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THE RAPE OF THE LOCK.

AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM.

1 Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos;

Sed juvat, hoc precibus me tribuisse tuis. MART. [Epigr. xII. 84.]

MADAM,

TO MRS. ARABELLA FERMOR?.

Ir will be in vain to deny that I have some regard for this piece, since I dedicate it to You. Yet you may bear me witness, it was intended only to divert a few young Ladies, who have good sense and good humour enough to laugh not only at their sex's little unguarded follies, but at their own. But as it was communicated with the air of a Secret, it soon found its way into the world. An imperfect copy having been offer'd to a Bookseller, you had the good-nature for my sake to consent to the publication of one more correct: This I was forc'd to, before I had executed half my design, for the Machinery was entirely wanting to compleat it.

The Machinery, Madam, is a term invented by the Critics, to signify that part which the Deities, Angels, or Dæmons are made to act in a Poem: For the ancient Poets are in one respect like many modern Ladies: let an action be never so trivial in itself, they always make it appear of the utmost importance. These Machines I determined to raise on a very new and odd foundation, the Rosicrucian doctrine of Spirits.

I know how disagreeable it is to make use of hard words before a Lady; but 'tis so much the concern of a Poet to have his works understood, and particularly by your Sex, that you must give me leave to explain two or three difficult terms.

The Rosicrucians are a people I must bring you acquainted with. The best account I know of them is in a French book call'd Le Comte de Gabalis, which both in its title and size is so like a Novel, that many of the Fair Sex have read it for one by mistake. According to these Gentlemen, the four Elements are inhabited by Spirits, which they call Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs, and Salamanders. The Gnomes or Dæmons of Earth delight in

1 It appears, by this Motto, that the following Poem was written or published at the Lady's request. But there are some further circumstances not unworthy relating. Mr Caryl (a Gentleman who was Secretary to Queen Mary, wife of James II. whose fortunes he followed into France, Author of the Comedy of Sir Solomon Single, and of several translations in Dryden's Miscellanies) originally proposed the subject to him in a view of putting an end, by this piece of ridicule, to a quarrel that was risen between two noble Families, those of Lord Petre and of Mrs Fermor, on the trifling occasion of his having cut off a lock of her hair. The Author sent it to the Lady, with whom he was acquainted; and she took it so well as to give about copies of it. That first sketch, (we learn from one of his Letters) was written in less than a fortnight, in 1711, in two Canto's only, and it was so printed; first, in a Miscellany of Bern. Lintot's, without the name of the Author. But it was received so well that he made it more considerable the next year by the addition of the

machinery of the Sylphs, and extended it to five Canto's. P.

This insertion he always esteemed, and justly, the greatest effort of his skill and art as a Poet. Warburton.

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[Warton quotes a poem addressed to the same lady by Parnell, on her leaving London, commencing: 'From town fair Arabella flies.' Miss Arabella Fermor's niece, Prioress of the English Austin Nuns at the Fossée at Paris, told Mrs Piozzi 'that she believed there was but little comfort to be found in a house that harboured poets; for that she remembered Mr Pope's praise made her aunt very troublesome and conceited, while his numberless caprices would have employed ten servants to wait on him.' Life and Writings of Mrs Piozzi, 1. 329. Miss Arabella Fermor was, in 1714, married to Francis Perkins, Esq. of Ufton Court, Berks. Though her own and her father's family are both extinct, her portrait is still preserved at his earlier seat, Tusmore. See Carruthers, Life of Pope, 107.]

mischief; but the Sylphs, whose habitation is in the Air, are the best-condition'd creatures imaginable. For they say, any mortals may enjoy the most intimate familiarities with these gentle Spirits, upon a condition very easy to all true Adepts, an inviolate preservation of Chastity.

As to the following Canto's, all the passages of them are as fabulous, as the Vision at the beginning, or the Transformation at the end; (except the loss of your Hair, which I always mention with reverence). The Human persons are as fictitious as the airy ones; and the character of Belinda, as it is now manag'd, resembles you in nothing but in Beauty.

If this Poem had as many Graces as there are in your Person, or in your Mind, yet I could never hope it should pass thro' the world half so Uncensur'd as You have done. But let its fortune be what it will, mine is happy enough, to have given me this occasion of assuring you that I am, with the truest esteem, MADAM, Your most obedient, Humble Servant,

A. POPE.

[The original idea of this delightful poem-merum sal, as Addison called it— was confessedly due to Pope's friend Caryll; and the characters which carry on its action all belong to the circle of Catholic families in which Pope at the time moved. The heroine and her assailant are identified by him in his note; Thalestris was Mrs Morley, and Sir Plume her brother Sir George Brown, who not unnaturally resented the use to which his individuality was put in the poem. In its original form it was published in 1712, in its present complete form, containing the addition of the machinery of the Sylphs1, in 1714. The Key to the Lock, put forth in the following year by Esdras Barnevelt Apoth.', which gravely explained the whole poem as a covert satire upon Queen Anne and the Barrier Treaty, was only one of those exegetical mystifications to which Pope was in the habit of treating his public -apparently at his own expense, in reality in order to attract an adventitious interest to his own productions.

