Edward King:

[659] Fenton in his version of Sappho to Phaon:

[660] Dryden's Theodore and Honoria:

With deeper brown the grove was overspread.—Steevens.

Dryden, Æn. vii. 40:

[661] In allusion to this sacrifice of herself at his will she says in her first letter: "You are of all mankind most abundantly indebted to me; and particularly for that proof of absolute submission to your commands in thus destroying myself at your injunction."—Wakefield.

[662] Heloisa to Abelard: "Death only can make me leave the place where you have fixed me, and then too my ashes shall rest there, and wait for yours."

[663] Abelard to Heloisa: "I hope you will be contented when you have finished this mortal life to be buried near me. Your cold ashes need then fear nothing."

[664] Heloisa to Abelard: "Among those who are wedded to God I serve a man. What a prodigy am I! Enlighten me, O Lord! Does thy grace or my despair draw these words from me?"

[665] Heloisa to Abelard: "I am sensible I am in the temple of chastity only with the ashes of that fire which has consumed us."

[666] This couplet, and its wretched rhymes, seem derived from an elegy of Walsh in Dryden's Miscellanies:

[667] Heloisa to Abelard: "I am here a sinner, but one, who far from weeping for her sins, weeps only for her lover; far from abhorring her crimes endeavours only to add to them, and then who pleases herself continually with the remembrance of past actions when it is impossible to renew them." And again: "I, who have experienced so many pleasures in loving you feel, in spite of myself, that I cannot repent of them, nor forbear enjoying them over again as much as is possible by recollecting them in my memory." Abelard, in the translation of the letters, expresses the same sentiment: "Love still preserves its dominion in my fancy, and entertains itself with past pleasures."

[668] Abelard to Heloisa: "To forget in the case of love is the most necessary penitence, and the most difficult."

[669] Dryden's Cymon and Iphigenia:

[670] Abelard to Heloisa: "How can I separate from the person I love the passion I must detest? Will the tears I shed be sufficient to render it odious to me? It is difficult in our sorrow to distinguish penitence from love."

[671] Heloisa to Abelard: "A heart which has been so sensibly affected as mine cannot soon be indifferent. We fluctuate long between love and hatred before we can arrive at a happy tranquillity." Abelard to Heloisa: "In such different disquietudes I contradict myself; I hate you; I love you."

[672] Heloisa to Abelard: "God has a peculiar right over the hearts of great men. When he pleases to touch them he ravishes them, and lets them not speak nor breathe but for his glory."

[673] Heloisa to Abelard: "Yes, Abelard, I conjure you teach me the maxims of divine love. Oh! for pity's sake help a wretch to renounce her desires, herself, and, if it be possible, even to renounce you."

[674] Heloisa to Abelard: "When I shall have told you what rival hath ravished my heart from you, you will praise my inconstancy, and will pray this rival to fix it. By this you may judge that it is God alone that takes Heloise from you. What other rival could take me from you? Could you think me guilty of sacrificing the virtuous and learned Abelard to any other but God?"

[675] Horace, Epist. Lib. i. xi. 9:

Oblitusque meorum, obliviscendus et illis.

My friends forgetting, by my friends forgot.—Wakefield.

[676] Taken from Crashaw.—Pope.

Wakefield gives the complete couplet from Crashaw's Description of a religious House:

[677] The idea of the "wings of seraphs shedding perfumes" is from Milton, Par. Lost, v. 286, where Raphael "shakes heavenly fragrance" from "his plumes," and Dryden in his Tyrannic Love, Act v., mentions the perfumes, the spousals, and the celestial music as accompaniments of the death of St. Catherine:

[678] Adapted from Dryden's Britannia Redivivus:

[679] Dryden's Cinyras and Myrrha, translated from Ovid:

For guilty pleasure gives a double gust.

[680] Heloisa to Abelard: "I will own to you what makes the greatest pleasure I have in my retirement. After having passed the day in thinking of you, full of the dear idea I give myself up at night to sleep. Then it is that Heloise, who dares not without trembling think of you by day, resigns herself entirely to the pleasure of hearing you, and speaking to you. I see you Abelard, and glut my eyes with the sight. Sometimes forgetting the perpetual obstacles to our desires, you press me to make you happy, and I easily yield to your transports. Sleep gives me what your enemies' rage has deprived you of, and our souls, animated with the same passion, are sensible of the same pleasure. But, oh, you delightful illusions, soft errors, how soon do you vanish away! At my awaking I open my eyes, and see no Abelard; I stretch out my arms to take hold of him, but he is not there; I call upon him, he hears me not."

[681] Dryden, Æneis, iv. 677, supplied the idea:

[682] The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes the same expression from Steele's Miscellanies:

[683] Heloisa to Abelard: "You are happy, Abelard, and your misfortunes have been the occasion of your finding rest. The punishment of your body has cured the deadly wounds of your soul. I am a thousand times more to be lamented than you; I must resist those fires which love kindles in a young heart."

[684] Dryden's Ovid, Met. i.:

[685] Sir William Davenant's Address to the Queen:

[686] Heloisa to Abelard: "When we love pleasures we love the living and not the dead." In all editions till that of 1736 this couplet followed:

[687] Hudibras, Part ii. Canto i. 309:

[688] Heloisa to Abelard: "Whatever endeavours I use, on whatever side I turn me, the sweet idea still pursues me, and every object brings to my mind what I ought to forget. Even into holy places before the altar, I carry with me the memory of our guilty loves. They are my whole business."

[689] Abelard to Heloisa: "In spite of severe fasts your image appears to me, and confounds all my resolutions."

[690] Sedley's verses on Don Alonzo:

The force of the line is, however, in the phrase "too soft" which Pope has added. "With every bead I drop a tear of tender love instead of a tear of bitter repentance."

[691] Smith's PhÆdra and Hippolytus, Act i.:

[692] How finely does this glowing imagery introduce the transition,

While prostrate here, &c.—Bowles.

[693] The whole of this paragraph is from Abelard's letter to Heloisa:

"I am a miserable sinner prostrate before my judge, and with my face pressed to the earth I mix my tears and sighs in the dust when the beams of grace and reason enlighten me. Come, see me in this posture and solicit me to love you! Come, if you think fit, and in your holy habit thrust yourself between God and me, and be a wall of separation! Come and force from me those sighs, thoughts, and vows which I owe to him only! Assist the evil spirits and be the instrument of their malice! But rather withdraw yourself and contribute to my salvation."

[694] Abelard to Heloisa: "Let me remove far from you, and obey the apostle who hath said, fly."

[695] Wakefield quotes the lines of Hopkins to a lady, where, speaking of her beauties, he entreats that she will

[696] Abelard to Heloisa: "It will always be the highest love to show none: I here release you of all your oaths and engagements to me."

[697] The combination "heavenly-fair" is also found in Sandys, Congreve, and Tickell.—Wakefield.

[698] "Low-thoughted care" is from Milton's Comus.—Warton.

[699] This resembles a passage in Crashaw:

Fair hope! our earlier heaven.—Wakefield.

[700] "It should," says Mr. Mills, "be near her cell. The doors of all cells open into the common cloister. In that cloister are often tombs." Steevens adds the frivolous objection that the "Paraclete had been too recently founded for monuments of the dead to be expected there." Heloisa had been five years abbess when she wrote her first letter to Abelard, and it is certainly not an extravagant supposition that a death might have occurred among the nuns in that space of time.

[701] Dryden's Palamon and Arcite:

And issuing sighs that smoked along the wall.—Wakefield.

Addison's translation of a passage from Claudian:

[702] Fenton's translation of Sappho to Phaon:

Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act iv. Sc. 4:

[703] Pope owes much throughout this poem to the character of Dido as drawn by Virgil, and this passage seems directly formed upon one in Dryden, Æn. iv. 667:

The imitation of the passage in Ovid, Epist. vii. 101, similar to this from Virgil, is still more palpable:

[704] It is well contrived that this invisible speaker should be a person that had been under the very same kind of misfortunes with Eloisa.—Warton.

[705] Dryden's version of the latter part of the third book of Lucretius:

But all is there serene in that eternal sleep.—Wakefield.

[706] In the first edition:

I come ye ghosts.—Wakefield.

