"Yet surely, surely, these were famous men ! Of Shakespeare's nature, and of Cowley's wit; than his Epic, but very unlike the character as well as numbers of Pindar.-POPE. Dryden continued Cowley's Pindaric style, but it had no doubt lapsed in Pope's time, and even when revived by Gray and Collins, with more inspiration, it was coldly received. The poet has here put the bald cant of women and boys into extreme fine verse. This is in strict imitation of his original, where the same impertinent and gratuitous criticism is admirably ridiculed.POPE. 2 Compare Dunciad, ii. 223. 3 There is no trustworthy account of the origin of the literary partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher. It was no uncommon thing for managers in the Elizabethan period to employ more than one poet on a play. Thus no less than five poets were engaged in the production of a lost play called Two Harpies. It is, however, probable that the co-operation of Beaumont and Fletcher was the result rather of private friendship than stage convenience. 4 Nothing was less true than this particular. But the whole paragraph has a mixture of irony, and must not altogether be taken for Horace's own judgment, only the common chat of the pretenders to criticism in some : 80 85 things right, in others wrong, as he tells us in his answer, Interdum vulgus rectum videt; est ubi peccat.-POPE. The criticism on Wycherley and Shadwell was made by Rochester, in his Allusion to the Tenth Satire of the First Book of Horace : Of all our modern wits none seem to me Once to have touched upon true comedy, But hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley. Pope said to Spence: "Lord Rochester's character of Wycherley is quite wrong. He was far from being slow in general, and in particular wrote the Plain Dealer in three weeks. -Anecdotes, p. 200. " 5 Thomas Southern, best known by his play of Oroonoko, born 1660, died 1746. See Pope's lines to him, On his Birthday, 1742. Nicholas Rowe, born 1673, died 1718. His best known tragedies are The Fair Penitent, Jane Shore, and Lady Jane Grey. Johnson says of him: "He seldom moves either pity or terror; but he often elevates the sentiments; he seldom pierces the breast, but he always delights the ear, and often improves the understanding." 6 John Heywood may be called the father of the English stage. His Interludes form the connecting link be tween the "moralities " and the regular drama. Compare Dunciad, i. 98. All this may be; the people's voice is odd, It is, and it is not, the voice of God.' 2 To Gammer Gurton if it give the bays, But let them own that greater faults than we And Sidney's verse halts ill on Roman feet:5 1 The "vox populi," as far as it is the verdict of a mere passing majority, need be nothing more than the voice of fashion; but from the decision of the world, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, - there is no appeal. "Securus judicat orbis terrarum." Pope, however, seems here to mean no more than that the judgment of the people is partly right and partly wrong. 2 A piece of very low humour, one of the first printed plays in English, and therefore much valued by some antiquaries.-POPE. It is said to have been written by Still, Bishop of Bath and Wells. The oldest extant edition of the play is dated 1575. 3 The public never "denied the Careless Husband praise." The play was always popular, and retained the stage throughout the last century. Cibber tells us in his Apology that he wrote the first two acts in 1703, and then laid the play aside in despair of being able to find a Lady Betty Modish. Afterwards, having discovered Mrs. Oldfield's genius, he finished the piece and assigned the part to her. In his letter to Pope, he seems to doubt whether Pope's line was intended to be really com In quibbles, angel and archangel join, DRYDEN, Preface to Translations from Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace. 1 The quibbles passing between angel and archangel probably refer to the jests of Satan and Belial in the battle of the Angels, Paradise Lost, Book 6, 609-628. The "school divinity" of the First Person of the Trinity is most pronounced in the Third Book of Paradise Lost. This may be either understood as a metaphor from a hedger's bill-hook, or, as Warburton takes it, of the brackets in which Bentley used to enclose the lines which he considered spurious. Pope himself applies the word "hook" in this sense Bentley's critical method, in a note to Dunciad, iv. 194. Probably he intended both meanings. Compare Epistle to Arbuthnot, ver. 164. to 3 Alluding to Lord Hervey's affected depreciation of classical education in his Letter to a Doctor of Divinity: All that I learned from Dr. Friend at school, By Gradus, Lexicon, or Grammar-rule, Has quite deserted this poor John-Trot head, And left plain native English in its stead. See Pope's remarks on these lines in his Letter to a Noble Lord. 105 110 Thomas Carew, born about 1589, died in 1639. Pope said of him to Spence : "Carew (a bad Waller), Waller himself, and Lord Lansdowne, are all of one school; as Sir John Suckling, Sir John Mennis, and Pryor are of another." It is hard to say what he meant by this subtle classification. Carew had certainly on the whole more in common with Sir John Suckling than with Waller, who was