placated, and Miss Fermor allowed Pope to dedicate the second edition of the poem to her. In the first form the "machinery" of the sylphs was absent. In order that the reader may compare the two versions, Pope's later additions are shown within brackets; aside from these additions and a few minor verbal changes, the poems are identical. The charm of the poem comes from its mock solemnity, its sudden bits of bathos, its delicious wit and sparkle, its light sketching of human vanities and follies, and the perfect art of its verse and phrasing. I, 1. 32. silver token, the silver penny which superstition said the elves would drop into the shoe of a maid who was tidy about her work. Circled green, the fairy ring (cf. the song from A Midsummer Night's Dream (p. 143), l. 8). P. 278. II, ll. 112-115. Note that the fanciful name in each case tells the sylph's occupation: Zephyretta, little breeze; Brillante, shining one (for Belinda's earrings); Momentilla, little moment, i.e., timekeeper; Crispissa, curly one (cf. IV, 99-102, from which it appears that Belinda's hair did not curl by nature). II, ll. 134-135, and III, 1. 106. The drinks served were chocolate and coffee. The chocolate was evidently brought in a hard ball or cake, as it is still prepared in the West Indies, and was ground in a hand mill, as were the roasted coffee berries. Pp. 279 f. III, II. 25-100. The popular Spanish game of ombre. Evidently Pope's description is accurate (cf. Lamb's Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist, p. 426). Most commonly it was played by three persons, one of whom made the trump and played against the other two. Nine cards were dealt (l. 29-30). The Matadores (1. 33) were the principal trumps, in the order of importance (l. 34) as follows: (1) Spadillio (1. 49), the ace of spades; (2) Manillio (1. 51), with a black trump, the deuce (as here, cf. ll. 46-47), with a red trump, the seven; (3) Basto (1. 53), the ace of clubs; (4) Pam (1. 61-62), the knave of clubs. The game runs thus: Belinda leads successively the ace of spades (1. 49), the deuce of spades (1. 51), the ace of clubs (1. 53), the king of spades (1. 56), and takes four tricks: (1) two trumps (1. 50), (2) two trumps (1. 51), (3) a trump and another card (1. 54), (4) Pam and another card (ll. 61, 64). Then she leads the king of clubs (1. 69) and loses the trick because the baron plays the queen of spades (11. 66-68). The baron then has the lead and takes three more tricks with the king, queen, and knave of diamonds (the last trick including Belinda's queen of hearts, ll. 75-76, 87-88). As Belinda and the baron have four tricks each, Ac the next trick will determine who wins the deal. The baron leads the ace of hearts (1. 95), but Belinda has the king (ll. 95-96), which, except when hearts are trumps, outranks the ace. cordingly, she is saved from codille (1. 92), the failure of the person who makes the trump (Spanish: "yo suy hombre," "I am the man," which gives the name to the game) to take more tricks than her opponents. P. 280. l. 122-124. Scylla stole for her lover Minos the purple lock of hair of her father Nisus, on which depended the safety of his city. For this she was scorned by Minos and changed by the gods into a bird (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 6-151). P. 281. IV, l. 20. In England, the raw wind that makes people blue and irritable. In Dickens's Bleak House, Mr. Jarndyce commented on all misfortunes with "The wind is in the East again." P. 282. ll. 127-132. The irony of 1. 132 is pointed by the proportion of oaths and expletives used, fully half of the four lines. P. 284. V, ll. 125-126. Romulus, the founder of Rome, was believed by the Romans to have been carried up to heaven by his father Mars, while he was reviewing his troops during a thunderstorm. He was said to have appeared in a vision to Proculus, and to have bidden him tell the Romans that their city would become the greatest in the world. ELOISA TO ABELARD Pp. 285 f. This poem is a highly romantic effort in itself, and surprising as coming from the pen of the leading poet of the age of common sense. It is based upon an English translation made by Hughes in 1714 of a French version published in 1693 of the famous correspondence of Abelard and Heloise. With the original Latin letters, the authenticity of which has been questioned, Pope's version has practically nothing to do. The story, however, is as follows: Abelard, a famous scholar and teacher of the twelfth century, fell in love with his pupil Heloise; but the lovers were separated by her uncle and both entered the religious life. The letters are supposed to have been written some years later, when Abelard was Abbot of St. Gildas in Brittany and Heloise Abbess of the convent of the Paraclete, of his friend Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, The poem had as great a success in Germany and Pp. 288 ff. Dr. Arbuthnot, Queen Anne's ciations in all literature. It should be noted, however, that Pope, for reasons unknown, opened the war in his Imitations of Horace by scoffing at Lord Hervey for both his good looks and his pretensions to verse. In l. 151, he expressed his opinion that Gildon had been paid by Addison to defame him. In 1. 153, what he says of Dennis might as justly have been applied to himself. Dennis had found fault with Pope's Pastorals; Pope ridiculed him in his Essay on Criticism; Dennis retorted in a violent pamphlet. The comments on Bentley and Tibbalds (Lewis Theobald), 1. 