1. 224. The rights a court attack'd, a poet sav'd. Bennet says that for this passage the author was threatened with prosecution.

1. 226. Stretch'd to relieve the idiot and the poor. Swift's resolution to endow a hospital for lunatics was taken many years before his death. Cf. his Verses on his own Death, Works, 14. 369 :

'He gave the little wealth he had

To build a house for fools or mad.'

With the first £500 he could call his own he instituted a fund for granting small loans to such industrious artisans and tradesmen as could find security for repayment by weekly instalments.

1. 228. And stretch the ray. Awkward substitute for Lucretius' 'Vitai lampada tradunt.'

1. 230. Hopkins and Sternbold. This passage is ironical, but the irony is not very transparent. 'Hopkins and Sternhold,' with Pope, are typical names for bad poets. Cf. Pope to Swift, October 15, 1725: My name is as bad a one as yours, and hated by all bad poets, from Hopkins and Sternhold to Gildon and Cibber.' The version of the Psalms which goes under their name is the joint contribution of seven or eight different versifiers. Thirtyseven Psalms drawen into English metre by Thomas Sternholde' were published in 1551.

1. 251. ill-inclin'd =

'having received an ill tendency or direction.' 1. 257. At length, by wholesome dread of statutes bound. There was an enactment against libel as early as the thirteenth century. It is Stat. Westminst. i. c. 34, 3 Edw. I., and was occasioned by a lampoon written seven years before upon Richard, King of the Romans. The verses may be seen in Percy's Reliques. To this case Pope alludes (Sat. and Ep. 1. 146): 'It stands on record that in Richard's times

A man was hang'd for very honest rhymes.'

But we do not find much in the Year-Books till the great case De Libellis Famosis, 3 James I., which was the foundation of what was considered, in Pope's time, law with respect to libels. See Barrington on the Statutes, P. 58.

1. 263. We conquer'd France, but felt our captive's charms. Notwithstanding De Quincey's (Works, 10. 49) witty protest, there is sufficient truth in Pope's assertion to allow it to represent Horace's Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit.' The cast and tone which English poetry assumed after the Restoration is French, and that by direct influence and communication. It is true that this communication was in no connexion with the conquest of France two hundred years earlier. But the same objection lies against Horace's antithesis. Greek literature was adopted and imitated by the Romans quite independently of the subjugation of Greece. If we allow Græcia capta victorem cepit' as a rhetorical contrast, not as cause and

effect, we may allow Pope's transfusion, 'We conquer'd France, but felt our captive's charms.'

1. 267. Waller was smooth. Edmund Waller, died 1687. Johnson, Life of Waller Waller certainly very much excelled in smoothness most of the writers who were living when his poetry commenced. But he was rather smooth than strong; of the "full-resounding line" which Pope attributes to Dryden he has given very few examples. The critical decision has given the praise of strength to Denham, and of sweetness to Waller.' Cf. Pope, Essay on Criticism, 360:

'Where Denham's strength and Waller's sweetness join.' Dryden says, Well-placing of words for the sweetness of pronunciation was not known till Mr. Waller introduced it.' On this criticism, Masson observes (Essays, p. 102): ‘To aver with such specimens of English verse before us as the works of Chaucer and Spenser, and the minor poems of Milton, that it was Waller that first taught us sweetness or smoothness, or even correctness of verse, is so ridiculous that the currency of such a notion can only be accounted for by the servility with which small critics go on repeating whatever one big critic has said.'

join: i.e. unite the four things which follow. Cf. Churchill, Apology (Chalmers, 14. 284):

'With strong invention, noblest vigour fraught,

Thought still springs up and rises out of thought,
Numbers ennobling numbers in their course,

In varied sweetness flow, in varied force;

The pow'rs of genius and of judgment join,

And the whole art of poetry is thine.'