[707] Ogilby, Virg. Æn. xi.:

And to the dead our last sad duties pay.

Dryden, Æn. xi. 322:

Perform the last sad office to the slain.—Wakefield.

[708] Dryden's Aurengezebe at the commencement of Act iv.:

[709] Oldham's translation of Bion on the death of Adonis:

Dryden's Virg. Æn. iv. 984:

And in his Cleomenes, the end of Act iv.:

———sucking in each other's latest breath.—Wakefield.

[710] Rowe's ode to Delia:

[711] Dryden Æn., xi. 1194:

And from her cheeks the rosy colour flies.

[713] Spenser, Faerie Queen, i. 4, 45:

Cause of my new grief, cause of new joy.—Wakefield.

[714] Abelard and Eloisa were interred in the same grave, or in monuments adjoining, in the monastery of the Paraclete. He died in the year 1142, she in 1163 [4].—Pope.

Abelard and Heloisa are said to have been both sixty-three when they died. They were buried in the same crypt, but it was not till 1630, or near five hundred years after the death of Heloisa, that their remains were consigned to the same grave. Then their bones are reported to have been put into a double coffin, divided by a partition of lead. They subsequently underwent various disinterments and removals, till in 1817 the alleged relics were transferred to the cemetery of PÈre-Lachaise, at Paris, and have not since been disturbed.

[715] Dryden, in his translation of Canace to Macareus:

[716] Milton, Il Penseroso:

[717] "Dreadful sacrifice" is the ritual term. So in the History of Loretto, 1608, ch. 20, p. 278, "The priest, as the use is, assisted the cardinal in the time of the dreadful sacrifice."—Steevens.

[718] Warton says that the eight concluding lines of the Epistle "are rather flat and languid." It is indeed an absurd supposition that a woman who had been speaking the fervid language of christianity should imagine that her state in the world beyond the grave would be that of a "pensive ghost," and that her consolation would consist in having her woes "well-sung" on earth. And it is in the tremendous conflict between piety and passion, while divine and human love are contending fiercely for the mastery, that she finds relief in this unsubstantial idea that some future lover would make her the subject of a poem.

[719] The last line is imitated from Addison's Campaign.

This Pope had in his thoughts; but not knowing how to use what was not his own, he spoiled the thought when he had borrowed it. Martial exploits may be painted; perhaps woes may be painted; but they are surely not painted by being well sung: it is not easy to paint in song, or to sing in colours.—Johnson.

[720] Roscoe supposes Richardson to have asserted that there was an "entire discrepancy between the Essay on Man as published, and the original manuscripts," and to have implied that the change was from "infidelity" to its opposite. This is not the statement of Richardson. He says, on the contrary, that when the "exceptionable passages" were pointed out Pope "did not think of altering them," and "never dreamed of adopting" a more orthodox "scheme" for his Essay till after "its fatalism and deistical tendency" had excited that "general alarm" which could not precede the publication of the poem, and which only, in fact, commenced some three years later. Richardson is enforcing his charge against Warburton of inventing forced meanings, and the instance would contradict the accusation if Pope had altered his language from deism to orthodoxy before he printed the work. The commentary would then have expressed the natural sense of the text. The change of which Richardson speaks was not in the Essay itself, but in the interpretation Pope put upon it. While he was composing the poem he accepted the deistical construction of the Richardsons; and when he was terrified at the "general alarm" he endorsed the christian construction of Warburton.

[721] Dr. Desaguliers, the son of a French refugee, was born at Rochelle in 1683, and died, Feb. 29, 1744, at the Bedford Coffee-house, Covent Garden. He was a clergyman of the church of England, a great lover of science, and a friend of Newton. He delivered lectures for many years on Experimental Philosophy, and published an excellent work on the subject in 2 vols. 4to. He does not appear to have shown any turn for poetry, and those who ascribed to him the Essay on Man may have had no better ground for their opinion than that the poem treated of one kind of philosophy, and Desaguliers was learned in another.

[722] Thomas Catesby, Lord Paget, son of the Earl of Uxbridge, died before his father in Jan. 1742. He published in 1734, a poem called An Essay on Human Life; and in 1737 An Epistle to Mr. Pope, in Anti-heroics. "The former," says Horace Walpole, "is written in imitation of Pope's ethic epistles, and has good lines, but not much poetry."

[723] In the Life of Pope by the pretended Squire Ayre, it is said that "a certain gentleman," meaning Mallet, was at Pope's house shortly after the first Epistle was published, and in answer to the question "What new pieces were brought to light?" replied, "That there was a thing come out called an Essay on Man, and it was a most abominable piece of stuff; shocking poetry, insufferable philosophy, no coherence, no connection at all." Pope confessed he was the author, which, says Ayre, "was like a clap of thunder to the mistaken bard; with a blush and a bow he took his leave of Pope, and never ventured to show his unlucky face there again." The final statement is contradicted by the letters of Pope and Mallet, which prove that they carried on a cordial intercourse to the last. The rest of the story is improbable, for it is not likely that Pope, who was bent at this early period upon keeping the authorship a secret, would have unmasked himself in a manner to preclude confidence, and provoke Mallet to divulge the truth to the world. Ayre's authority is good for nothing, and Ruffhead only copied Ayre, but his repetition of the anecdote gave it currency, and it has ever since passed unquestioned from writer to writer.

[724] Warburton. "Your Travels I hear much of," says Pope in the letter to Swift; "my own I promise you shall never more be in a strange land, but a diligent, I hope, useful investigation of my own territories. I mean no more translations, but something domestic, fit for my own country, and my own time." The allusion is obscure, and it may be doubted whether Pope referred to his ethical scheme, which he did not commence till four years later.

[725] Bolingbroke.

[726] The authority was Lord Bathurst. Dr. Hugh Blair dined with him in 1763, and says in a letter to Boswell, that "the conversation turning on Mr. Pope, Lord Bathurst told us that the Essay on Man was originally composed by Lord Bolingbroke in prose, and that Mr. Pope did no more than put it into verse: that he had read Lord Bolingbroke's manuscript in his own handwriting, and remembered well that he was at a loss whether most to admire the elegance of Lord Bolingbroke's prose, or the beauty of Mr. Pope's verse." Boswell read the account to Johnson, who replied, "Depend upon it, sir, this is too strongly stated. Pope may have had from Bolingbroke the philosophic stamina of his Essay, and admitting this to be true, Lord Bathurst did not intentionally falsify. But the thing is not true in the latitude that Blair seems to imagine; we are sure that the poetical imagery, which makes a great part of the poem, was Pope's own."

[727] The first treatise of Crousaz was translated by Miss Carter, and published in 1738, under the title of An Examination of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man. The second treatise was translated by Johnson himself, and published in 1742, with the title, A Commentary on Mr. Pope's Principles of Morality.

[728] Theobald's Shakespeare was published in 1733, the same year with the first three epistles of the Essay on Man.

[729] Warburton's first letter in vindication of Pope appeared in The Works of the Learned, December 1738. The journal called The Present State of the Republic of Letters, had come to an end in 1736.

[730] Jacob Robinson, a bookseller in Fleet-street, was the publisher of The Works of the Learned, to which Warburton sent his five letters in reply to Crousaz.

[731] This was done in 1740, when the five letters were expanded into six. A seventh letter was added in a subsequent edition, and the whole was re-arranged in four letters in the edition of 1742.

[732] Ruffhead's Life of Pope, p. 219.

[733] Warton states that Dobson relinquished the undertaking from the impossibility of preserving in Latin verse the conciseness of the English. He appears to have accomplished half his task; for when Christopher Smart subsequently volunteered his services, Pope said in his reply, Nov. 18, 1740, "The two first epistles are already well done." A specimen from Dobson's translation of each of these epistles was among the papers of Spence, and is printed in the appendix to Mr. Singer's edition of the Anecdotes. A version of the Essay in Latin hexameters appeared at Wirtemberg. This, Pope tells Smart, was "very faithful but inelegant," and he adds that his reason for desiring a more adequate rendering was that either the sense or the poetry was lost in all the foreign translations.

[734] By "his friend," Johnson means Warburton, not Dobson.

