Chapter 1

Tho beheld I fields and plains, And now hills, and now mountains, Now valeys, and now forestes, And now unnethes great bestes, Now riveres, now citees, Now townes, and now great trees, Now shippes sayling in the sea.--POPE.

Dennis objected to Pope's version that "if the whole creation was open to his eyes" he must be too high "to discern such minute objects as ships and trees." But the imagination in dreams conjures up appearances which are beyond the compass of the waking powers, and it is therefore strictly natural to represent events as passing in visions, which would be unnatural in actual life. Added to this, Pope had before him Ovid's description of the house of Fame, which is endued with the property of enabling the beholder to distinguish the smallest objects however remote:

Unde quod est usquam, quamvis regionibus absit, Inspicitur.

Or as Sandys translates it,

Where all that's done, though far removed, appears.]

[Footnote 13: Dryden's translation of Ovid's Met. book xii.:

Confused and chiding, like the hollow roar Of tides, receding from th' insulted shore; Or like the broken thunder heard from far When Jove at distance drives the rolling war.

This is more poetically expressed than the same image in our author. Dryden's lines are superior to the original.--WARTON.

Pope copied Dryden's translation of Ovid, and for this reason did not quote the parallel passage from Chaucer's second book of the House of Fame, where the eagle, when they come within hearing of the swell of indistinct voices, holds a colloquy with the poet on the phenomenon:

"And what sound is it like?" quoth he. "Peter! beating of the sea," Quoth I, "against the rockes hollow, When tempest doth the shippes swallow, Or elles like the last humbling After the clap of a thundring."

"Peter" is an exclamation; and the sense is, "By St. Peter it is like the beating of the sea against the hollow rocks." In Pope's poem no cause is assigned for the "wild promiscuous sound." In Chaucer it is produced by the confluence of the talk upon earth, every word of which is conveyed to the House of Fame.]

[Footnote 14: Chaucer's third book of Fame:

It stood upon so high a rock, Higher standeth none in Spayne-- What manner stone this rock was, For it was like a lymed glass, But that it shone full more clere; But of what congeled matere It was, I niste redily; But at the last espied I, And found that it was every dele, A rock of ice and not of stele.--POPE.

The temple of Fame is represented on a foundation of ice, to signify the brittle nature and precarious tenure, as well as the difficult attainment of that possession, according to the poet himself below, ver. 504:

So hard to gain, so easy to be lost.--WAKEFIELD.

Having complained that it was contrary to the laws of sight to suppose that a prospect in sleep could be extended beyond the ordinary range of mortal vision, Dennis proceeds to contend that for a rock to be sustained in the air was contrary to the eternal laws of gravitation, "which," says Pope sarcastically, in a manuscript note, "no dream ought to be." The cavil of Dennis was as false in science as in criticism, for it is not more contrary to the laws of gravitation for a rock to be suspended in space than for the earth itself.]

[Footnote 15: Dryden, Æneis, vi. 193:

Smooth the descent, and easy is the way.]

[Footnote 16:

Tho saw I all the hill y-grave With famous folkes names fele. That had been in muchel wele And her fames wide y-blow; But well unneth might I know Any letters for to rede Their names by, for, out of drede, They weren almost off-thawen so, That of the letters one or two Were molte away of every name, So unfamous was woxe their fame; But men said what may ever last.--POPE.]

[Footnote 17:

Tho gan I in myne harte cast, That they were molte away for heate, And not away with stormes beate.--POPE.]

[Footnote 18: Does not this use of the heat of the sun appear to be a puerile and far-fetched conceit? What connection is there betwixt the two sorts of excesses here mentioned? My purpose in animadverting so frequently as I have done on this species of false thoughts is to guard the reader, especially of the younger sort, from being betrayed by the authority of so correct a writer as Pope into such specious and false refinements of style.--WARTON.