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The Rape of the Lock is correctly termed by its author a heroicomical poem, and belongs distinctly to that class of composition which we call burlesque. In other words, it applies a peculiar kind of treatment to a subject palpably and therefore ludicrously undeserving of it. It differs from poems which are mere parodies on other poems, inasmuch as it burlesques or mocks an entire class of poetry; and herein lies its superiority to a mere travesty, such as the Batrachomyomachia. its true predecessors Warton notes the Rape of the Bucket (1612) by Alessandro Tassoni, and two other similar Italian works. With Boileau's Lutrin (translated into English by Rowe in 1708) the Rape of the Lock has in common both nature of subject and method of treatment—a trivial quarrel humorously dignified with epical importance. But while the French poem almost rises to the level of a national satire, the English is rather, to adopt Roscoe's expression, a social 'pleasantry.' The surly cavil of Dennis, that Pope's poem wants a moral and is on that account inferior to the Lutrin, scarcely required to be refuted with mock gravity by Dr Johnson, who declares that 'the freaks, and humours, and spleen, and vanity of women, as they embroil families in discord, and fill houses with disquiet, do more to obstruct the happiness of life in a year than the ambition of the clergy in many centuries.'

Strange to say, the opposite objection has recently been made to a work of which the execution has in general been allowed to possess in a rare degree the double charm which pervades the irony of polite conversation. Mr Taine would

[Mr Kingsley, in his essay on Alexander Smith and Alexander Pope, has pointed out how Pope, in employing the Sylphs as poetic machinery, viewed them, after the precedent of Spenser and Ariosto, solely in their fancied con

nexion with man; while the relation of such mythological beings to nature (an aspect under which they were equally regarded by the Greeks) was only restored to them in literature by the moderns, Schiller and Goethe and Keats.]

insist that even the Rape of the Lock is in its entire scheme nothing more than a practical joke in the fashionable style, and persuade his readers that, like all his English contemporaries, Pope, in representing the life of the world, retained and revealed the contempt which he had for it in his heart. Pope, even here, is according to this consistent critic in reality far from polite, and sins against the good manners of which he affects the varnish. This criticism is perhaps the most striking instance in Mr Taine's admirable work of his tendency towards straining a special instance in order to make it fit into a general view. It is quite true that the spirit of the age to which Pope belonged was devoid of true delicacy in the appreciation of the nobler relations between the sexes; quite true that Pope individually showed in many of his poems a want of that genuine tenderness which may display itself in satire as well as in erotic verse. But the Rape of the Lock being intended as a piece of raillery, can only be condemned if in it raillery passes the bounds of what is pleasing; and though doubtless much might have been put into the poem which is not there, yet what there is in it (if due allowance be made for certain approaches to a coarseness by no means confined to the contemporary literature of any one particular country), is both light and charming; and if a moral be conveyed, it is (except in a single passage towards the beginning of the last Canto) implied with well-bred ease and good humour, and not sourly obtruded upon an unprepared

audience.

The Rape of the Lock enjoyed the honour of translation by a distinguished French writer. Marmontel's Boucle de Cheveux enlevée is upon the whole a spirited and successful effort, not more inaccurate than is usually the case with French translations, and felicitous in some of the more salient passages, as e.g. the description of the game at Ombre. But the antithetical brilliancy of Pope's lines, nowhere more observable than in this poem, is all but lost in the easy flow of the French version, which is of course in Alexandrines. If dramatic pieces be left out of the question, the Rape of the Lock is probably one of the longest occasional poems in any literature; and yet French literature itself may be challenged to match the sparkling vivacity of its execution no less than the airy grace of its plot and underplot.]

WH

CANTO I.

WHAT dire offence from am'rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things,

I sing This verse to CARYL1, Muse! is due:
This, ev'n Belinda may vouchsafe to view:
Slight is the subject, but not so the praise,
If She inspire, and He approve my lays.

Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel
A well-bred Lord t' assault a gentle Belle?
O say what stranger cause, yet unexplor❜d,
Could make a gentle Belle reject a Lord?
In tasks so bold, can little men engage,
And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty Rage?

[John Caryll, a gentleman of an ancient Catholic family in Sussex, and till his death in

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1736 a most intimate friend of Pope's. See Introductory Memoir.]