[735] This sort of burlesque abstract, which may be so easily but so unjustly made of any composition whatever, is exactly similar to the imperfect and unfair representation which the same critic has given of the beautiful imagery in Il Penseroso of Milton.—Warton.

Johnson's criticism of a poem like this, cannot be compared with his futile declamation against the imagery of the Penseroso. For in speaking of the Penseroso, Johnson spoke of what I do not hesitate to say he did not understand. He had no congenial feelings properly to appreciate the character of such poetry; but the case is different where he brings his great mind to try, by the test of truth, arguments and doctrines which appeal to the understanding. Johnson was not an inadequate judge of Pope's philosophy, though he was certainly so of Milton's poetry. But no composition could possibly stand before his contemptuous declamation.—Bowles.

[736] Bowles himself had a low opinion of the "system of philosophy" embodied in the Essay on Man. After stating that Pope was the pupil of Bolingbroke, he adds, "But this poem will continue to charm from the music of its verse, the splendour of its diction, and the beauty of its illustrations, when the philosophy that gave rise to it, like the coarse manure that fed the flowers, is perceived and remembered no more."

[737] Burke's Works, ed. 1808, vol. v. p. 172.

[738] Spence, p. 108, 127.

[739] Essay on Man, Epist. iv. ver. 391. Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iii. p. 40. "You have begun at my request the work which I have wished long that you would undertake."

[740] Spence, p. 238.

[741] Spence, p. 36.

[742] Spence, p. 103.

[743] Pope to Swift, Sept. 15, 1734.

[744] Spence, p. 12.

[745] Warton's Essay on the Genius of Pope, 5th ed. vol. ii. p. 149.

[746] "It may safely," says Lord Kames, "be pronounced a capital defect in the composition of a verse, to put a low word, incapable of an accent, in the place where this accent should be," and he instances the last syllable of "dependencies," in Pope's Essay on Man, Epist. i. ver. 30:

What appeared a defect to Lord Kames will seem to many persons an advantage. The want of accent softens the rhyme, and relieves the monotonous, cloying effect of a full concord of sound. In most of Pope's imperfect rhymes the similarity of sound is too slight, and the ear is disappointed.

[747] Letters by Eminent Persons, 2nd ed. vol. ii. p. 48.

[748] Spence, p. 108.

[749] Warburton's Works, vol. xii. p. 335.

[750] Bolingbroke's Works, Philadelphia, vol. iii. pp. 40, 45; vol. iv. p. 111.

[751] Warburton's Works, vol. xii. p. 336.

[752] Grimouard, Essai sur Bolingbroke, quoted by Cooke, Memoirs of Bolingbroke, vol. ii. p. 96.

[753] Chesterfield's Works, ed. Mahon, vol. ii. p. 445.

[754] Ruffhead, Life of Pope, p. 219. The manuscript of this passage exists in Warburton's handwriting. Ruffhead altered two or three words, which are here restored from the original.

[755] Warburton's Works, vol. xii. p. 91.

[756] Spence, who wrote down the anecdote from Warburton's conversation, says that Hooke talked of "Lord Bolingbroke's disbelief of the moral attributes of God," which agrees substantially with the language in Ruffhead.

[757] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iv. p. 320.

[758] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iv. pp. 23, 24; vol. iii. p. 430.

[759] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iv. p. 111.

[760] Essay on Man, Epist. ii. ver. 1; iv. ver. 398, and the additional couplet in the note.

[761] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iv. pp. 175, 152.

[762] Warburton's Works, vol. xii. p. 335.

[763] Warburton's Works, vol. xii. p. 88.

[764] Warburton's Works, vol. xii. p. 336.

[765] Warburton, Note on Epist. ii. ver. 149.

[766] Warburton, Note on Epist. iii. ver. 303.

[767] Warburton, Note on Epist. iii. ver. 303.

[768] Epist. ii. ver. 274; Epist. iii. ver. 286.

[769] Epist. iii. ver. 305.

[770] Warburton's Works, vol. xii. p. 335.

[771] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iv. p. 436.

[772] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iv. pp. 333, 366. "The imperfection of the parts," says Leibnitz, Opera, p. 638, "produce a greater perfection in the whole." According to his custom, Bolingbroke copied Leibnitz without naming him.

[773] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iii. p. 41.

[774] Pope's Correspondence, ed. Elwin, vol. i. p. 339.

[775] Pope's Correspondence, vol. i. pp. 339, 345, 346, 348.

[776] Spence, p. 107.

[777] Middleton to Warburton, Jan. 7, 1740.

[778] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iv. p. 262.

[779] Spence, p. 238.

[780] Watson's Life of Warburton, p. 15.

[781] Warburton's Letters to Hurd, p. 224.

[782] Tyers, Historical Rhapsody, p. 78.

[783] For this we have the authority of Dr. Law, the Bishop of Carlisle, in the preface to his translation of King's Origin of Evil.

[784] Prior's Life of Malone, p. 430. Warton's Pope, vol. i. p. xlv.

[785] Warburton's Commentary on Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, ed. 1742, p. 182.

[786] Warburton's Pope, Essay on Man, Epist. ii. ver. 31.

[787] Warton's Pope, vol. iii. p. 162.

[788] Warburton's Commentary on Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, p. 121.

[789] Warburton's Letters to Hurd, p. 224.

[790] Warburton to Dr. Doddridge, Feb. 12, 1739, in Nichols, Illustrations of Literary History, vol. ii. p. 816.

[791] Warburton's Vindication of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, 1740, p. 83.

[792] Nichols, Illustrations of Literary History, vol. ii. p. 113.

[793] Warburton's Pope, Epist. iv. ver. 394.

[794] Warton's Pope, vol. ix. p. 342.

[795] Nichols, Illustrations of Lit. Hist., vol. ii. p. 53.

[796] Warburton's Works, vol. xii. pp. 92, 185.

[797] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iii. p. 53.

[798] Pope to Warburton, Sept. 20, 1739; Jan. 4, 1740.

[799] Œuvres de Louis Racine, ed. 1808, tom. i. p. 444. "If," said Voltaire, "Pope wrote this letter to Racine, God must have given him at the close of his life the gift of tongues." Voltaire repeats three times over in his works, that he associated with Pope for a twelvemonth, and knew, what was publicly notorious in England, that he could hardly read French, and could not speak one word or write one line of the language. The objection was founded on the mistaken assumption that the French translation was the original letter. In the later editions of Racine's poem the letter is printed from Pope's English. Voltaire was annoyed that Pope should "retract" his deism, and wanted to have it believed that Ramsay alone was responsible for the sentiments expressed in the letter to Racine.

[800] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iii. p. 457.

[801] Ruffhead, Life of Pope, p. 542. Spence, p. 277.

[802] Œuvres de Louis Racine, tom. i. p. 451.

[803] Œuvres de Louis Racine, tom. i. p. 442.

[804] Spence, p. 231.

[805] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iii. p. 62.

[806] Epist. ii. ver. i.

[807] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iii. p. 52.

[808] Leibnitz, Opera Philosophica, ed. Erdmann, pp. 506, 544.

[809] Hume's Essays, ed. 1809, vol. ii. pp. 146, 147, 152.

[810] Hume's Essays, vol. ii. p. 153.

[811] John, xv. 2.

[812] Phillimore's Life of Lord Lyttelton, vol. i. p. 304.

[813] Leibnitz, Opera, p. 628.

[814] Epist. i. ver. 159, 151-4.

[815] Epist. i. ver. 141-6.

[816] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iv. p. 366.

[817] Leibnitz, Opera, pp. 571, 577.

[818] Epist. i. ver. 147, iv. ver. 115.

[819] Epist. iv. ver. 116, note.

[820] Leibnitz, Opera, pp. 312, 431, 507, 603.

[821] Epist. i. ver. 241-258.

[822] Epist. i. ver. 47-8.

[823] Epist. i. ver. 43-50.

[824] Voltaire, Œuvres, tom. xlvii. p. 98.

[825] Jeremiah, ix. 23, 24.

[826] John, xiv. 9.

[827] Epist. ii. ver. 1-2.

[828] Epist. ii. ver. 3-18.

[829] Epist. i. 61-8.

[830] Epist. ii. ver. 53-8.

[831] Warburton's Commentary, Epist. ii. ver. 53.

[832] Epist. ii. ver. 235-8.

