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THE FIRST EPISTLE

OF THE

SECOND BOOK OF HORACE.

TO AUGUSTUS.1

WHILE you, great patron of mankind!' sustain
The balanced world, and open all the main;'
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,"
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend; ✓

1 The king's name was George Augustus.

2 All those nauseous and outra geous compliments, which Horace, in a strain of abject adulation, degraded himself by paying to Augustus, Pope has converted into bitter and pointed sarcasms, conveyed under the form of the most artful irony.WARTON.

3 This has been thought a very obscure expression; but it should be remembered that irony is the leading feature of this Epistle. It was written in 1737, at the time when the Spanish depredations at sea were such that there was an universal cry that the British flag had been insulted, and the contemptible and degraded English braved on their own element. "At this period," says Mr. Coxe, "the House was daily inundated with petitions and papers relating to the inhumanities committed on the English prisoners taken on board of trading vessels."

3

"Opening all the main" means, therefore, that the King was so liberal as to leave it open to the Spaniards, who committed with impunity whatever outrages they pleased, on those who were before considered the almost exclusive masters of it.-BOWLES.

Rather, "Open all the main" has a double meaning. It seems, on the surface, to mean, "open all the main to English trade;" but what is actually meant is, as Bowles says, that the main was left open only to the Spaniards. By the treaty of 1667, the Spaniards had the right of searching merchant vessels in those seas for contraband goods, and the manner in which they exercised the right provoked the liveliest indignation in England. The public excitement reached its height over what Burke calls "the fable of Jenkins's ears."

4 I have not ventured to alter the punctuation, for the passage stands as here pointed in all the early editions as

How shall the Muse, from such a monarch, steal
An hour, and not defraud the public weal?
Edward and Henry,' now the boast of fame,
And virtuous Alfred, a more sacred name,
After a life of generous toils endured,
The Gauls subdued, or property secured,
Ambition humbled, mighty cities stormed,
Or laws established, and the world reformed;
Closed their long glories with a sigh, to find
The unwilling gratitude of base mankind! 2
All human virtue, to its latest breath,
Finds envy never conquered but by death.
The great Alcides, every labour passed,
Had still this monster to subdue at last.
Sure fate of all, beneath whose rising ray
Each star of meaner merit fades away!
Oppressed we feel the beam directly beat,
Those suns of glory please not till they set.3

But I can.

well as in Warburton's.
not help thinking that the comma
after "chief" was originally an error,
which was left uncorrected; and that
the comma should be placed after
"arms. Bowles. indeed, says: "This
line meaus quite the contrary. The
people were wearied with so long a
period of peace, and in 1738 the
public mind was agitated almost to
frenzy, and the cry of instant war,
retaliation, and revenge, resounded
from one part of England to the
other; it is therefore with the bit-
terest sarcasm that Pope exclains:
'Your country, chief, in arms
abroad defend.' But besides that it
is a clumsy piece of irony merely to
say bluntly the exact opposite of
what is really meant, and that there
is much awkwardness in the second
apostrophe to the King as "chief,"
the point of the satire seems to lie,
first, in the words " 'chief in arms,"
alluding to the King's notorious de-

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sire to command the army in person (see Lord Hervey's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 371); and, secondly, in the words "abroad defend," meaning that George II. was more careful for the interests of Hanover than for those of England, which was of course one of the stock charges of the Opposition.

1 Edward III. and Henry V.

2 That is to say, "closed their long glories with a sigh at finding how unwillingly the gratitude of base mankind was given."

3 He seems indebted to Waller's poem on the Protector, throughout this noble passage:

Still as you rise, the State, exalted too, Finds no distemper when 'tis changed by you;

Changed like the world's great scene,
when without noise

The rising sun night's vulyar lights destroys.
Had you, some ages past, this age of glory
Run, with amazement we should read
your story:

To thee, the world its present homage pays,
The harvest early, but mature the praise:
Great friend of liberty! in kings a name
Above all Greek, above all Roman fame:
Whose word is truth, as sacred and revered,
As Heaven's own oracles from altars heard.
Wonder of Kings! like whom, to mortal eyes
None e'er has risen, and none e'er shall rise.
Just in one instance, be it yet confessed
Your people, sir, are partial in the rest:
Foes to all living worth except your own,
And advocates for folly dead and gone.

Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old;
It is the rust we value, not the gold.'
Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote,'
And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote:*
One likes no language but the Faery Queen ;*
A Scot will fight for Christ's Kirk o' the Green :'

But living virtue, all achievements past,
Meets Envy still, to grapple with at last.