Not only is the comparison defective, but the fundamental idea is unfounded, for though excess of admiration may produce a temporary reaction, the opinion of the world oscillates back to the middle line, and no instance can be quoted of an author who has finally lost his due reputation because he had once been overpraised. Chaucer makes a different use of the image. In his poem the north side of the icy mountain bears the names of the ancients which were safe from injury. The sunny side bears the names of the moderns, and he perhaps intended to intimate his opinion that the reason why their fame was less durable than that of the Greeks and Romans was that they were a more luxurious race, and did not in the same degree "scorn delights, and live laborious days" for the sake of producing immortal works.]

[Footnote 19:

For on that other side I sey Of that hill which northward ley, How it was written full of names Of folke, that had afore great fames, Of olde time, and yet they were As fresh as men had written hem there The self day, right or that houre That I upon hem gan to poure: But well I wiste what it made; It was conserved with the shade (All the writing that I sye) Of the castle that stoode on high, And stood eke in so cold a place, That heate might it not deface.--POPE.]

[Footnote 20: Though a strict verisimilitude be not required in the descriptions of this visionary and allegorical kind of poetry, which admits of every wild object that fancy may present in a dream, and where it is sufficient if the moral meaning atone for the improbability, yet men are naturally so desirous of truth that a reader is generally pleased, in such a case, with some excuse or allusion that seems to reconcile the description to probability and nature. The simile here is of that sort, and renders it not wholly unlikely that a rock of ice should remain for ever by mentioning something like it in our northern regions agreeing with the accounts of our modern travellers.--POPE.]

[Footnote 21: "Mountains _propping_ the sky" was one of those vicious common-places of poetry which falsify natural appearances.]

[Footnote 22: A real lover of painting will not be contented with a single view and examination of this beautiful winter-piece; but will return to it again and again with fresh delight. The images are distinct, and the epithets lively and appropriate, especially the words "pale," "unfelt," "impassive," "incumbent," "gathered."--WARTON.]

[Footnote 23: This excellent line was perhaps suggested by a fine couplet in Addison's translation of an extract from Silius Italicus:

Stiff with eternal ice, and hid in snow, That fell a thousand centuries ago.]

[Footnote 24: Dryden's Hind and Panther:

Eternal house not built with mortal hands.]

[Footnote 25: The temple is described to be square, the four fronts with open gates facing the different quarters of the world, as an intimation that all nations of the earth may alike be received into it. The western front is of Grecian architecture: the Doric order was peculiarly sacred to heroes and worthies. Those whose statues are after mentioned, were the first names of old Greece in arms and arts.--POPE.

The exterior of the Doric temples abounded in sculptured figures, which may be the reason that Pope supposes the order to have been "peculiarly sacred to heroes and worthies," but it may be doubted whether he had any good grounds for his assertion.]

[Footnote 26: The expression literally interpreted would signify that the gates were placed on the top of columns. Pope could not have had such a preposterous notion in his mind, and the meaning must be that the lofty gates were hung upon columns. He copied a couplet in Dryden's Æneis, vi. 744, where the translation misrepresents the original:

Wide is the fronting gate, and raised on high With adamantine columns, threats the sky.]

[Footnote 27: Addison's Vision of the Table of Fame, in the Tatler: "In the midst there stood a palace of a very glorious structure; it had four great folding doors that faced the four several quarters of the world."

Charles Dryden's translation of the seventh Satire of Juvenal, ver. 245:

Behold how raised on high A banquet house salutes the southern sky.]

[Footnote 28: Dryden, Juvenal, Sat. iii. 142:

No Thracian born, But in that town which arms and arts adorn.]

[Footnote 29: In the early editions:

The fourfold walls in breathing statues grace.

Addison in his Letter from Italy had called the Roman statues "breathing rocks."]

[Footnote 30: Addison's Letter from Italy:

Or teach their animated rocks to live. And emperors in Parian marble frown.]