[833] Epist. ii. ver. 53.

[834] Epist. i. ver. 131.

[835] Epist. ii. ver. 126.

[836] Madame de StaËl, De l'Allemagne, Part iii., Chap. 16.

[837] Butler's Sermons, Oxford, 1835, pp. xx., 8, 161.

[838] A man may eat from principle, which often happens with the sick when they are wishing to die, and appetite is extinct. For the same reason they may eat delicacies when the stomach rebels against common fare. This was the case with Pascal in his illness, and, from a mistaken asceticism, he endeavoured to swallow the choice food without tasting it.

[839] Epist. ii. ver. 70, 113, 116, 119-22.

[840] Epist. ii. ver. 131-148, 157.

[841] Epist. ii. ver. 138, 147.

[843] Fable of the Bees, ninth edition, vol. i. p. 137.

[844] Epist. ii. ver. 175, 197.

[845] Epist. ii. ver. 185-194.

[846] Epist. ii. ver. 59, 67.

[847] Epist. ii. ver. 147.

[848] Epist. ii. ver. 201.

[849] Matthew, xii. 33.

[850] Epist. iii. ver. 261.

[851] Epist. ii. ver. 185-194, 196.

[852] Spence, p. 9.

[853] Epist. ii. ver. 216, note.

[854] Epist. ii. ver. 245.

[855] Epist. ii. ver. 285-292.

[856] Epist. ii. ver. 291. Spence, p. 109.

[857] Epist. ii. ver. 238.

[858] Argument of Epist. ii.

[859] Epist. ii. ver. 241-4.

[860] Epist. ii. ver. 272.

[861] Epist. ii. ver. 286-7.

[862] Epist. ii. ver. 288.

[863] Epist. ii. ver. 268.

[864] Bolingbroke, Works, vol. iv. p. 154.

[865] Epist. ii. ver. 273.

[866] Epist. ii. ver. 275-282.

[867] Epist. ii. ver. 293-4.

[868] Epist. iii. ver. 149.

[869] Epist. iii. ver. 209.

[870] Epist. iii. ver. 232-40.

[871] Epist. iii. ver. 201-6.

[872] Epist. iii. ver. 149-168.

[873] Epist. iii. ver. 245.

[874] Epist. iii. ver. 221.

[875] Epist. iii. ver. 154, 217.

[876] Epist. i. ver. 165-170.

[877] Epist. iii. ver. 169-198.

[878] Epist. iii. ver. 179-182.

[879] Epist. iii. ver. 183-188, 210.

[880] Epist. iii. ver. 303.

[881] Epist. iii. ver. 269, 279.

[882] Epist. iii. ver. 305.

[883] Epist. iii. ver. 307-310.

[884] Epist. iv. ver. 331.

[885] Epist. iv. ver. 111-115.

[886] Spence, p. 107.

[887] Spence, p. 206.

[888] Epist. i. ver. 16.

[889] The Design, post, p. 343.

[890] Epist. iii. ver. 19.

[891] Epist. i. ver. 73, 93-4.

[892] Epist. iv. ver. 310. Argument to Epist. iv.

[893] Epist. iv. ver. 66.

[894] Epist. iv. ver. 167-172.

[895] Mackintosh, Miscellaneous Works, ed. 1851, p. 13.

[896] Epist. iv. ver. 57.

[897] Epist. iv. ver. 69-72.

[898] Recollections by Samuel Rogers, pp. 31, 35.

[899] Argument to Epist. iv.

[900] Epist. iv. ver. 77-80.

[901] Bolingbroke's Works, Vol. iv., p. 378.

[902] Epist. iv. ver. 149.

[903] Epist. iv. ver. 87.

[904] Epist. iv. ver. 89.

[905] Epist. iv. ver. 98.

[906] Epist. iv. ver. 99-102.

[907] Epist. iv. ver. 98, 121-130.

[908] Matt. x. 29-31.

[909] Wollaston, Religion of Nature Delineated, 7th ed., p. 192.

[910] Epist. iv. ver. 105.

[911] Epist. iv. ver. 149-155.

[912] Epist. iv. ver. 156.

[913] Philipp. iv. 11.

[914] Heb. xii. 11.

[915] Epist. iv. ver. 157-166.

[916] Epist. iv. ver. 189-192.

[917] Epist. iv. ver. 193-204.

[918] Epist. iv. ver. 205-258.

[919] Epist. iv. ver. 259-268.

[920] Henry V., Act iv., Sc. 1.

[921] Epist. ii. ver. 85.

[922] Epist. iv. ver. 19.

[923] Epist. iv. ver. 23, 28.

[924] Bolingbroke's Works, vol. iii. p. 286.

[925] Epist. iv. ver. 29.

[926] Epist. ii. ver. 35-42.

[927] Epist. iv. ver. 29-34.

[928] Rasselas, chap. xxii.

[929] Butler, Sermons, Preface, pp. vii., xi.

[930] Bolingbroke, Works, vol. iv. p. 430.

[931] The Design. See post, p. 344.

[932] De Quincey, Works, ed. 1863, vol. viii. pp. 21, 51; xii. pp, 25, 33.

[933] De Quincey, Works, vol. viii. p. 44.

[934] Johnson, Lives of the Poets, vol. iii. p. 105.

[935] De Quincey, Works, vol. xii. p. 32.

[936] Voltaire, Œuvres, tom. xii. p. 156; xxxvii. p. 260.

[937] Marmontel, ÉlÉments de LittÉrature, Art. Épitre.

[938] Dugald Stewart, Works, ed. Hamilton, vol. vii. p. 133.

[939] Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, ed. 1841, p. 147.

[940] De Quincey, Works, vol. viii. p. 42.

[941] Life of Byron by Moore, 1 vol. ed. p. 696.

[942] Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, pp. 375, 377-8.

[943] Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, p. 374.

[944] De Quincey, Works, vol. xii. pp. 21, 22.

[945] De Quincey, Works, vol. viii. pp. 45-50; xii. 297-303.

[946] Marmontel, ÉlÉments de LittÉrature, Art. Didactique.

[947] Bolingbroke, Works, vol. iii. p. 44.

[948] Bolingbroke, Works, vol. ii. p. 220; iii. p. 128.

[949] De Quincey, Works, vol. viii. p. 50.

[950] Milton, Comus, ver. 476.

[951] Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets, p. 378.

[952] De Quincey, Works, vol. viii. p. 51.

[953] Taine, Histoire de la LittÉrature Anglaise, 2nd ed. tom. iii. p. 91; iv. pp. 172-176, 203.

[954] Taine, tom. iv. p. 175.

[955] This prefatory notice only appeared in the first edition of the first epistle.

[956] "Whose" is by some authors made the possessive case of "which," and applied to things as well as persons.—Lowth.

[957] Two "Epistles to Mr. Pope concerning the Authors of the Age," by the poet Young. They were published in 1730.

[958] The second Epistle of the Essay on Man had the brief preface which follows: "The author has been induced to publish these Epistles separately for two reasons, the one that he might not impose upon the public too much at once of what he thinks incorrect; the other, that by this method he might profit of its judgment on the parts, in order to make the whole less unworthy of it."

[959] "The Design" was prefixed in 1735, when Pope inserted the four Epistles of the Essay on Man in his works.

[960] The early editions have "forming out of all."

[961] For "St. John" the manuscript has "Memmius," and the first edition "LÆlius." Memmius was an author and orator of no great distinction to whom Lucretius dedicated his De Rerum Natura. LÆlius was celebrated for his statesmanship, his philosophical pursuits, and his friendship, and is described by Horace as delighting, on his retirement from public affairs, in the society of the poet Lucilius. Thus the name was fitted to the functions of Bolingbroke, and the relation in which he stood to Pope.

[962] Pope's manuscript supplies various readings of this line:

In a letter to Swift, Dec. 19, 1734, Pope says that the couplet was a monitory, and ineffectual hint to Bolingbroke, to give up politics for philosophy. If the censure was directed against the party vices of the man the reproof is inconsistent with the eulogy on his patriotism, Epist. iv. ver. 265, and if against his pursuit in the abstract, it is folly to say that statesmanship is one of the "meaner things" which should be left to "low ambition," and empty "pride."