1. 269. The long majestic march, and energy divine. This magnificent tribute to the memory of Dryden must be limited to the language and expression. The ideas of Dryden are the thoughts of a bare and prosaic age, and not even its best thoughts. But there is an energy of expression, a force of reasoning, and a general sense of power about his lines, which distinguish him from all his contemporaries, and which are hardly to be found elsewhere in English poetry. Wakefield observes that Gray wrote his lines on Dryden with a reminiscence of Pope's expressions. Progress of Poesy, 104.

1. 271. splay-foot verse. Cf. Essay on Criticism, 354:

Then at the last, and only, couplet fraught

With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,

A needless Alexandrine ends the song.'

Though ridiculed by Pope and Swift, the Alexandrine long kept its place English heroic verse.

1. 279. And fluent Shakspeare scarce effac'd a line. Ben Jonson, Discoveries

(ed. Gifford, 9. 175): 'I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakspeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand !",

The best criticism on the

1. 287. Congreve-Farqubar_Vanbrugh. Comic Dramatists of the Restoration is to be found in Macaulay's Essay on the subject.

1. 289. How Van wants grace, who never wanted wit. It is not certain whether grace here is said of style and manner, or of an influence which should have restrained the licence of his dialogue and situations. Pope uses it frequently in this sense. Sat. and Ep. 6. 286:

'My heir may sigh, and think it want of grace,

A man so poor would live without a place.'

Of Sir John Vanbrugh Hallam says, Lit. of Europe, 3. 528: Amanda, in The Relapse, is the first homage that the theatre had paid since the Restoration to female chastity. Notwithstanding the vicious tone of the other characters, in which Vanbrugh has gone as great lengths as any of his contemporaries, we perceive the beginnings of a reaction which gradually reformed the moral standard of the stage.'

1. 290. The stage how loosely does Astræa tread. Astræa, the poetical name, parisyllabically, of Aphara Behn, died 1689. She was a prolific authoress, having produced, besides novels, seventeen plays, which were mostly successful. By loosely is indicated the indecorous character of some of her performances.

1. 292. And idle Cibber, how he breaks the laws, i. e. the received laws of the dramatic writers.

293. To make poor Pinky eat with vast applause. William Pinkethman, a comic actor, called by Gildon 'the flower of Bartholomew Fair, and the idol of the rabble.' It was in the character of Don Lewis, in 'Love makes a Man,' that Pinkethman ate two chickens in three seconds. Pinkethman's name is prefixed to a collection of Jests published in 1720-1. See an account of him in Colley Cibber, Apology for his own Life, p. 159. On the vulgar taste for theatrical pantomime, see Dunciad,

3. 265:

'But lo! to dark encounter in mid-air

New wizards rise; I see my Cibber there;
Booth in his cloudy tabernacle shrin'd,

On grinning dragons Cibber mounts the wind.'

1. 312. Taste, that eternal wanderer, which flies. Cibber, Apol. for his own Life, p. 79: Taste and fashion with us have always had wings, and fly from one public spectacle to another so wantonly that a famous puppetshew in Salisbury Change, then standing where Cecil-street now is, so far

L

distressed these two companies (the King's and the Duke's), that they peti

tioned the king for relief against it.

Nor ought we to think this strange,

Roman auditors of his time with the

when Terence himself reproaches the

like fondness for the rope-dancers.' Hecyra, Prol. :

'Ita populus studio stupidus in funambulo

Animum occuparat.'

1. 313. From beads to ears, and now from ears to eyes. The downward course of taste from the acted, to the musical, drama, in the last generation, and from Operas to Pantomime in the present.

1. 318. Old Edward's armour beams on Cibber's breast. Cibber, Letter to Mr. Pope, 1742, defends himself from having been an encourager of

these fooleries.'

1. 328. on Orcas' stormy steep. Pope explains in a note, 'the farthest northern promontory of Scotland, opposite to the Orcades.' In placing wolves in Scotland he seems to have forgotten his own note on Pastorals, Summer, 83. There he says, he withdraws the line, ‘And list'ning wolves grow milder as they hear,' on account of the absurdity of introducing wolves into England.'