[Footnote 31: Milton, Par. Lost, i. 714:

Doric pillars overlaid With golden architrave, nor did there want Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 32: Dryden, Ovid's Met. book xii.:

An ample goblet stood of antique mould And rough with figures of the rising gold.

Dryden, Æn. viii. 830:

And Roman triumphs rising on the gold.

Addison's Letter from Italy:

And pillars rough with sculpture pierce the skies.]

[Footnote 33: This legendary hero was an Athenian knight-errant who, in imitation of Hercules, went about doing battle with the scourges of mankind, both human and animal.]

[Footnote 34: Minerva presented Perseus with her shield when he undertook to kill the Gorgon, Medusa.]

[Footnote 35: This figure of Hercules is drawn with an eye to the position of the famous statue of Farnese.--POPE.

It were to be wished that our author, whose knowledge and taste of the fine arts were unquestionable, had taken more pains in describing so famous a statue as that of the Farnesian Hercules; for he has omitted the characteristical excellencies of this famous piece of Grecian workmanship; namely, the uncommon breadth of the shoulders, the knottiness and spaciousness of the chest, the firmness and protuberance of the muscles in each limb, particularly the legs, and the majestic vastness of the whole figure, undoubtedly designed by the artist to give a full idea of strength, as the Venus de Medicis of beauty. To mention the Hesperian apples, which the artist flung backwards, and almost concealed as an inconsiderable object, and which therefore scarcely appear in the statue, was below the notice of Pope.--WARTON.

Addison's Vision: "At the upper end sat Hercules, leaning an arm upon his club."]

[Footnote 36: The pause at the word "strikes" renders the verse finely descriptive of the circumstance. Milton, in Par. Lost, xi. 491, has attempted this beauty with success:

And over them triumphant Death his dart Shook, but delayed to strike.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 37: Milton, Par. Lost, i. 710:

a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 38: "Trees," says Dennis, "starting from their roots, a mountain rolling into a wall, and a town rising like an exhalation are things that are not to be shown in sculpture." This objection, that "motion is represented as exhibited by sculpture," is said by Johnson, "to be the most reasonable of Dennis' remarks," but Dennis neutralised his own criticism when he added, that "sculpture can indeed show posture and position, and from posture and position we may conclude that the objects are in motion."]

[Footnote 39: Wakefield quotes from Milton (Par. Lost, ii. 4), the expression, "barbaric pearl and gold," and from Addison's translation of the second book of Ovid's Met. the line in which it is said that the palace of the sun

With burnished gold and flaming jewels blazed.

[Footnote 40: Cyrus was the beginning of the Persian, as Ninus was of the Assyrian monarchy.--POPE.]

[Footnote 41: The Magi and Chaldæans (the chief of whom was Zoroaster) employed their studies upon magic and astrology, which was, in a manner, almost all the learning of the ancient Asian people. We have scarce any account of a moral philosopher, except Confucius, the great law-giver of the Chinese, who lived about two thousand years ago.--POPE.

There are several mistakes in Pope's note. Zoroaster was not a magician who "waved the circling wand" of the necromancer. "The Magians," says Plato, "teach the magic of Zoroaster, but this is the worship of the Gods." His creed was theological, and had no connexion with sorcery. Some of his nominal followers subsequently professed to be fortune-tellers. Astrology was not a general characteristic of the diverse nations who constituted the "ancient Asian people," and their learning was by no means limited to it. The Hindoos, for instance, were the precursors of Aristotle in logic, and the earliest metaphysicians whose doctrines have come down to us. "The Indian philosophy," says M. Cousin, "is so vast that all the philosophical systems are represented there, and we may literally affirm that it is an abridgment of the entire history of philosophy." Nor was Confucius the only oriental "law-giver who taught the useful science to be good." The Hindoo body of laws, which bears the name of Menu, was compiled centuries before Confucius was born, and it is eminently a moral and religious, as well as a political code.]