[963] MS.:

Since life, my friend, can, etc.

[964] Denham, of Prudence:

the latter of which verses our poet has inserted without alteration in his Prologue to the Satires, ver. 262.—Wakefield.

[965] This exordium relates to the whole work, first in general, then in particular. The 6th, 7th, and 8th lines allude to the subjects of this book,—the general order and design of Providence; the constitution of the human mind, whose passions cultivated are virtues, neglected vices; the temptations of misapplied self-love, and wrong pursuits of power, pleasure, and false happiness.—Pope.

"The whole work" was to have been in four books, and the phrase "this book" means the four published Epistles of the Essay on Man, which were to form the first book of the full design.

[966] In the first edition,

A mighty maze of walks without a plan.

This Pope altered because, says Johnson, "if there was no plan it was vain to describe or to trace the maze."

[967] The 6th verse alludes to the subject of this first Epistle—the state of man here and hereafter, disposed by Providence, though to him unknown.—Pope.

[968] Alludes to the subject of the second Epistle,—the passions, their good or evil.—Pope.

[969] Alludes to the subject of the fourth Epistle,—of man's various pursuits of happiness or pleasure.—Pope.

[970] The 10th, 13th, and 14th verses allude to the subject of the second Epistle of the second book,—the characters of men and manners.—Pope.

The four published Moral Essays were a portion of the projected second book.

[971] The 11th and 12th verses allude to the subject of the first Epistle of the second book,—the limits of reason, learning, and ignorance.—Pope.

This Epistle was never written, but some part of the matter was incorporated into the fourth Book of the Dunciad.

[972] MS.:

Those who "blindly creep" are the ignorant and indifferent; those who "sightless soar" are the presumptuous, who endeavour to transcend the bounds prescribed to the intellect of man.

[973] Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, Part ii.:

Dryden, Aurengzebe, Act iii.:

Youth should watch joys and shoot 'em as they fly.

[974] These metaphors, drawn from the field sports of setting and shooting, seem much below the dignity of the subject, and an unnatural mixture of the ludicrous and serious.—Warton.

They are the more so as Pope is not content with barely touching the metaphor of shooting en passant, but pursues it with so much minuteness. Let us "beat this ample field,"—"try what the covert yields,"—"eye nature's walks,"—"shoot folly." An illustration, if not at all dignified, or in correspondence with the theme, should not be pursued so minutely that the mind must perforce observe its meanness.—Bowles.

[975] "Candid" here bears the unusual sense of "lenient and favourable in our judgment."

[976] Alludes to the subject which runs through the whole design,—the justification of the methods of Providence.—Pope.

Milton, Par. Lost, i. 26:

And justify the ways of God to men.—Warton.

[977] The last part of the verse is barbarously elliptical. The meaning is that all our reasonings respecting the end of man must be drawn from his station here, and to this station we must refer all that we learn respecting him. Since we can know nothing but what relates to our present condition, the doctrine of a future life is excluded.

[978] MS.:

[979] MS.:

[980] "And what" was the reading of all editions till that of 1743. Wollaston's Religion of Nature, ed. 1750, p. 143: "The fixed stars are so many other suns with their several sets of planets about them."

[981] MS.:

What other habitants in ev'ry star.

[982] This was the reading of the first edition which Pope ultimately restored, but in the edition of 1735 the line stands thus:

May tell why heav'n made all things as they are.

Pope's assertion in the text that it is impossible for us to "tell why heaven has made us as we are," unless we had a complete insight into the plan of universal creation, contradicts ver. 48, where he says that "it is plain there must be somewhere such a rank as man."

[983] First edition: "And centres."

[984] Bolingbroke, Fragment 43: "As distant as are the various systems, and systems of systems that compose the universe, and different as we may imagine them to be, they are all tied together by relations and connections, by gradations and dependencies."—Wakefield.

[985] Pascal's Thoughts, translated by Dr. Kennet, 2nd ed., 1727, p. 288: "If a man did but begin with the study of himself he would soon find how incapable he was of proceeding further. For what possibility is there that the part should contain the whole?"

[986] I should have pointed out the expression and great effect of this line as illustrating the subject it describes; but Ruffhead says "it is the most heavy, languid, and unpoetical of all Pope ever wrote, and that the expletive 'to' before the verb is unpardonable."—Bowles.

[987] An allusion to the golden chain of Homer, which the poet represents as sustained by Jove, with the whole creation appended to it.—Wakefield.

[988] "Why one reason," says Wakefield, "should be harder than the other I am unable to discern." The passage is taken, as Warton pointed out, from Voltaire's remarks on Pascal's Thoughts, but Voltaire put the questions on the same footing, and did not pretend that the second was harder to solve than the first. "You are astonished," he says "that God has made man so contracted, so ignorant, and so unhappy. Why are you not astonished that he has not made him more contracted, more ignorant, and more unhappy?" Neither question ought to have presented any difficulty to Pope, since it was "plain" to him that "the best possible system" required that "there should be somewhere such a rank as man." All who admit the attributes of the Deity must allow that every portion of the world, sentient or insensible, is the consummation of wisdom with reference to its place in the infinite and eternal scheme. "God," says Leibnitz, "does not even neglect inanimate things; they are unconscious, but God is conscious for them. He would reproach himself with the least real defect in the universe, although no one perceived it."

[990] This word is commonly pronounced in prose with the e mute in the plural, as in the singular, and is therefore only of three syllables; but Pope has in the plural continued the Latin form and assigned it four. I think, improperly.—Johnson.

[991] Pope says that we cannot tell why Jupiter's satellites are less than Jupiter. Any mathematician could have shown him that if Jupiter was less than his satellites they would not revolve round him.—Voltaire.

Warburton, to evade Voltaire's criticism, put a strained and paraphrastic interpretation upon Pope's lines. Their natural meaning is, that man is too ignorant to comprehend why he is not less instead of greater,—nay, that he cannot even tell why oaks are taller than weeds, why Jupiter's satellites are less than Jupiter, and all his investigations into the earth and the heavens will not supply him with the answer.

[992] Pope did not generally condescend to the artificial inversion which places the adjective after the substantive. Here, in a passage where simplicity was an object, we have "systems possible" followed by "wisdom infinite,"—combinations, too, which have the effect of producing a disagreeable monotony, occurring in the same part of the lines to which they respectively belong.—Conington.

[993] Bolingbroke, Fragment 43: "Since infinite wisdom not only established the end, but directed the means, the system of the universe must necessarily be the best of all possible systems."—Wakefield.

[994] There must be no interval, that is, between the parts, or they will not cohere.

[995] Bolingbroke, Fragment 43: "It might be determined in the divine ideas that there should be a gradation of life and intellect throughout the universe. In this case it was necessary that there should be some creatures at our pitch of rationality."—Wakefield.

The theory of a chain of beings was adopted by Bolingbroke and Pope from Archbishop King's Essay on the Origin of Evil. Arguing from the analogy of our own world, King contended that a universe fully peopled with superior natures would leave room for an inferior grade, and these for lower grades still, in a continuously descending scale. There must either be inferior creatures, or else voids in creation, and we may presume that the maximum of existence is most conducive to the ends of benevolence and wisdom.

[996] MS.:

Is but if God has placed his creature wrong.

[997] Bolingbroke, Fragment 50: "The seeming imperfection of the parts is necessary to the real perfection of the whole."—Wakefield.

The sentence quoted by Wakefield was copied by Bolingbroke from Leibnitz. Lord Shaftesbury adopted the same hypothesis in his Inquiry concerning Virtue. If, he says, our earth is a part only of some other system, and if what is ill in our system makes for the good of the general system, then there is nothing ill with respect to the whole. Rousseau, who heartily embraced the doctrine, remarks that "we cannot give direct proofs for or against, because these proofs depend on a complete knowledge of the constitution of the universe, and of the ends of its author."

[998] Bolingbroke, Fragments 43 and 63: "We labour hard, we complicate various means to bring about some one paltry purpose.—In the works of men the most complicated schemes produce very hardly and very uncertainly one single effect: in the works of God one single scheme produces a multitude of different effects, and answers an immense variety of purposes."—Wakefield.

How clearly and closely is this sentiment expressed by Pope, and yet how difficult to render into verse with precision and effect.—Bowles.

