But see! each Muse, in LEO's golden days1, But soon by impious arms from Latium chas'd3, Yet some there were, among the sounder few Of those who less presum'd, and better knew, [The papacy of Leo X. lasted from 1513 to 1521. The rebuilding of St Peter's was commenced under his predecessor Julius II.; for whom also some of Raphael's greatest works were executed.] 2 'I have the best authority, that of the learned, accurate, and ingenious Dr Burney, for observing that, in the age of Leo X., music did not keep pace with poetry in advancing towards perfection. Costantio Festa was the best Italian composer during the time of Leo, and Pietro Aaron the best theorist. Palestrina was not born till eight years after the death of Leo.' Warton. 3 [Vida is as a critical writer chiefly known by his Art of Poetry, subsequently, and probably in consequence of Pope's encomium, translated into English by Christopher Pitt. This Art of Poetry, written about 1520, is chiefly directed to a consideration of the rules of Epic Poetry; and was the first of many similar discourses by Italian poets, Torquato Tasso among the number.] As next in place to Mantua,] Alluding to 'Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremona.' Virg. This application is made in Kennet's edition of Vida. Warton. 5 [Referring to the sack of Rome by the duke of Bourbon in 1527.] 700 710 720 6[Boileau's (1636-1711) Art Poétique, in four cantos, like Pope's essay itself, heralds no new literary era; it is rather a summary by an independent critic of precepts which apply to poetic literature in general, though they are frequently pointed by special and even personal application. Nicolas Despréaux Boileau was born in 1636 and lived till 1711. Besides the A.P. his Epistles and Lutrin are his most noteworthy productions; as a satirist he is of the school of Horace rather than of Juvenal; as a critic he is distinguished by incisiveness rather than breadth. His Odes have no exceptional merit.] 7 Such was the Muse]-Essay on Poetry by the Duke of Buckingham. Our poet is not the only one of his time who complimented this Essay, and its noble author. Mr Dryden had done it very largely in the dedication to his translation of the Æneid; and Dr Garth in the first edition of his Dispensary says, "The Tiber now no courtly Gallus sees, But smiling Thames enjoys his Normanbys.' Though afterwards omitted, when parties were carried so high in the reign of Queen Anne, as to allow no commendation to an opposite in politics. The Duke was all his life a steady adherent to the Church-of-England party, yet an enemy to the extravagant measures of the court in the reign of Charles II. On which account after having strongly patronized Mr Dryden, a cool Such was Roscommon1, not more learn'd than good, To him the wit of Greece and Rome was known, Such late was Walsh 2-the Muse's judge and friend, To failings mild, but zealous for desert; The clearest head, and the sincerest heart. This praise at least a grateful Muse may give: Content, if hence th' unlearn'd their wants may view, Not free from faults, nor yet too vain to mend3. ness succeeded between them on that poet's absolute attachment to the court, which carried him some lengths beyond what the Duke could approve of. This nobleman's true character had been very well marked by Mr Dryden before, 'the Muse's friend, Himself a Muse. In Sanadrin's debate True to his prince, but not a slave of state.' Abs. and Achit. Our Author was more happy, he was honour'd very young with his friendship, and it continued till his death in all the circumstances of a familiar esteem. P. 1 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, and enlivened it with a tale in imitation of Boileau. It is indisputably better written, in a closer and more vigorous style, than the last-mentioned essay. Roscommon was more learned than Buckingham. He was bred under Bochart, at Caen in Normandy. He had laid a design of forming a society for the refining and fixing the standard of our language; in which project his intimate friend Dryden was a principal assistant. Warton. [Wentworth Dillon earl of Roscommon, nephew of the great earl of Strafford, was born about 1632 and died in 1684. His muse was chaste at a dissolute court; but in his habits of life he participated in one at least of the vices of the age. As to his design of founding an English Academy, it was revived by De Foe and probably plagiarised from the latter by Swift, and also found favour with Prior and Tickell. It has been again advanced, upon a broader basis, by a brilliant critic of our own days. See Matthew Arnold's essay on The Literary Influence of Academies.] [John Sheffield earl of Mulgrave and marquis 730 740 of Normanby by creation of William and Mary, and duke of Buckinghamshire by creation of Queen Anne, was born in 1649 and died in 1722. His Essay on Poetry, to which Pope has given an undeserved immortality, is a short and tolerably meagre performance, in which a variety of disjointed rules are applied to the principal species of poetic composition. It contains however some vigorous lines and some sensible observations of individual criticism. Compare note to p. 51.] 2 If Pope has here given too magnificent an eulogy to Walsh, it must be attributed to friendship, rather than to judgment. 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... Pope owed much to Walsh; it was he who gave him a very important piece of advice, in his early youth; for he used to tell our author, that there was one way still left open for him by which he might excel any of his predecessors, which was, by correctness; that though, indeed, we had several great poets, we as yet could boast of none that were perfectly correct; and that therefore he advised him to make this quality his particular study. Warton. [As to Walsh's suggestion with reference to the Fourth Pastoral, see Pope's note to p. 11. William Walsh was born in 1663 and died about 1709; his poems and imitations shew him to have been an elegant and pleasing writer, who, however, in Dr Johnson's words, 'is known more by his familiarity with greater men, than by anything done or written by himself.'] 3 These concluding lines bear a great resemblance to Boileau's conclusion of his Art of Poetry, but are perhaps superior: 'Censeur un peu facheux, mais souvent nécessaire, Plus enclin à blâmer, que savant à bien faire.' Warton. 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 It 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. [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. 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. As 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.] ани WH CANTO I. HAT dire offence from am'rous causes springs, I sing This verse to CARYL1, Muse! is due: Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel O say what stranger cause, yet unexplor❜d, And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty Rage? [John Caryll, a gentleman of an ancient 1736 a most intimate friend of Pope's. See InCatholic family in Sussex, and till his death in troductory Memoir.] IO A |