[Footnote 42: It was often erroneously stated that the Brahmins dwelt always in groves. By the laws of Menu the life of a Brahmin was divided into four portions, and it was during the third portion only that he was commanded to become an anchorite in the woods, to sleep on the bare ground, to feed on roots and fruit, to go clad in bark or the skin of the black antelope, and to expose himself to the drenching rain and scorching sun. The caste have ceased to conform to the primitive discipline, and the old asceticism is now confined to individual devotees. The functions which Pope ascribes to the Brahmins formed no part of their practices. They did not pretend to "stop the moon," and summon spirits to "midnight banquets." Pope copied Oldham's version of Virgil's eighth Eclogue:

Charms in her wonted course can stop the moon.]

[Footnote 43: Addison's translation of a passage in Claudian:

Thin airy shapes, that o'er the furrows rise, A dreadful scene! and skim before his eyes.]

[Footnote 44: Dryden's Palamon and Arcite:

And sigils framed in planetary hours.

Dryden's Virgil, Æn. vii. 25:

That watched the moon and planetary hour.]

[Footnote 45: Confucius flourished about two thousand three hundred years ago, just before Pythagoras. He taught justice, obedience to parents, humility, and universal benevolence: and he practised these virtues when he was a first minister, and when he was reduced to poverty and exile.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 46: The learning of the old Egyptian priests consisted for the most part in geometry and astronomy: they also preserved the history of their nation. Their greatest hero upon record is Sesostris, whose actions and conquests may be seen at large in Diodorus, &c. He is said to have caused the kings he vanquished to draw him in his chariot. The posture of his statue, in these verses, is correspondent to the description which Herodotus gives of one of them, remaining in his own time.--POPE.]

[Footnote 47: The colossal statue of the celebrated Eastern tyrant is not very strongly imagined. The word "hold" is particularly feeble.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 48: Virgil's giant Bitias, Æn. ix. 958, has in Dryden's translation, quoted by Wakefield, "a coat of double mail with scales of gold."]

[Footnote 49: Two flatter lines upon such a subject cannot well be imagined.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 50: The architecture is agreeable to that part of the world.--POPE.]

[Footnote 51: The learning of the northern nations lay more obscure than that of the rest. Zamolxis was the disciple of Pythagoras, who taught the immortality of the soul to the Scythians.--POPE.

They worshipped Zamolxis, and thought they should go to him when they died. He was said by the Greeks who dwelt on the shores of the Hellespont, to have been the slave of Pythagoras before he became the instructor of his countrymen, but Herodotus believed that if Zamolxis ever existed, he was long anterior to the Greek philosopher.]

[Footnote 52: Odin, or Woden, was the great legislator and hero of the Goths. They tell us of him, that, being subject to fits, he persuaded his followers, that during those trances he received inspirations, from whence he dictated his laws. He is said to have been the inventor of the Runic characters.--POPE.]

[Footnote 53: Pope borrowed this idea from the passage he quotes at ver. 179, where Chaucer describes Statius as standing

Upon an iron pillar strong That painted was, all endelong, With tigers' blood in every place.]

[Footnote 54: These were the priests and poets of those people, so celebrated for their savage virtue. Those heroic barbarians accounted it a dishonour to die in their beds, and rushed on to certain death in the prospect of an after-life, and for the glory of a song from their bards in praise of their actions.--POPE.

The opinion was general among the Goths that men who died natural deaths went into vast caves underground, all dark and miry, full of noisome creatures, and there for ever grovelled in stench and misery. On the contrary, all who died in battle went to the hall of Odin, their god of war, where they were entertained at infinite tables in perpetual feasts, carousing in bowls made of the skulls of the enemies they had slain.--SIR W. TEMPLE.]

[Footnote 55:

It shone lighter than a glass, And made well more than it was, To semen every thing, ywis, As kind of thinge Fames is.--POPE.]

[Footnote 56: Addison's Vision: "On a sudden the trumpet sounded; the whole fabric shook, and the doors flew open."]