164, were drawn by the "slashing" that the famous classical scholar gave to Pope's Iliad in calling it "a very pretty poem but not Homer"; while the "piddling" (trifling) of Theobald refers to his objections to Pope's Shakespearean emendations and guesses. Theobald later brought out a much better edition of Shakespeare than Pope's. Pope's contempt for Ambrose Phillips (ll. 179–180) seems to be a case of sheer jealousy of the praise bestowed upon Phillips's Pastorals and of Addison's friendship for him. Over against these evidences of pettiness must be placed not only the list of men of letters and of social eminence by whom Pope's genius had been recognized and with whom he was on friendly terms (ll. 135-141), but also his own defence in ll. 125-134, with the tragic implications of 1. 132. Granville, Baron Lansdowne (1. 135), was a statesman and himself a verse-writer and dramatist. He said of Pope when the poet was only seventeen or eighteen years of age that he promised "miracles." Pope dedicated to him his Windsor Forest. Walsh (1.136) and Garth (l. 137) were themselves poets and men of taste. Congreve (l. 138) was one of the leading dramatists of the Restoration. Talbot (1. 139), Earl and Duke of Shrewsbury, rose to be lord chamberlain. He was, according to Swift, one of the most popular men of the time and also "the finest gentleman we have." Lord Somers (1. 139), lord chancellor, was a member of the Kit Kat Club and a patron of various members of it. He gave Addison his pension, and to him Swift dedicated his Tale of a Tub. Sheffield (1. 139), Earl of Mulgrave and afterward Duke of Buckingham and Normanby, was a munificent patron to Dryden. He wrote in both prose and verse, and his Essay on Poetry was praised by Dryden and Pope. Pope edited his collected works. Rochester (l. 140) was Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, one of Pope's special friends and himself a writer of polished prose. St. John (1. 141) was Lord Bolingbroke, by whom the Essay on Man was largely inspired. The Epistle is interesting not merely as a satire on Pope's enemies but also as a defence of his own position and a study of his own character as he saw himself. It is impossible, however, to take He had the him precisely at his own estimate. double sensitiveness of the poet and the hunchback, which made him unable to bear the slightest unfavorable criticism, however good-natured, of his work or of himself. While it is true that many of his enemies deserved what he said of them, it is also certain that he was in most instances provoked by their failure to approve of him. For instance, the three singled out in l. 146 had all written against Pope. Thomas Burnet, son of the Bishop of Salisbury (satirized in The Dunciad, as G -[Gilbert Burnet], IV, 1. 608), had published Homerides; or a letter to Mr. Pope occasioned by his intended translation of Homer, by Sir Iliad Doggrel, and Pope suspected him (wrongly) of writing Pope Alexander's Supremacy. Pope retaliated upon Oldmixon was a him also in The Dunciad. Grub Street writer, one of the many who replied to The Dunciad, and had criticised Pope on other occasions. Cooke, who himself translated Hesiod, abused Pope in an article called the Battle of the Poets. Again, "gentle Fanny," 1. 149 (Lord Hervey), had infuriated Pope by ridiculing his deformity and his birth. The passage in ll. 305333 (not given here) is one of the bitterest denun 1. 190. Pope uses Tate merely as a type. He has been described as the "author of the worst alterations of Shakespeare, the worst version of the Psalms of David, and the worst continuation of a great poem (Absalom and Achitophel) extant." ll. 193-214. The three enemies of whom Pope drew elaborate pen pictures were Addison, Lord Halifax, and Lord Hervey. Against Lord Hervey he seems to have cherished some strong personal grudge (see note on 1. 149, above); he railed against Halifax not only because the First Lord of the Treasury failed to bestow the pension he had promised, but also because Halifax had the bad taste to approve of the poet Tickell. While his attacks on these two men are marked by the most undignified vituperation, the lines on Addison show a certain restraint, as if Pope stood in some awe of the Atticus (Addison was already so called for his supposedly flawless style) of his age; a certain unwilling respect shows through his taunting phrases. We have omitted the portraits of Halifax and Hervey. THE DUNCIAD P. 290. The Dunce-epic had as its hero in the first edition (1728) Lewis Theobald, who had pointed out the faults in Pope's edition of Shakespeare. The poem was written in imitation of Dryden's MacFlecknoe, which deals with the appointment of Shadwell (who supplanted Dryden as poet laureate in 1688) to succeed Flecknoe, an obscure poet, as monarch of the kingdom of Dulness. Pope represented Dulness as a goddess who chooses Tibbald (Theobald) to succeed Settle (Elkanah Settle, a third-rate dramatist who had become a hack writer and died in 1724) as ruler of her land. In 1741 Pope added a fourth book; and in 1743, he published a revised edition with Colley Cibber, the actor-dramatist, as hero. The change was due to one of Pope's many quarrels. Cibber had introduced into a play some lines ridiculing a play that had failed, in which Pope had had a hand. For this reason Pope had satirized Cibber in the fourth book added to