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1. 256. buzzas rhymes with weighs, according to the pronunciation of the last vowel, which then ruled. The present pronunciation huzza is etymologically more correct. The word represents a cry of the chase (? Norman),

bou! ça!

1. 257. Marcellus. Marcus Marcellus (died B. C. 46) may be ranked with M. Cato as the best and most public-spirited of the Pompeian party. After Pharsalus, he withdrew to Mitylene, where he devoted himself to literature and philosophy. By Marcellus, Pope is known to have meant the Duke of Ormond. The Duke of Ormond owed the devotion of the Tory party to his descent from the most illustrious of the cavaliers. He was himself an insignificant person, spoiled by flattery, without decision, and without capacity, relying always on others, yet without that distrust of himself from which an habitual reliance upon others might be expected to proceed. James, second Duke, was attainted of high treason, 1715, along with Lords Bolingbroke and Oxford. He was now (1734) living in exile in France in the service of the Pretender.

1. 266. All fear, none aid you, and few understand. The constant complaint of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius; see his De Rebus Suis, passim. 1. 267. Painful prebeminence! Cf. Byron, Childe Harold, canto 3,

st. 45:

'He who ascends to mountain tops shall find

The loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow;
He who surpasses or subdues mankind

Must look down on the hate of those below.'

1. 278. Mark how they grace Lord Umbra, or Sir Billy. It has been thought that Lord Melcombe and Sir William Yonge are here intended. But Bubb Dodington was only advanced to the peerage as Lord Melcombe in 1761; and there is no point in supposing any real character to be aimed at here. The only reason for so thinking is, that in 1. 280,

Look but on Gripus, or on Gripus' wife,'

the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough are intended, as the context, 1. 302 foll., shews.

1. 281. Bacon. Francis Bacon, born 1560, died 1626, aet. 66. Party rancour pressed against him certain charges of venality in the discharge of his judicial functions as Lord Chancellor. He pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to pay a fine of 40,000l., to be imprisoned in the Tower during the king's pleasure, and was declared incapable of holding any office or of sitting in parlia

ment.

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1. 282. The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind. It is painful to turn,' says Macaulay, from contemplating Bacon's philosophy, to contemplating his life.' So much truth requires us to say. But Pope goes beyond the truth. Bacon was not the meanest of mankind. Pope cannot forego an antithetical effect at whatever cost it has to be obtained. And in estimating historical characters he seems to have been without any proper standard, and wholly at the mercy of prevailing social prejudices. In the Essay alone we have such mistakes in the cases of Alexander the Great, Cromwell, Newton, Bacon, &c. Cf. 4. 219. Thomson had excused Bacon in lines as much better in sentiment as they are weaker in expression. Seasons; Summer,

Hapless in his choice,

Unfit to stand the civil storms of state,
And through the smooth barbarity of courts,
With firm but pliant virtue, forward still

To urge his course; him for the studious shade
Kind nature formed, deep, comprehensive, clear,
Exact and elegant;' &c.

1. 283. ravish'd with. Spenser uses this construction, Sonnet 3:
'Ravished with fancy's wonderment,'

Drummond, Hymn on Fairest Fair:

But ravished with still beholding thee.'

ravish'd with the whistling of a name. Alluding to the proverb, The fowler's whistle the bird's death.' See Gosson, School of Abuse, p. 10. robably remembered Cowley, Ess. Trans. of Virg. Georg. 2:

'Charmed with the foolish whistlings of a name.'

1. 284. Cromwell. See note on 4. 282.

1. 285. all, united: i. e. the rich, the honour'd, fam'd, and great.

Pope

1. 290. How bappy! those to ruin, these betray. Pope has here carried condensation to obscurity.

1. 292. From dirt and sea-weed as proud Venice rose. Pope is affecting to redress the false scale of the common estimate of human affairs. A true sense of greatness would not have permitted him to sneer at the humble origin of Venice, which in 1735, though she had not lost her independence, had fallen from her splendour. More just was the sentiment of the Latin poets, who always refer to the lowly origin of Rome in a spirit of pride, e. g. Propertius, Eleg. 4. I:

Hoc, quodcunque vides, hospes, qua maxima Roma est,
Ante Phrygem Aeneam, collis et herba fuit.'

Thomson again is in a nobler tone (of Venice), Liberty, pt. 4, l. 294:

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Where pushed from plunder'd earth a remnant still
Inspired by me, through the dark ages, kept

Of my old Roman flame some sparks alive;
The seeming god-built city,' &c.

Alluded to by Byron, Childe Harold, c. 4, st. 13:

'Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done,
Sinks like a sea-weed into whence she rose.'

Cf. Rogers' Italy, Venice.