1. 331. Quin. Quin's characters are enumerated by Churchill, Rosciad, 944. Quin held the first place as a tragic actor till the appearance of Garrick in 1741. He retired from the stage in 1753.

1. 334. Booth enters. According to Theophilus Cibber, Life of Booth, p. 68, Booth used to defend pantomime on the ground of its being the only means of keeping up the regular theatres against the superior attractions of the Opera. For Booth, see Sat. and Ep. 5. 122.

1. 348. this part of the poetic state. The drama as a distinct part of the poetical republic. Augustus' patronage was limited to the dramatic poets, and Horace puts in a petition for an extension of it to the other classes of poetry.

1. 352. Or who shall wander where the Muses sing? The point of these four lines is obscure. It must be sought in Pope's desire to drag in, without regard to the context, a sneer at the Queen. Merlin's Cave was a whim of hers in Richmond Gardens, which had cost her a good deal of money, and occasioned her constant vexation from the King. The selection of the books in the small library in the Cave did not please Pope, as it did not include his own writings, or those of his friends.

The change of taste in the next generation was fatal to Merlin's Cave. Its destruction is commemorated by Mason, Heroic Epistle, 1. 55:

Destroys those wonders which were once thy own.
Lo, from his melon-ground the peasant slave
Has rudely rush'd and level'd Merlin's Cave,

Knock'd down the waxen wizard, seiz'd his wand,
Transform'd to lawn what late was fairy-land,
And mar'd with impious hand each sweet design
Of Stephen Duck and good Queen Caroline.'

1. 375. As once for Lewis, Boileau and Racine. Boileau, Ep. 10. 107: 'Que ce Roi, dont le nom fait trembler tant de Rois

Voulut bien que ma main craionnât ses exploits.'

Boileau was associated with Racine for the purpose of writing the history of the glories of Louis' reign in October, 1677.

1. 379. Fit to bestow the Laureat's weighty place. A sarcasm on Sir Robert Walpole, who had degraded the laureateship by bestowing it on Cibber as a reward for a political play-The Nonjuror.

1. 381. Assign'd bis figure to Bernini's care. Bernini, born at Naples, 1598, was painter, sculptor, architect. He executed busts of a number of exalted personages, and amongst others of Charles I. and Louis XIV. His bust of Charles I. is not known to be in existence. It is conjectured that it may have perished in the fire of Whitehall. Bernini died in 1680. Pope possessed a head of Homer by Bernini, which he left by will to Lord Mansfield.

1. 382. And great Nassau to Kneller's hand decreed. Kneller, died 1723, is described in Pope's epitaph in Westminster Abbey as

'Now for two ages having snatch'd from fate

Whate'er was beauteous or whate'er was great.' His great picture of William III. on horseback is now in the presencechamber at Windsor.

1. 387. One knighted Blackmore. Sir Richard Blackmore was knighted by William III. in his professional character, as Physician in Ordinary, not as a tribute to his poetical merits. But his fame came from his poetry. Smith, Poem to Memory of John Philips, calls Blackmore—

'A haughty bard to fame by volumes raised,

At Dick's and Batson's, and through Smithfield prais'd.'

one pension'd Quarles. This may have been a fact known to Pope by tradition. No authentication of it has yet been discovered. See Notes and Queries, 1st Ser., vols. I and 2.

1. 389. No Lord's anointed, but a Russian bear. No tolerable explanation has yet been offered of this allusion, which the editors judiciously pass by in silence. The difficulties of it are thus stated in Notes and Queries, 2nd Ser., I. 449: The puzzle is how Ben Jonson and Dennis could concur on the same affidavit; why the Lord's anointed should be contrasted with a Russian bear; and why a Russian bear?'

1. 395. your arms, your actions, your repose to sing. concluding lines was only too transparent in 1737.

The irony of these They now no longer