In the first line the phrase "one single," for "one single movement," is especially inelegant. Bowles might have selected many couplets from the Essay on Man more deserving of the commendation. The thought which Pope owed to Bolingbroke, Bolingbroke owed to Leibnitz, who says in his ThÉodicÉe, "Everything in nature is connected, and if a skilful artizan, engineer, architect, statesman, often makes the same contrivance serve for several purposes, we may affirm that God, whose wisdom and power are perfect, does so always." Hence Pope contends that what is defective in man considered separately, may be advantageous in relation to the hidden ends he is intended to serve.

[999] Bolingbroke, Fragments 43: "We ought to consider the world no otherwise than as a little wheel in our solar system; nor our solar system any otherwise than as a little but larger wheel in the immense machine of the universe; and both the one and the other necessary perhaps to the motion of the whole."—Wakefield.

[1000] MS.:

We see but here a part, etc.

[1001] Since the monarchy of the universe is a dominion unlimited in extent, and everlasting in duration, the general system of it must necessarily be quite beyond our comprehension. And since there appears such a subordination, and reference of the several parts to each other, as to constitute it properly one administration or government, we cannot have a thorough knowledge of any part without knowing the whole. This surely should convince us that we are much less competent judges of the very small part which comes under our notice in this world than we are apt to imagine.—Bishop Butler.

[1002] MS.:

[1003] In the former editions,

Now wears a garland an Egyptian god.—Warburton.

A bull was kept at Memphis by the Egyptians, and worshipped, under the name of Apis, as a god. Other oxen were sacrificed to him, which brought the bovine "victims" and the bovine "god" into direct contrast.

[1004] Pope may mean that we cannot tell with respect to the general scheme of Providence why we are made what we are, in which case he unsays what he had said just before, that "it is plain there must be somewhere such a rank as man." Or he may mean that we cannot tell with respect to ourselves the use and end of our being and its vicissitudes, in which case the doctrine would debase every person who received it, by diverting him from his true end, which is to imitate and adore the perfections of God.

[1005] The expression, "as he ought," is imperfect for "ought to be."—Warton.

[1006] Bolingbroke, Frag. 50: "The nature of every creature is adapted to his state here, to the place he is to inhabit."

[1007] This line is the application to man of the language which the schoolmen applied to the Deity,—that his eternity was a moment, and his immensity a point. The couplet in the MS. was at first as follows:

[1008] MS.:

What then, imports it whether here or there?

[1009] Ed. 1:

Omitted in the subsequent editions.—Pope.

This note appeared, 1735, in vol. 2 of the quarto edition of Pope's Poetical Works. The lines originally followed ver. 98, and when they re-appeared in the text in 1743 they were shifted to their present position. They are especially bad,—elliptical and prosaic in expression, and sophistical in argument. The suffering which matters nothing when it is over is not unimportant while it lasts. A prolonged imprisonment in a noisome dungeon does not cease to be a penalty because the captive will one day be free. The Bible recognises the bitterness of human misery, but teaches that christians are to be reconciled to it on account of the moral purposes it subserves, and the endless felicity which ensues. Pope notes in his MS. that ver. 76 is "reversed from Lucretius on death," and Wakefield quotes the translation of Dryden which Pope copied:

[1010] See this pursued in Epist. iii. ver. 66, etc., ver. 79, etc.—Pope.

[1011] This resembles PhÆdrus, Fab. v. 15:

[1012] Matt. x. 29.—Warburton.

Pope, in the MS., had expanded the idea, and added this couplet:

It is doubtful whether Virgil was the author of the Culex or Gnat, which, says Mr. Long, "is a kind of Bucolic poem in 413 hexameters, often very obscure." Pope's assertion that there is "no great, no little," is contradicted by the passage in St. Matthew to which Warburton refers. Our Lord there assures us that "we are of more value than many sparrows," and the ruin of a world, with its myriad of sentient beings, must be of infinitely greater moment in the sight of the Deity than the bursting of a bubble. Pope repeats, ver. 279, a statement which is repugnant to reason, to revelation, and to his own system of a scale of beings.

[1013] MS.:

Systems like atoms into ruin hurled.

[1014] Edit. 1. Fol. and Quart.:

Further opened in Epist. ii. ver. 283. Epist. iii. ver. 74. Epist. iv. ver. 346, etc.—Pope.

[1015] Pope has frequently contradicted this line, and allowed that men who place their happiness in right objects, and use the recognised means, enjoy a present pleasure, in addition to the hope of an equal or greater pleasure in the future. This hope in turn is constantly realised, in contradiction to the lively saying ascribed to Lord Bacon, that "hope makes a good breakfast, but a bad supper."

[1016] All editions till that of 1743 had "at" for "from." The home of the soul was this world according to the first reading, and the next world according to the second. The alteration was made under the auspices of Warburton to get rid of the imputation that Pope doubted or disbelieved the immortality of the soul.

[1017] MS.:

Seeks God in clouds or on the wings of wind.

The savage, that is, being ignorant of scientific laws, supposes the wind and the rain to be produced directly by the Deity without the interposition of secondary causes.

[1018] Dryden, Threnod. August. Stanza 12:

Out of the solar walk and heaven's highway.—Hurd.

[1019] The ancient opinion that the souls of the just went thither. See Tully, Som. Scipion. and Manilius i. [ver. 733-799.]—Pope.

Virtue is in Cicero the title of admission into the milky way, but the version which Manilius gives of the popular creed assumes that the milky way is the general receptacle for earthly celebrities, without any special regard to their morals.

[1020] Shakespeare, Tempest, Act iv. Sc. 1. "The cloud-capped towers."

[1021] Dryden, Æn. vii. 310:

From that dire deluge through the wat'ry waste.—Wakefield.

MS.:

Pope must have assumed that the Indian's hope of a blissful immortality was an unsubstantial dream, or he would not have called it "nature's flattery."

[1022] MS.:

There is an earlier form of the last couplet:

[1023] So in Homer, at the funeral of Patroclus, xxiii. 212, of our poet's translation:

[1024] "Sense" is put for "the senses," and Pope exclaims against the folly of censuring the government of God on the strength of the imperfect information which the senses supply.

[1025] Bolingbroke, Fragment 25: "This is to weigh his own opinion against Providence." Pope adduces the contented faith of the savage to rebuke the dissatisfaction of certain civilised men. The contrast completely fails. The contentment and dissatisfaction are applied by Pope to different objects, the contentment of the savage being limited to his idea of a future life, whereas the dissatisfaction of civilised man is said to be chiefly with his present condition, about which the savage is often dissatisfied likewise. The imperfect information of missionaries is not even sufficient warrant for asserting that all Indians believed in a future state, and if there were dissentients among them their case did not differ from that of civilised men. Above all the contentment of the Indian is the result of grovelling views, and uninquiring ignorance, and whatever may be the errors of infidels among ourselves they cannot be remedied by an appeal to those blind conceptions of the savage, which Pope supposed to be false. "Our flattering ourselves here," he said to Spence, "with the thoughts of enjoying the company of our friends when in the other world may be but too like the Indians thinking that they shall have their dogs and horses there."

[1026] First edition:

Pronounce He acts too little or too much.

[1027] "Gust," or the relish for anything, is the opposite of "disgust," and is applied by Pope to the pleasures of the palate. The word is found in Dryden, and several other writers, but never came into general use.

[1028] MS.:

Yet if unhappy think tis He's unjust,

which is the reading of the first edition, except that "thou" is substituted for "if."

[1029] The meaning cannot be that the caviller complained that other creatures were made perfect as well as himself, because nobody supposed that either men or animals were perfect. Pope apparently means that these persons complained that man was not an exception to the general law of imperfection and mortality, although he "alone" would then have been "perfect" in this world, and immortal in the next. It follows that the objectors disbelieved in the immortality of the soul, and that Pope thought their demand for immortality unreasonable.

[1030] The "balance" in which qualities are weighed; the "rod" with which offences are chastised.