Again, in his verses on St. James's
Park:

Those suns of empire! where they rise, they set.- WAKEFIELD.

1 Compare Epistle to Addison, v. 35:

With sharpened sight pale antiquaries

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Skelton was Laureate before the year 1490. He took orders in 1498, and was censured, and perhaps suspended from his priestly office, for his satirical ballads against the Mendicants. He afterwards attacked Cardinal Wolsey, and was obliged to take shelter in the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, where he was entertained and protected by Abbot Islip till his death in 1529. He was buried in St. Margaret's, Westminster. Erasmus styled him "Britannicarum literarum lumen et decus."

4 Compare ver. 97.

5 A ballad made by a king of Scotland.-POPE.

Our James I. was eminent for poetry no less than for music. We have many poems ascribed by tradition to that king; one in particular, Christ's Kirk o' the Green, is a ludicrous poem, describing low manners with no less propriety than sprightliness.-LORD KAMES.

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And each true Briton is to Ben so civil,

He swears the Muses met him at the Devil.'

Though justly Greece her eldest sons admires,

Why should not we be wiser than our sires? 29

In every public virtue we excel;

We build, we paint, we sing, we dance as well;
And learned Athens to our art must stoop,
Could she behold us tumbling through a hoop.'
If time improve our wits as well as wine,
Say at what age a poet grows divine ?
Shall we, or shall we not, account him so,
Who died, perhaps, an hundred years ago?
End all dispute; and fix the year precise
When British bards begin to immortalize?
"Who lasts a century can have no flaw,

I hold that wit a classic, good in law."

Suppose he wants a year, will you compound? And shall we deem him ancient, right, and sound, Or damn to all eternity at once,

At ninety-nine, a modern and a dunce ? v

"We shall not quarrel for a year or two;

By courtesy of England' he may do."

Then, by the rule that made the horse-tail bare, I pluck out year by year, as hair by hair,"

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The Devil Tavern, where Ben Jonson held his Poetical Club.POPE. Ben Jonson presided over the Apollo Club at the "Devil," which was next door to Child's Bank in Fleet Street. The tavern was pulled down when the Bank premises were extended in 1788.

2 This is a stroke at the contemporary rage for spectacular and acrobatic exhibitions of all kinds upon the stage in the place of legitimate drama. Sedley notes the beginning of the new taste after Dryden's disappearance from the stage:

Poets of different magnitude advance,
In humble confidence of song and dance.
Ballons and tumblers please, though
poets fail.

3 Courtesy of England is restricted in law to the single case of not dis turbing the husband in the enjoy ment, for his life, of his wife's estate after her death. Pope applies it loosely to the case of not disturbing the claim of a poet to rank as a classic where a prescriptive title of a full century could not be made out.PATTISON.

4 The allusion in Horace is to the

And melt down ancients like a heap of snow,
While you, to measure merits, look in Stowe,'
And estimating authors by the year,
Bestow a garland only on a bier.

Shakespeare (whom you and every play-house bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.2
Ben, old and poor, as little seemed to heed
The life to come in every poet's creed."
Who now reads Cowley ? if he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art,'
But still I love the language of his heart.

fallacy called Sorites, and is said to refer to the sophism of Eubulides of Miletus, the question being how many hairs could be pulled out of a man's head before he could be said to be made bald.

1 The old chronicler. He is mentioned again in the Versification of Donne, Sat. iv. 131.

2 Shakespeare and Ben Jonson may truly be said not to have thought of this Immortality, the one in many pieces composed in haste for the stage; the other in his latter works in general, which Dryden called his dotages.-POPE.

3 This must mean "seemed as little to heed the life to come which is part of every poet's creed." The criticism is not just. Jonson worked to the last with painful art, and his Ode to Himself, after the failure of the New Inn, is a bitter philippic against the bad taste of the public:

Say that thou pour'st them wheat,
And they will acorns eat;

"Twere simple fury still thyself to waste

On such as have no taste!

To offer them a surfeit of pure bread,
Whose appetites are dead!

No! give them grains their fill,
Husks, draff, to drink and swill:
VOL. III.-POETRY.

65

70

75

If they love lees and leave the lusty wine,
Envy them not, their palate's with the swine.

* Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), who, in his own age, enjoyed a greater reputation than perhaps any poet of the seventeenth century. He was the head of the "metaphysical" school of poetry, which had in Pope's time gone completely out of fashion.

5 "Wit, abstracted from its effects on the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit thus defined they " (the metaphysical school) "have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased."-JOHNSON, Life of Cowley.

6 Cowley's Epic is called the Davideis.

7 Which has much more merit

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