the day. At the same time he keeps in touch with Miss Arabella, and while telling her that the character of Belinda, as it is now managed, resembles you in nothing but beauty', he contrives, with wonderful tact, as a French critic has pointed out, to let her see that she herself was not entirely free from blame in the matter which had given rise to the trouble.

Fully to appreciate the deftness with which Pope has turned to account the Comte de Gabalis, we must consider for a few moments what precisely is meant by machinery' and its place in epic poetry. The meaning of the word, in this connexion, is the interposition of some supernatural agency or personage in a poem. Pope's own words, though written in a spirit of banter, are very significant: The use of these machines is evident: since no epic poem can possibly subsist without them, the wisest way is to reserve them for your greatest necessities: when you cannot extricate your hero by any human means, or yourself by your own wit, seek relief from heaven, and the gods will do your business very readily' (The Art of Sinking in Poetry. For the machines). Similarly, Professor Ker, in his Epic and Romance, speaking of the stories told to the Phaeacians in the Odyssey, says, "The episodes of Circe, of the Sirens, and of Polyphemus, are machines.'

In the first half of the eighteenth century, all classes of literature had a more or less conventional form, and consequently lent themselves to burlesque far more readily than the literature of our own day. Gay's Beggar's Opera and Swift's Gulliver's Travels are two instances which readily suggest themselves, as being burlesques respectively of the conventional methods of dramatists and of writers of travels. As regards Epic poetry, the theory of Aristotle and the

practice of Homer and Virgil were supreme. Every poem began with a stereotyped invocation of the Muse, it invariably contained episodes, machinery, and all the rest of it, and ended in a well-recognized fashion. The original version of The Rape of the Lock was lacking in many characteristics which a reader naturally looked for in an epic; and Pope by the introduction of machinery', and especially of machinery derived from an unwonted source, made his poem far more complete and mock-heroic. The spirits of the Rosicrucian philosophy gave him exactly what he wanted. Instead of the hackneyed gods and goddesses of Homer and Virgil, the angels of Tasso, the personification of Discord, Faith, and so on, of the Lutrin of Boileau, he found in Le Comte de Gabalis his sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders ready to his hand. It is true that he found himself under the necessity of altering in many particulars the account of these as given in the French book, but that was easily done without impairing the novelty of the thing; and the grace and dexterity with which it was accomplished only added to the charm of the poem.1

We must not leave the subject of the ' machinery' without calling attention to a remark recently made by Professor Macaulay, who has ingeniously compared Pope with James Thomson, his junior by twelve years. Thomson, he says,

:

1 The sylphs, however, had not been entirely neglected by previous French writers, for Madame de Sévigné makes mention of them as invisible attendants upon ladies and Horace Walpole added 'There is nothing new under the sun' to his note pointing out that Sonnerat, in his Voyage aux Indes orientales (1782), describes the 'Grandouvers of East Indian mythology in terms corresponding with Pope's sylphs. Later on, we have the Glendoveer in Southey's Curse of Kebama borrowed from the same source; and the Undine of de la Motte Fouqué is but another name for nymph'; indeed the Comte de Gabalis speaks of them as 'undines, or nymphs'.

was in a certain sense the complement of Pope, applying to country scenes something of the same power of true observation and vivid portraiture which Pope used upon the town'; and he goes on to point out that the introduction by Pope of the machinery of the sylphs to embroider' his description of town life in The Rape of the Lock is analogous to the use made by Thomson of man's relations with nature.

VI

We have referred above to the Lutrin of Boileau, which is one of the instances usually adduced of mock-heroic poems prior in point of date to The Rape of the Lock. This had appeared in 1674, and was undoubtedly the best production of the kind until it was excelled by Pope. It records, in a comic epic fashion, the petty squabbles of the chapter of La Sainte Chapelle in Paris over the position of a lectern. Another predecessor, written just 100 years before The Rape of the Lock, was the Secchia Rapita (Rape of the Bucket) of Alessandro Tassoni, which describes in comic fashion the battles of the Bolognese and Sardinians in 1249. Tassoni himself claims to have been the first to combine the heroic, the comic, and the satiric in one poem (Muratori, Vita di Tassoni, p. 81); but, as far as the heroic and the comic are concerned, he had to some extent been anticipated both by the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci and the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto. Garth's Dispensary, of which we have already made mention, was also prior in point of date to The Rape of the Lock, but there is not much that is comic' in it, and it can scarcely be regarded as a serious competitor. Of course there are instances among the classics of the ironical treatment of trifling subjects as if they were matters of great

importance, notably The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, attributed to Homer, but they may be left out of account as being of too old a date to come into comparison.

Another addition which, although of minor importance compared with the introduction of the Rosicrucian sylphs, furnishes one of the most brilliant episodes of the poemthe game of Ombre (as to which see Appendix, p. 93)-was suggested to Pope by the Scacchia Ludus (Game of Chess) of Vida. Vida, who was Bishop of Alba, died in 1566, and the poem, an admirable description of a game of chess in Latin hexameters, was published at Rome in 1527. It is interesting to note that, when Pope came in after years (1740) to edit two little volumes of Selecta Poemata Italorum, his selections from Vida included the Scacchia Ludus; and that Goldsmith left an English translation at his death in 1774.

We shall not attempt to follow out the well-known story of Pope's life subsequent to the publication of The Rape of the Lock. To do so with any detail would take up far more space than we have at our present disposal; but a short chronological table has been appended which may be useful for reference. As a last word, we may point out that it is, to say the least, interesting to find that the play of Menander (Пepikeɩpoμévn = Circumtonsa) which has at last been brought to light among the Oxyrhynchus papyri, has for its subject the cutting off of a lady's hair.

G. H.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF POPE'S PRINCIPAL PUBLICATIONS, AND SOME OF THE CHIEF EVENTS IN HIS LIFE, SUBSEQUENT TO 1713. 1714 Prologue to Addison's Cato. Windsor Forest. His breach with Addison-joins the Scriblerus Club' (Swift, Arbuthnot, Congreve, &c.). Takes lessons in painting from Charles Jervas. Translation of the Iliad projected.

1715 First book of the Iliad published.

1716 The Pope family moved from Binfield to Chiswick.

1717 Pope's father died. Eloisa to Abelard.

1718 Fifth volume of the Iliad finished at Stanton Harcourt. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu returned from the East.

1719 Pope bought lease of house and five acres of land at Twickenham. Lady M. W. Montagu came and lived near him. He invested

in the South Sea Stock. Addison died.

1722 Quarrelled with Lady M. W. Montagu. Edited Parnell's poems. Began his edition of Shakespeare.

1723 Atterbury exiled. Bolingbroke returned.

1725 Shakespeare a failure. First three volumes of his Odyssey published. His nurse, Mary Beach, died. Bolingbroke settled at Dawley near Twickenham.

1726 Swift visited him at Twickenham, and Pope arranged for him the publication of Gulliver's Travels.

1727 Swift again visited him. The Dunciad. Miscellanies.

1728 The Dunciad published anonymously.

1729 Enlarged edition of The Dunciad published, with the names no longer concealed under initials.

1736 John Caryll died. Bolingbroke returned to France.

1737 Pope's Correspondence published, as the result of intriguing and

very unworthy manœuvres on his part. His correspondence with Swift published in similar fashion. The Epistle to Augustus. 1738 The Epilogue to the Satires. The Universal Prayer.

F