Sol thro' white curtains shot a tim'rous ray,
And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day:
Now lap-dogs give themselves the rousing shake,
And sleepless lovers, just at twelve, awake:

Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knock'd the ground,
And the press'd watch return'd a silver sound.
Belinda still her downy pillow prest,

Her guardian SYLPH prolong'd the balmy rest:
'Twas He had summon'd to her silent bed
The morning-dream that hover'd o'er her head;
A Youth more glitt'ring than a Birth-night Beau,
(That ev'n in slumber caus'd her cheek to glow)
Seem'd to her ear his winning lips to lay,
And thus in whispers said, or seem'd to say.
Fairest of mortals, thou distinguish'd care

Of thousand bright Inhabitants of Air!

If e'er one vision touch'd thy infant thought,

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Of airy Elves by moonlight shadows seen,
The silver token, and the circled green,

Of all the Nurse and all the Priest have taught;

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Or virgins visited by Angel-pow'rs,

With golden crowns and wreaths of heav'nly flow'rs;
Hear and believe! thy own importance know,

Nor bound thy narrow views to things below.
Some secret truths, from learned pride conceal'd,
To Maids alone and Children are reveal'd:
What tho' no credit doubting Wits may give?
The Fair and Innocent shall still believe.
Know, then, unnumber'd Spirits round thee fly,
The light Militia of the lower sky:
These, tho' unseen, are ever on the wing,
Hang o'er the Box, and hover round the Ring.
Think what an equipage thou hast in Air,
And view with scorn two Pages and a Chair.
As now your own, our beings were of old1,
And once inclos'd in Woman's beauteous mould;
Thence, by a soft transition, we repair
From earthly Vehicles to these of air.

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Think not, when Woman's transient breath is fled,
That all her vanities at once are dead;
Succeeding vanities she still regards,

And tho' she plays no more, o'erlooks the cards.
Her joy in gilded Chariots, when alive,
And love of Ombre, after death survive 2.
For when the Fair in all their pride expire,
To their first Elements their Souls retire:

As now your own, etc.] He here forsakes the Rosicrucian system; which, in this part, is too extravagant even for poetry; and gives a beautiful fiction of his own, on the Platonic Theology of the continuance of the passions in another state, when the mind, before its leaving this, has not been purged and purified by philo

sophy; which furnishes an occasion for much useful satire. Warburton.

2 [Chatto, in his History of Playing-Cards, disproves the statement of Barrington, that Ombre was probably introduced by Catherine of Portugal, the queen of Charles II. (since Waller has a poem 'On a card torn at Ombre by the Queen,")

The Sprites of fiery Termagants in Flame
Mount up, and take a Salamander's name.
Soft yielding minds to Water glide away,
And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea.
The graver Prude sinks downward to a Gnome,
In search of mischief still on Earth to roam.
The light Coquettes in Sylphs aloft repair,
And sport and flutter in the fields of Air.

Know further yet; whoever fair and chaste
Rejects mankind, is by some Sylph embrac'd:
For Spirits, freed from mortal laws, with ease
Assume what sexes and what shapes they please.
What guards the purity of melting Maids,
In courtly balls, and midnight masquerades,
Safe from the treach'rous friend, the daring spark,
The glance by day, the whisper in the dark,
When kind occasion prompts their warm desires,
When music softens, and when dancing fires?
'Tis but their Sylph, the wise Celestials know,
Tho' Honour is the word with Men below1.

Some nymphs there are, too conscious of their face2,

For life predestin'd to the Gnomes' embrace.

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These swell their prospects and exalt their pride,
When offers are disdain'd, and love deny'd:

Then gay Ideas crowd the vacant brain,

While Peers, and Dukes, and all their sweeping train,
And Garters, Stars, and Coronets appear,

And in soft sounds, Your Grace salutes their ear.
'Tis these that early taint the female soul,
Instruct the eyes of young Coquettes to roll,
Teach Infant-cheeks a bidden blush to know,
And little hearts to flutter at a Beau.

Oft, when the world imagine women stray,
The Sylphs thro' mystic mazes guide their way,
Thro' all the giddy circle they pursue,
And old impertinence expel by new.

What tender maid but must a victim fall

To one man's treat, but for another's ball?

When Florio speaks what virgin could withstand,

If gentle Damon did not squeeze her hand?

With varying vanities, from ev'ry part,

They shift the moving Toyshop of their heart;

Where wigs with wigs, with sword-knots sword-knots strive,
Beaux banish beaux, and coaches coaches drive.
This erring mortals Levity may call;

Oh blind to truth! the Sylphs contrive it all.

by reference to a political pamphlet entitled The Royal game of Ombre, published at London in 1660, two years before the Queen's arrival in England. In the reign of Queen Anne, according to Chatto, Ombre was the favourite game of the ladies, as Piquet of the gentlemen. The name of the former game is of course derived

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from the Spanish word for a man; and 'there is reason to believe that it was one of the oldest games at cards played in Europe.']

1 Tho' honour is the word with men below.] Parody of Homer. Warburton.

2 too conscious of their face,] i. e. too sensible of their beauty. Warburton.

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