The rich buffet well-coloured serpents grace,' So quick retires each flying course, you'd swear Treated, caressed, and tired, I take my leave, Sick of his civil pride from morn to eve; I curse such lavish cost, and little skill, 155 160 165 And swear no day was ever passed so ill. Yet hence the poor are clothed, the hungry fed ;* Health to himself, and to his infants bread, 170 The labourer bears: what his hard heart denies, Another age shall see the golden ear 1 Taxes the incongruity of ornaments (though sometimes practised by the ancients), where an open mouth ejects the water into a fountain, or where the shocking images of serpents, etc., are introduced into grottos or buffets.-POPE. 2 The proud festivals of some men are here set forth to ridicule, where pride destroys the ease, and formal regularity all the pleasurable enjoyment of the entertainment.-POPE. 3 See Don Quixote, chapter xlvii. -POPE. 4 The moral of the whole where Providence is justified in giving 175 wealth to those who squander it in this manner. A bad taste employs more hands and diffuses expense more than a good one. This recurs to what is laid down in Book i. Epistle ii. ver. 230 to 237, and in the Epistle preceding this, ver. 161, etc.-POPE. But this Epistle was written before the preceding one, and before the Essay on Man. See note to ver. 176. 5 Had the poet lived but three years longer, he had seen his general prophecy against all ill-judged magnificence fulfilled in a very particular instance.-WARBURTON. In the edition of 1751 this note ran Who then shall grace, or who improve the soil ?1 Who plants like Bathurst, or who builds like Boyle ? 'Tis use alone that sanctifies expense, And splendour borrows all her rays from sense. Or makes his neighbours glad, if he increase : thus: Neither Warburton nor Warton notice that in the first edition these lines followed the character of Villario. Mr. Croker thinks that "this is one of Warburton's dislocations;" but the lines stand in their present place in the quarto and duodecimo editions of 1735. I suspect Pope moved them in order to emphasise his denial that the character of Timon was meant for Chandos. As we see by his note to ver. 169, he wanted to connect the character of Timon with the general principle which is laid down in the "Essay on Man," and is repeated in the First and Third Moral Essays. He knew also that the "hard heart" of Timon would seem strikingly inapplicable to the openhanded Duke. If, on the other hand, he had transposed the passage merely for the sake of making an effective 180 185 190 poetical prophecy, he would have helped to convict himself of what he so strenuously denied. The Duke's ruin was as early as 1734 foreseen by shrewd observers. His affairs had become involved in consequence of the collapse of the African Company, of which he was chairman, and Swift, who hated him, wrote in that year: Yet since just Heaven the duke's ambition mocks, Since all he got by fraud is lost by stocks, His wings are clipped: he tries no more in vain With bands of fiddlers to extend his train. Canons was sold by the second Duke in 1747. 1 These lines, 177 to 190, were (with the exception of ver. 179-80) not in the first edition. Ver. 179,180 in the first edition, ran : In you, my Lord, Taste sanctifies expense, For splendour borrows all her rays from sense, and then followed: You show us Rome was glorious, &c. 2 Compare the address to Bathurst in Imitation of Horace, Epistle ii. Book ii. 254-263. Jones and Palladio to themselves restore, Till kings call forth the ideas of your mind," 195 (Proud to accomplish what such hands designed,)3 1 M. Vitruvius Pollio (B. C. 80), author of the Treatise De Architectura. 2 The poet, after having touched upon the proper objects of magnificence and expense, in the private works of great men, comes to those great and public works which become a prince. This poem was published in the year 1732, when some of the new-built churches, by the Act of Queen Anne, were ready to fall, being founded in boggy land (which is satirically alluded to in our author's Imitation of Horace, Lib. ii. Satire 2: Shall half the new-built churches round thee fall ;) others very vilely executed through fraudulent cabals between undertakers, officers, &c. Dagenham breach had done very great mischiefs; many of the highways throughout England were hardly passable; and most of them were infamously executed, even to the entrance of London itself. The proposal of building a bridge at Westminster had been petitioned against and rejected; but in two years after the publication of this poem, an Act for building a bridge passed through both Houses. After many debates in the Committee the execution was left 200 3 66 'Design" must be here used in its technical sense, i.e., "draw." 4 Compare Spectator, No. 415: "We are obliged to devotion for the noblest buildings that have adorned the several countries of the world. It is this which has set men at work on temples and public places of worship, not only that they might, by the magnificence of the building, invite the Deity to reside within it, but that such stupendous works might, at the same time, open the mind to vast conceptions, and fit it to converse with the divinity of the place." 5 Imitated from Dryden, Translation of Æneid, vi. Those are imperial arts, and worthy thee. |