[1031] Divines maintained that there must be a future state, or that many of the phenomena of this life would be inexplicable. Bolingbroke rejected a future state, and argued that this life was a scheme complete in itself. All who did not concur in his view "joined," he said, "in a clamour against Providence," and "murmured against his justice." Not that they had ever uttered a syllable against Providence, for they were devout and humble adorers of his perfections, but they denied that Bolingbroke's scheme was God's scheme, and Bolingbroke in his arrogance and passion insisted that whoever repudiated his philosophy set himself up against God. Pope versified the declamation of Bolingbroke, without pointing it to the class against whom it was originally directed.

[1032] The first edition reads "In pride, my friend, in pride," and the edition of 1735, "In reas'ning pride, my friend."

[1033] Verbatim from Bolingbroke: "Men would be angels, and we see in Milton that angels would be gods."—Warton.

Sir Fulk Greville, "Works, 1633, p. 73:

Men would be tyrants, tyrants would be gods."—Hurd.

[1034] Lord Bacon's Advancement of Learning, ed. Montagu, p. 267: "Aspiring to be like God in power, the angels transgressed and fell; aspiring to be like God in knowledge, man transgressed and fell."

[1035] Piety must equally answer with grateful adoration that all these things have been created for the use of man. The error of pride is in the assumption that they have been created for man alone, who is only one out of an infinity of creatures on our globe, as our globe again is only a portion of a larger system. Hence Pope intends us to infer, that it is folly for us to test all things by the consequences to ourselves. The language, however, which he puts into the mouth of pride is extravagant, and "can hardly," says M. Crousaz, "have been ever uttered by any one, unless it were in jest."

[1036] MS.:

[1037] Garth, Dispensary, i. 175:

His couch a trench, his canopy the skies.—Wakefield.

Pope remembered Isaiah lxvi. 1: "Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool." No sane man could ever pretend that "earth was his footstool," and Pope alone is responsible for the unbecoming misapplication of the prophet's language.

[1038] MS.:

[1039] "A nation" in the first edition. The expression is hyperbolical. Pope alludes to such catastrophes as the inundation of Jutland when the sea broke down the dykes in 1634, and fifteen thousand people were drowned. Irruptions on a smaller scale have sometimes been occasioned by the rising of the sea during an earthquake. In that of 1783 the inhabitants of Scilla, in the kingdom of Naples, deserted their city to avoid being crushed by the falling houses, and fled to the shore. A mighty wave, which swept three miles inland, carried back with it 2473 persons, and their prince among the number. Cowper, The Task, ii. 117, has recorded the tragedy in his grandest verse:

[1040] Pope says, that "earthquakes swallow towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep," where "to" should be "in." But this would not have suited the phrase "tempests sweep," and the poet preferred brevity to correctness.

[1041] First edition:

The government by general laws, we are told, has "a few exceptions," which must either refer to the scripture miracles, which Pope did not believe when he wrote the Essay on Man, or to the doctrine of a special providence, which he opposes in the fourth epistle.

[1042] "Some change" for "there has been some change," is bad English. The argument is not superior to the language. Plagues, earthquakes, and tempests, say the vindicators of nature, may in part be explained by the changes which have taken place since the creation of the world. Pope, Epist. iv. ver. 115, repeats that "evil" has been "admitted" through "change." As no reason is assigned for this conversion of physical good into physical evil, the supposition does not diminish the difficulty.

[1043] On a cursory reading we might understand Pope to mean that nature sometimes deviates from her stated course for the purpose of promoting human happiness. This sense does not agree with the context, and the true interpretation is, that if the great end of terrestrial creation is allowed to be human happiness, then it is clear that nature sometimes deviates from that end, as in the instance of plagues and earthquakes.

[1044] The assertion is monstrous that we cannot be expected to control our evil passions because nature has her storms, diseases, and earthquakes. This is not to justify the ways of God, but the ways of wicked men. The physical evil ordained by the ruler of the world, cannot be put upon the same foundation with the moral evil which reason and revelation condemn. Sin is permitted because it is better that offences should exist than that free will should be destroyed, but it is lamentable that we should will to do evil in preference to good. The justification of the abuses of free will is a distinct proposition from the argument into which Pope glides, that it is not harder to understand why man should be allowed to be a scourge to man than why suffering should be inflicted through the agency of earthquakes and pestilence.

[1045] To draw a parallel between things of a nature entirely different is mere sophistry. A continual spring would be fatal to the earth and its inhabitants, but how would the world suffer if men were always wise, calm, and temperate?—Crousaz.

[1046] Shortly after his father, Alexander VI., ascended the papal throne in 1492, CÆsar Borgia commenced the career of war, massacre, and murder which made him the scourge and terror of Italy. He was killed by a musket-ball at a petty siege in 1507. The conspiracy of Catiline against the Roman government was terminated by his death at the head of his banditti, B.C. 62, but from his depraved and desperate character there was every reason to believe that he would have used a victory to plunder with insatiable greediness, and to destroy with remorseless cruelty.

[1047] God does not "pour ambition into CÆsar's mind," or the all-perfect being would be the author of sin. The aberrations of ambition are the acts of the ambitious man.

[1048] Alexander the Great. He made a pilgrimage to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, in Africa, and the priests styled him son of their god. Upon the faith of the oracle his flatterers believed, or affected to believe, that he was of divine descent.

[1049] The four lines, ver. 157-160, first appeared in the edition of 1743.

[1050] MS.:

Pope plainly avows that physical evil is the disobedience of inanimate nature to the Creator, as moral evil arose from the disobedience of man. The couplet, in an altered form, was transferred to Epist. iv. ver. 111, where the context confirms the interpretation which the present version appears to require.

[1051] See this subject extended in Epist. ii. from ver. 100 to ver. 122; ver. 165, etc.—Pope.

Pope is answering the objections to moral evil. The passions for which he has undertaken to account are vicious in kind or in degree—they are the passions which are contrary to "virtue," ver. 166,—the passions of Borgia, Catiline, CÆsar, and Alexander,—and these are not elements essential to human life.

[1052] Pope uses almost the very words of Bolingbroke: "To think worthily of God we must think that the natural order of things has been always the same; and that a being of infinite wisdom and knowledge, to whom the past and the future are like the present, and who wants no experience to inform him, can have no reason to alter what infinite wisdom and knowledge have once done."—Warton.

In saying that the "general order" had been "kept," Pope did not mean that there were no exceptions, for he held that there had been "some change" since the beginning of things, which was to reject the fanciful principle of Bolingbroke. Infinite wisdom cannot err, but change is not necessarily the reparation of error, and a progressive may be preferable to a stationary system.

[1053] This is Pope's summary of his weak defence of moral evil. Moral and physical irregularities, he says in effect, have always prevailed, and both are indispensable. He denies this in his third epistle, and asserts that universal innocence endured for several generations to the great advantage of man.

[1054] Psalm viii. 5: "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour."—Warburton.

[1055] MS.: "Brawn."

[1056] Pope, in these lines, diverts himself with drawing the picture of a fool, that he may remark upon him, and extend the remarks to mankind in general. But such fools are rarely to be met with, and I question whether one can be found infatuated to a degree like this.—Crousaz.

Bishop Butler, like Crousaz, did not believe that such "fools" existed. "Who," he asked, "ever felt uneasiness upon observing any of the advantages brute creatures have over us?" Pope's authority was The Moralists of Lord Shaftesbury. "Why, says one, was I not made by nature strong as a horse? Why not hardy and robust as this brute creature? or nimble and active as that other?"

[1057] The inversion is harsh; and when the words are ranged in their proper order, "If he call all creatures made for his use," is but uncouth English.

[1058] Shaftesbury's Moralists, Part ii. Sect. 4: "Nature has managed all for the best, with perfect frugality and just reserve; profuse to none, but bountiful to all."

[1059] It is a certain axiom in the anatomy of creatures, that in proportion as they are formed for strength their swiftness is lessened; or as they are formed for swiftness their strength is abated.—Pope.

This is an error. The most powerful race-horses are often the fleetest.

[1060] First edition:

So justly all proportioned to each state.

[1061] Vid. Epist. iii. ver. 79, etc., and ver. 109, etc.—Pope.

[1062] That is, in its own state or condition.

[1063] First edition:

[1064] First edition:

This rejected couplet embodied a fancy from Lord Shaftesbury's Moralists that the leading qualities in any being are always provided at the expense of other organs, and that if man had been endowed with greater and more numerous bodily capacities his brain would have been starved.