obviously the first of the fathers of the eighteenth-century style. Carew, on the other hand, was of Ben Jonson's line. The ground on which all the poets enumerated met in common was "conceit," the bane of seventeenth century verse. Sir Charles Sedley, father of Catharine Sedley, Duchess of Dorset, a wit and courtier in Charles II.'s reign. He was born in 1639, and died in 1701. His verse is of the fashionable amatory description peculiar to that period, and is praised by his friend Rochester in a characteristic manner : Sedley has that prevailing gentle art One simile, that solitary shines In the dry desert of a thousand lines, Or lengthened thought that gleams through many a page, I lose my patience, and I own it too, When works are censured not as bad but new; While if our elders break all reason's laws, These fools demand not pardon, but applause. On Avon's banks where flowers eternal blow, Or well-mouthed Booth with emphasis proclaims, 1 So Dryden, in his Essay on Satire : When one poor thought sometimes left all alone, For a whole page of dulness must atone. Roscommon, in his Essay, seems also not unattended to: The weighty bullion of one sterling line Drawn to French-wire would through whole pages shine.- WAKEFIELD. 2 Pope had criticised Shakespeare's manner in the preface to his edition published in 1725. Theobald in his subsequent edition cast some reflections on his presumption. 3 Thomas Betterton, the son of one of King Charles I.'s cooks, was born in 1635, and had a greater reputation than any actor on the English stage from the Restoration till his retirement in 1710, which took place only a few days before his death. He is described vividly in Cibber's Apology, and a still more minute account of his characteristics is given by Anthony Aston in a pamphlet called A brief Supplement to Colley Cibber, Esq., his lives of the famous Actors and Actresses:" "Mr. Betterton, although a superla 115 120 tive good actor, laboured under an ill figure, being clumsily made, having a great head, a short thick neck, stooped in the shoulders, and had fat, short arms, which he rarely lifted higher than his stomach. His left hand frequently lodged in his breast between his coat and waistcoat, while with his right he prepared his speech; his actions were few but just; he had little eyes and a broad face, a little pock-fretten, a corpulent body and thick legs, with large feet. He was better to meet than to follow, for his aspect was serious, venerable, and majestic, in his latter time a little paralytic; his voice was low and grumbling, yet he could tune it by an artful climax, which enforced universal attention, even from the fops and orange-girls; he was incapable of dancing even in a country dance." 4 An absurd custom of several actors, to pronounce with emphasis the mere proper names of Greeks and Romans, which (as they call it) fill the mouth of the player.— POPE. It is evident that Pope had a How will our fathers rise up in a rage, And swear all shame is lost in George's age! He, who to seem more deep than you or I, Extols old bards or Merlin's prophecy,' And to debase the sons, exalts the sires." Had ancient times conspired to disallow What then was new, what had been ancient now? Or what remained, so worthy to be read By learned critics, of the mighty dead? In days of ease, when now the weary sword' Was sheathed, and luxury with Charles restored; grudge against Booth, and the reason of his resentment is to be found in a letter of Dennis to Booth (B. B.) 18th Dec., 1714 (printed among the libels against himself, collected by Pope), in which the former says: "You are in the right, sir-Windsor Forest is a wretched rhapsody, not worthy the observation of a man of sense," showing that Booth had first expressed the same opinion to Dennis. At the same time Pope disliked the solemn and formal style of the old school of acting, and was enthusiastic in his praise of Garrick, who was the first to introduce a more free and natural manner. 1 A translation of the so-called Prophecies of Merlin had been published by T. Heywood in 1641. 2 "It is not with an ultimate intention to pay reverence to the manes of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson, that they commend their writings, but to throw dirt on the writers of this age their declaration is one thing, but their practice 125 130 133 140 is another. By a sceming veneration to our fathers they would thrust out us, their hopeful issue, and govern us themselves, under a specious pretence of reformation."- DRYDEN'S Preface to his Translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. 3 This passage (139-188) should be closely compared with the original. The comparison will show the difficulties of the Imitation, the ingenuity with which Pope encountered them, and the faults into which he fell in his desire to produce striking modern parallels to the Latin. Horace is arguing against the idea that the merit of his poetical predecessors was a fixed standard to which it was necessary that all modern poets should conform. He illustrates his argument, first by showing how rapidly Greece ran through all the circle of the arts, and then how the Romans exchanged their rustic simplicity for literary refinement; thus proving by two instances that the fickleness of taste was the conse |