the original Dunciad. Cibber replied in a printed letter, but in a spirit of good-humored raillery. Pope was roused by this to the point of fury which is reflected in the revised Dunciad. THE ILIAD Cf. note on Chapman, p. 710, above. JOHN GAY Pp. 291 f. Gay, at the request of Pope, set out 'to burlesque the Pastorals of Ambrose Phillips, but having an eye for reality and a genuine though slight poetic talent, he produced in his Shepherd's Week a work of some interest and vitality. The same sense of reality and lightness of touch are displayed in his Trivia, or Art of Walking the Streets and in his Fables. His Black-eyed Susan connects him with the romantic movement, in that it is an early eighteenth century song dealing sympathetically though artificially with the lives and emotions of the lowly. His greatest success and his main claim to a place in the history of English literature came from his composition of the Beggar's Opera, a burlesque of fashionable Italian opera, in which the principal characters are thieves and vagabonds. It is in a sense the ancestor of modern comic opera. EDWARD YOUNG Pp. 292 f. Young's poetry has now entirely lost its appeal, but it is important historically. The tide of the Romantic Movement was rising when he began to write, and he was carried on with it so that his mediocre talent brought him a disproportionate success. His sententious moral izing, and his religious sentimentality appealed strongly to an age of rigid theoretical conventions and actual license. His early satires were in the manner and form of the classical age; his later poems, from which our extracts are taken, are romantic, not merely in their background and emotion, but in their use of blank verse, the great vehicle of those writers who rebelled against the couplets of Dryden and Pope. THE TRANSITION LADY WINCHILSEA P. 294. Lady Winchilsea finds a place here because of recent years the romantic qualities of her work, noted long ago by Wordsworth, have met with general recognition and have received special significance from their existence at a time when the Classical Movement seemed supreme. Her sketch of the sights and sounds of night 734 ENGLISH PROSE AND POETRY (11. 23-36) shows observation and simplicity ROBERT BLAIR Pp. 294 f. Blair's one poem gave rise to a series of mortuary poems, and is important because it appealed to the same taste that took delight in Young's Night Thoughts, and so belongs to the same phase of the romantic movement. JAMES THOMSON Pp. 296 ff. Thomson is one of the earliest romantic poets to make the different aspects of Nature his main theme. The extracts from his Seasons show that he had really observed what he described, although he is not free from such indirectness of phrasing for mere effect as the bleating kind sheep, soft fearful people sheep, plumy people birds, watery gear fishing tackle, in which the classical school of poets delighted. He was preeminently the poet of the English middle classes until the nineteenth century, when Scott and then Tennyson took his place. morous. = = = Pp. 298 ff. His Castle of Indolence, like Shenstone's Schoolmistress (pp. 312 f.) and other eighteenth century imitations of Spenser's Faerie Queene, was intended to be at least mildly huThomson uses comparatively few archaic words or constructions just enough, perhaps, to secure the effect of quaintness and remoteness at which he aimed. It is hardly necessary to add that neither he nor any other eighteenth century writer was always accurate in his use of such words and constructions. JOHN DYER Pp. 300 f. Dyer wrote little but he had the eye of a careful observer and lover of Nature. For this he was perhaps indebted to his having been born and brought up in Wales among the mountains and dales of which he sings. It is just possible that the word "van" - rather curiously used in l. 3 - may have been suggested by the name the Carmarthen of a mountain familiar to him Van, the second highest peak in southwest Wales. DAVID MALLET his name was origiPp. 301 f. David Mallet nally Malloch lives in literary history by virtue of three rather curious circumstances: the title of one of his poems (The Excursion) had the honor of being used later by Wordsworth; the famous song, Rule Britannia! (p. 300), was first sung in a musical comedy called Alfred, a Masque, composed by him and James Thomson; and he was the reputed author of William and Margaret (p. 301), the most important ballad in the history of the Romantic Movement. Fate favored him in Wordsworth's choice of a title for his poem. She favored him in the second instance by letting the poet James Thomson die before Alfred was printed and before any public claim had been made to the great song which all scholars now asIcribe to Thomson. She favored him the third time by allowing him to retain for over one hundred and fifty years credit in literary circles for the authorship of William and Margaret, a ballad which we now know to have been printed in slightly different form and sold about the streets of London while he was still a child. The importance of the ballad for the history of Romanticism lies partly in its real beauty, partly in the early date at which it attracted public attention and interest, and partly in the large amount of discussion to which it gave rise. SAMUEL JOHNSON Pp. 302 ff. Boswell's incomparable account of the life and conversation of Dr. Samuel Johnson not only proves that his