[1065] First edition:

The second edition has some further variations:

Pope owed the thought, and the expression "microscopic eye" to Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, bk. ii. chap. 23, sect. 12: "If by the help of microscopical eyes, a man could penetrate into the secret composition of bodies, he would not make any great advantage by the change if he could not see things he was to avoid at a convenient distance."

[1066] The abbreviated language of the last four lines, which are not legitimate composition, makes it difficult to follow the construction: "Say what the use were finer touch given if, trembingly alive all o'er, we were to smart and agonise at ev'ry pore? Or what the use of quick effluvia darting through the brain, if we were to die of a rose in aromatic pain?"

[1067] Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, bk. ii. chap. 23, sect. 12: "If our sense of hearing were but one thousand times quicker than it is, how would a perpetual noise distract us. And we should in the quietest retirement be less able to sleep or meditate than in the middle of a sea-fight."—Warton.

Butler, Hudibras, ii. 1, 617.

It was an ancient fancy that the planets rolled along spheres, emitting music as they went. Pope's supposition that the music would stun us, alludes to the remarks of Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, that the crash of harmony is so tremendous that human ears cannot receive it, just as human eyes cannot gaze at the sun. Warburton remarks that Pope should not have illustrated a philosophical argument by the example of an unreal sound.

[1069] The manner of the lions hunting their prey in the deserts of Africa is this; at their first going out in the night-time they set up a loud roar, and then listen to the noise made by the beasts in their flight, pursuing them by the ear, and not by the nostril. It is probable, the story of the jackal's hunting for the lion was occasioned by observation of this defect of scent in that terrible animal.—Pope.

Pope was mistaken in his notion that the lion hunted by ear alone, and that his sense of smell was obtuse. His scenting powers are very acute. The account which Pope gives would not, if it were true, explain why the jackal should have been singled out for the office of lion's provider. The real reason is told by Livingstone. When the lion is devouring his prey, "the jackal comes sniffing about, and sometimes suffers for his temerity by a stroke from the lion's paw laying him dead." The persevering attempt of the lesser animal to share the spoils with the greater, led to the belief that the two worked in concert—that the jackal was the pioneer, and the lion the executioner. There are two other readings of ver. 213 in the MS.:

All the versions are deformed by the license of putting the preposition "between" after its noun.

[1070] It was formerly a common belief that fish were deaf; but Pope ascribes to them some capacity of hearing, and this is now known to be correct.

[1071] Dryden, Marriage-a-la-mode, Act ii.:

These lines are admirable patterns of forcible diction. The peculiar and discriminating expressiveness of the epithets ought to be particularly regarded. Perhaps we have no image in the language more lively than that of ver. 218. "To live along the line," is equally bold and beautiful. In this part of the epistle the poet seems to have remarkably laboured his style, which abounds in various figures, and is much elevated. Pope has practised the great secret of Virgil's art, which was to discover the very single epithet that precisely suited each occasion. If Pope must yield to other poets in point of fertility of fancy, or harmony of numbers, yet in point of propriety, closeness, and elegance of diction, he can yield to none.—Warton.

[1072] The house-spider conceals itself in a cell, which is constructed below the web, and at a distance from it. The threads which are spun from the edge of the web to the spider's lurking-hole, vibrate when a fly comes in contact with the web, and are at once a telegraph to give information to the spider, and a bridge along which it can rush forward to secure its prey.

[1073] When the nectar of flowers is poisonous, the bee has not the power of separating its noxious from its wholesome properties, nor do bees always avoid the flowers which are hurtful to them. Some honey which is fatal to man may not be injurious to the insects collecting it.

[1074] At first it ran,

[1075] Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel:

Pope is illustrating his proposition that there must be grades of capacity for animal to be subject to animal, and all animals to man. The application of the couplet to his argument is obscure, and the couplet itself very vague. The "remembrance" closely "allied to reflection" appears to be the effort of attention by which we recall the dormant stores of memory. "Thought" is a dubious term, but seems to be put by Pope for the acts of mind which take their rise in the mind itself, as willing, imagining, reasoning, etc., in contradistinction to seeing, feeling, taste, etc., which are produced by the operation of external things upon the senses.

[1076] A two-fold or mixed nature was sometimes in old language called a "middle nature," such as a compound of mind and matter, or an amphibious animal, and Pope perhaps meant that the double nature "longs to join" in a more intimate union. Or he may have meant by "middle," an intermediate nature, such as any creature which has an order of beings above and below it, but then to satisfy Pope's phraseology there must be two of these middle natures which are longing to unite with each other, and the higher would not desire to be "joined" to the lower. The couplet seems at best to be mere mystical jargon.

[1077] The idea is in Locke's Essay, bk. iii. chap. 6, sect. 12, which Warton quotes. Bolingbroke, Fragment 49, copied Locke and others, and Pope copied Bolingbroke.

[1078] Ed. 1st:

Ethereal essence, spirit, substance, man.—Pope.

[1079] This is a magnificent passage. Thomson had before said in Summer, ver. 333:

Kennet's Pascal, p. 166: "He will find himself hanging, in the material scale, between the two vast abysses of infinite and nothing."

[1080] All that can be said of a scale of beings is to be found in the third chapter of King's Origin of Evil, and in a note ending with these emphatic words: "Whatever system God had chosen, there could have been but a determinate multitude of the most perfect creatures, and when that was completed there would have been a station for creatures less perfect, and it would still have been an instance of goodness to give them a being as well as others."—Warton.

[1081] Suffer men, says Pope, to encroach upon superior powers, and either inferior powers must rise to the rank we have vacated, or by not moving forward into the gap, they will leave a void in creation.

[1082] MS.:

[1083] Dryden, Love Triumphant, Act iv. Sc. 1:

[1084] MS.:

Yet more ev'n systems in gradation roll.

[1085] Bolingbroke, Fragment 42: "We cannot doubt that numberless worlds, and systems of worlds, compose this amazing whole, the universe."

[1086] Milton, Par. Lost, vii. 242:

And earth self-balanced on her centre hung.

The tendency of the earth to move in a straight line is balanced by the attraction of the sun, and Pope supposes this attraction to cease.

[1087] I like the reading of earlier editions better;

Planets and suns rush lawless through the sky.—Wakefield.

[1088] After Pope's death "tremble" was misprinted "trembles," and the error has been retained in most editions. The construction is, "Let planets and suns run lawless through the sky, let being be wrecked on being, world on world, let heaven's whole foundations nod to their centre, and let nature tremble to the throne of God!"

[1089] These six lines, ver. 251-256, are added since the first edition.—Pope.

Ruffhead says "there is no reading these lines without being struck with a momentary apprehension." Without quite allowing this, we cannot but feel their great beauty and force. Line rises upon line, with greater effect and nobler imagery, and in the conclusion the poet has touched the idea with propriety, as well as dignity and sublimity. If he had been more particular, the passage would have been unworthy the grandeur of the subject; had he been less it would have been obscure. He has at once evinced judgment and poetry. If there be a word or two not quite suitable, perhaps it is "run," and "foundations nod." I could have wished such a word as "rushed lawless," or "flamed lawless through the sky."—Bowles.

[1090] The chief problem which Pope undertook to solve was the existence of moral evil. Yet, if man, in obedience to God's commands, became morally perfect, none of the disastrous effects the poet describes would ensue. Angels would not be hurled from their spheres; worlds would not be wrecked; nor would heaven's foundations nod to their centre. Reason and revelation unite in the conclusion that moral perfection would, on the contrary, be an unmitigated blessing. Consequently Pope's hypothesis explains nothing unless he had shown how it is that a system which rendered evil impossible would be inferior to our own.

[1091] Plotinus, translated by Cudworth, Intellectual System, ed. Harrison, vol. iii., p. 479: "Some things in me partake only of being, some of life also, some of sense, some of reason, and some of intellect above reason. But no man ought to require equal things from unequal; nor that the finger should see, but the eye; it being enough for the finger to be a finger, and to perform its own office."—Warton.

[1092] Bolingbroke, Fragment 66: "Nothing can be more absurd than the complaints of creatures who are in one of these orders, that they are not in another."

[1093] Vid. the prosecution and application of this in Epist. iv. ver. 162.—Pope.