1. 303. story'd. A Miltonic epithet misused. Milton, Penseroso, 158, says storied windows,' that is, representing ancient story. Cf. Harrison, Description of England, bk. 2, c. I: As for our churches, all images, shrines, tabernacles, rood loftes, and monuments of idolatry, are removed, onely the stories in the glass windowes, excepted.' Story'd balls can only mean halls famed in story, historic. Cf. Comus, 516:

What the sage poets taught by th' heavenly muse

Storied of old in high immortal verse.'

Rowe, Lucan, b. 9, each storied place survey,' of Caesar visiting the plain of Troy. Gray, Elegy, st. 11, 'storied urn or animated bust.'

11. 307, 308. See 299, 300. This recurrence of the same rhyme, fame— shame, within ten lines is an instance of negligence.

1. 314. Is blest in what it takes, and what it gives. Cf. Merchant of Venice, 4. I: It is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.' 11. 314-318. J. B. Mayor, Contemp. Rev. vol. 14, p. 118: This is a specimen of Pope's incorrect style. There is no subject to the verbs. What is it which is "attended with no pain"? What is "without satiety "? What is "more distressed"? In the second line "joy unequalled" is in the absolute construction; "it" is merit; but we cannot speak of merit, scarcely of joy, as" attended with no pain"; the phrase is properly applicable only to "loss," understood from the verb lose which precedes.'

(Nature, whose dictates to no other kind

1. 347. Are giv'n in vain, but what they seek they find.) The parenthetical couplet suggests, but obscurely, the argument for a future life from the human instinct of immortality. This argument is shortly stated by Dr. S. Clarke, Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion (1075), p. 271 (ed. 1749): 'Tis not at all probable that God should have given men appetites which were never to be satisfied; desires which had no objects to answer them; and unavoidable apprehensions of what was never really to come to pass.' So Young, Night Thoughts, Night 7:

1. 351.

Heaven's promise dormant lies in human hope,
Who wishes life immortal, proves it too.'
At once bis own bright prospect to be blest,
And strongest motive to assist the rest.

The construction here is not only elliptical, but clumsy. Mr. Elwin, note in loc. explains: His greatest virtue is benevolence; his greatest bliss the hope of a happy eternity. Nature connects the two, for the bliss depends on the virtue.'

1. 364. As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake. Chaucer, House of Fame, 2. 283:

"If that thou

Threw in a water now a stone,
Well wost thou it will make anone
A littell roundell as a cercle,
Paraventure as broad as a covercle,

And right anone thou shalt see wele

That whele cercle will cause another whele.

Cf. Shakespeare, Henry VI. pt. 1, act I, sc. 2:

'Glory is like a circle in the water,

Which never ceases to enlarge itself

Till by broad spreading, it disperse to nought!'

Marvell makes another use of the image, First Anniversary, &c., Poems, p. 96 (ed. 1870):

'Like the vain curlings of the watery maze

Which in smooth streams a sinking weight doth raise,

So man declining, always disappears

In the weak circles of increasing years.'

Pope had employed the simile before, Temple of Fame, 436; Dunciad,

1. 373. come along. This vulgarism is a blemish in the outset of this fine concluding address to Bolingbroke.

1. 385. Say, shall my little bark attendant sail, &c. Hurd compares Statius Silv. 1. 4. 120:

immensae veluti connexa carinae

Cymba minor,' &c.

1. 390. guide, philosopher, and friend. Mason, Poems, Elegy, 1753, expostulates with the shade of Pope for his misplaced admiration bestowed on Bolingbroke, and refused to Marlborough, for no other reason than that of political connection:

'Ask if he ne'er bemoans that hapless hour

When St. John's name illumined glory's page?
Ask if the wretch who dar'd his memory stain,
Ask if his country's, his religion's foe

Deserv'd the meed that Marlbro' failed to gain,
The deathless meed he only could bestow?"

1. 391. urg'd by thee. Thus ascribing the suggestion of the subject to Bolingbroke.

I turn'd the tuneful art

From sounds to things, from fancy to the heart.

Pope supposed himself, in his poetry generally, and particularly in the Essay on Man, to have achieved a reform in the matter as well as in the style of writing. He had taken moral and social themes and topics of the day in which men's passions were interested, instead of exercising his ingenuity in coining verbal conceits, or writing copies of verses on neutral subjects. If Pope be contrasted broadly with the poets before the Restoration, called by Johnson metaphysical,' the antithesis here drawn is true. But then it is equally true of many other poets who were Pope's contemporaries, and of Dryden. The contrast between words and things he pursues again in the Dunciad, in satirising grammar-school education, 4. 159:

'Confine the thought to exercise the breath,
And keep them in the pale of words till death.'

November, 1882.

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