personal supremacy in the literary society of his day was deserved, but also exhibits in almost bewildering detail the independence of character, the courage, the strong and clear common sense, the freedom from cant, the wit, and the personal vigor, by virtue of which he dominated all with whom he came in contact. All these qualities are exhibited also in Johnson's writings, though his wit is sometimes made clumsy by an affected ponderosity of diction, and his common sense sometimes sounds to our modern ears like oracular emptiness in the elaborate artificiality of his balanced clauses and phrases. CONGREVE In his Lives of the English Poets, which were written when he was nearly seventy years old, Johnson's style is seen at its best. His diction has become more simple and natural and the structure of his sentences more varied and flexible. These essays are still valuable. Since they were written, research has cleared up many points which were then doubtful and has supplied much information which was then inaccessible; but in his judgments of men and affairs and his criticisms of the purely intellectual qualities of the writings he discussed Johnson has rarely been equalled. He was, however, not endowed with poetic imagination, and he had little sensitiveness to some of the finer aspects of beauty. Consequently, while he is nearly always right and convincing in his attacks on poor verse, his judgment as to what is best is not trustworthy. The passage in The Mourning Bride which he declares the most poetical paragraph in the whole mass of English poetry has impressed most good judges as mere rhetorical declamation and not of the highest order at that. P. 307 b. our Pindaric madness. Cowley was blamed by his successors for introducing into English a Pindaric ode that did not conform to the plan of Pindar, but in metre and rhythm was governed only by the writer's caprice. For the structural scheme of the classical Pindaric ode, cf. note on Gray's Progress of Poesy, pp. 736 f. THE RAMBLER Pp. 308 f. The Rambler was a periodical modeled on the Tatler, the Spectator, and their like. Johnson was unable to give his essays the grace, ease, playfulness, and infinite variety of tone and manner which made the success of Steele and Addison. His diction is here at its worst and his sentences, though clear and strong, rumble and creak; but even here the fine qualities of his mind are displayed. The subject and the ideas of the essay we have chosen as representative are from time to time re-discovered by social philosophers and exploited as a new contribution to human knowledge. LONDON Pp. 309 f. This is an imitation of the third satire of Juvenal. It was published in 1738 and in its bitterness bears evidence of the poverty, struggles, and lack of success which marked Johnson's life at that time. Satires were then much in vogue. An ambitious young author of that period wrote a satire as naturally and inevitably as he now writes a short story. This one is notable only for the author's sympathy with the poor and his expression of personal feeling in l. 173, which he caused to be printed in capital letters. In style, it shows many of the qualities and tricks which especially characterize his work, though they are not so fully developed as in the Rambler and The Vanity of Human Wishes. 11. 158 f. Even the sedate tradesman, at the THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES This is an imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal. It was published in 1749 and shows in style the further development of the qualities of sonorous diction and balanced sentence structure exhibited in London. The first couplet is often quoted as an example of tautology disguised by verbosity. The general theme of the satire is stated in the title. The method is to present successively examples of great ambitions unfulfilled or, when fulfilled, the source of disappointment. 11. 191 ff. The meteoric career of Charles XII of Sweden was fresh in mind when Johnson wrote, and had been brilliantly described by Voltaire. Charles invaded Denmark, defeated the Russians, the Poles, and the Saxons, and conceived the design of overthrowing the Russian Empire. When the Czar wished to negotiate peace, he declared, "I will treat with the Czar at Moscow." From this time his career was a succession of misfortunes and failures. His army, weakened by famine and cold (11. 207-208), was defeated and scattered at Pultowa, July 8, 1709, and he fled into Turkey, where he attempted by bribes and intrigues to enlist Turkey in his designs. But the Czar bribed and intrigued more effectively, and Charles was imprisoned. He escaped in disguise in 1714 and fled to Norway, where he was killed, at Frederickshall, Dec. 11, 1718, by some unknown person (1. 220). P. 311. l. 313 f. Solon is said to have told Croesus to count no man happy till his death. Il. 317-318. The duke of Marlborough, the greatest general of his time, was paralyzed in 1716, six years before his death, and spent his last days playing with his grandchildren, being quite out of public affairs. He was talked about for his petty economies; it was said that, old and infirm as he was, he would walk to save the expense of sixpence for a sedan chair. Swift's mind began to fail in 1738, and he subsequently had paralysis and aphasia; in 1741 he was insane beyond hope and so continued till his death in 1745, four years before Johnson wrote these lines. |