[Footnote 57: Milton, Par. Lost, i. 717:

The roof was fretted gold.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 58: The exterior of Chaucer's House of Fame,

Both the castle, and the tower And eke the hall, and every bower

was of beryl, which Pope transfers to the inside of the building. Chaucer says of the interior that

Every wall Of it, and floor, and roof, and all Was plated half a foote thick Of gold.

This gold was covered, as grass clothes a meadow, with jewelled ornaments

Fine, of the finest stones fair That men read in the Lapidaire.]

[Footnote 59: Milton, Par. Lost, i. 726:

From the arched roof Pendent by subtle magic many a row Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed With Naptha and Asphaltus, yielded light As from a sky.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 60: Addison's Vision: "A band of historians took their station at each door."]

[Footnote 61: Alexander the Great. The tiara was the crown peculiar to the Asian princes. His desire to be thought the son of Jupiter Ammon, caused him to wear the horns of that god, and to represent the same upon his coins, which was continued by several of his successors.--POPE.]

[Footnote 62: Dryden, Ode to St. Cecilia:

A dragon's fiery form belied the god.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 63: As a warrior and a man of letters; for skill in both capacities was supposed to be due to Minerva.]

[Footnote 64: Prior, in his Carmen Seculare, says of William III.,

How o'er himself as o'er the world he reigns.]

[Footnote 65: A concise and masterly stroke, which at once sets before us the mixture of character, which appears in that extraordinary man, Julius Cæsar.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 66: "In other illustrious men you will observe that each possessed some one shining quality, which was the foundation of his fame: in Epaminondas all the virtues are found united; force of body, eloquence of expression, vigour of mind, contempt of riches, gentleness of disposition, and, what is chiefly to be regarded, courage and conduct in war."--Diodorus Siculus, lib. xv.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 67: Timoleon had saved the life of his brother Timophanes in the battle between the Argives and Corinthians; but afterwards killed him when he affected the tyranny, preferring his duty to his country to all the obligations of blood.--POPE.

Pope followed the narrative of Diodorus. Plutarch says that Timoleon did not strike the blow, but stood by weeping, and giving his passive countenance to the assassins. Some of the Corinthians applauded, and some execrated his conduct. He was soon overtaken with remorse, and shunning the haunts of men he passed years in anguish of mind.]

[Footnote 68: This triplet was not in the first edition.]

[Footnote 69: In the first edition,

Here too the wise and good their honours claim, Much-suff'ring heroes of less noisy fame.

Pope did not perceive that in the attempt to improve the poetry he had introduced an inconsistency. He winds up the preceding group of patriots with the "wise Aurelius," whom he celebrates as an example of "unbounded virtue," and the "much-suffering heroes" could not be instances of "less guilty fame" than a man whose virtue was unbounded. The classification was probably suggested by Addison's Vision in the Tatler of the Three Roads of Life, and having his original in his mind when he composed his poem, Pope avoided the inconsistency which he subsequently imported into the passage. "The persons," says Addison, "who travelled up this great path, were such whose thoughts were bent upon doing eminent services to mankind, or promoting the good of their country. On each side of this great road were several paths. These were most of them covered walks, and received into them men of retired virtue, who proposed to themselves the same end of their journey, though they chose to make it in shade and obscurity."]

[Footnote 70: The names which follow are inappropriate examples of "fair virtue's _silent_ train." The first on the list spent his days in promulgating his philosophy, and they were all energetic public characters who made a stir in the world. When Pope originated the expression, he must have been thinking of the unobtrusive virtues of private life, and he probably added the illustrations later without observing the incongruity.]

[Footnote 71: Aristides, who for his great integrity was distinguished by the appellation of the Just. When his countrymen would have banished him by the ostracism, where it was the custom for every man to sign the name of the person he voted to exile in an oyster-shell, a peasant, who could not write, came to Aristides to do it for him, who readily signed his own name.--POPE.]

[Footnote 72: Who, when he was about to drink the hemlock, charged his son to forgive his enemies, and not to revenge his death on those Athenians who had decreed it.--WARTON.

He was condemned to death B. C. 317, at the age of 85, on the charge of treason to his country. Mistrusting the ability of Athens to maintain its independence, he connived at the dominion of the Macedonian kings. Many of those who admit his integrity contend that his policy was mistaken and unpatriotic. His party regained the ascendancy after his death, honoured his remains with a public funeral, and erected a statue of brass to his memory.]

[Footnote 73: Very unpoetically designated. Agis might as well have been left out, if all that could be said of him was that he was "not the last of Spartan names."--BOWLES.

Agis, king of Sparta, was celebrated for his attempt to restore the ancient Spartan regulations. Especially he was anxious to resume the excess of land possessed by the rich and divide it among the poor. He failed in his design, and was dethroned, and beheaded. At his execution one of the officers of justice shed tears. "Lament me not," said Agis; "I am happier than my murderers."]

[Footnote 74: In the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey, Cato sided with Pompey, and when the cause was lost, he stabbed himself in the bowels to avoid being captured. He was found by his friends insensible, but alive, and a physician began to sew up the wound. Cato recovered his consciousness, pushed away the physician, tore open the wound, and expired.]

[Footnote 75: A horrible spectre appeared to Brutus while he sat meditating in his tent at night. "What art thou?" said Brutus, "and what is thy business with me?" "I am thy evil genius," replied the spectre; "thou wilt see me at Philippi." At Philippi the spectre rose up again before him on the night preceding the battle in which he suffered a total defeat. He destroyed himself in the night which followed.]

[Footnote 76: In the midst of the Temple, nearest the throne of Fame, are placed the greatest names in learning of all antiquity. These are described in such attitudes as express their different characters. The columns on which they are raised are adorned with sculptures, taken from the most striking subjects of their works, which sculpture bears a resemblance, in its manner and character, to the manner and character of their writings.--POPE.

This was a trite device, and is poorly applied in the present instance. "The manner and character of the writings" of Homer, Virgil, Pindar, Horace, Aristotle, and Cicero could hardly have been described in a vaguer and more common-place way.]

[Footnote 77:

From the dees many a pillere, Of metal that shone not full clere, &c. Upon a pillere saw I stonde That was of lede and iron fine, Him of the sect Saturnine, The Ebraike Josephus the old, &c. Upon an iron piller strong, That painted was all endelong, With tigers' blood in every place, The Tholosan that highte Stace, That bare of Thebes up the fame, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 78:

Full wonder hye on a pillere Of iron, he the great Omer, And with him Dares and Titus, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 79: Pope has selected from Homer only three subjects as the most interesting: Diomed wounding Venus, Hector slaying Patroclus, and the same Hector dragged along at the wheels of Achilles' chariot. Are these the most affecting and striking incidents of the Iliad? But it is highly worth remarking, that this very incident of dragging the body of Hector thrice round the walls of Troy, is absolutely not mentioned by Homer. Heyne thinks that Virgil, for he first mentioned it, adopted the circumstance from some Greek tragedy on the subject.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 80:

There saw I stand on a pillere That was of tinned iron cleere, The Latin poete Virgyle, That hath bore up of a great while The fame of pious Æneas. And next him on a pillere was Of copper, Venus' clerk Ovide, That hath y-sowen wondrous wide The great God of Love's name-- Tho saw I on a pillere by Of iron wrought full sternely, The greate poet Dan Lucan, That on his shoulders bore up than As high as that I mighte see, The fame of Julius and Pompee. And next him on a pillere stoode Of sulphur, like as he were woode, Dan Claudian, sothe for to tell, That bare up all the fame of hell, &c.--POPE.

Since Homer is placed by Chaucer upon a pillar of iron, he places Virgil upon iron tinned over, to indicate that the Æneis was based upon the Iliad and was both more polished and less vigorous. The sulphur upon which Claudian stands, is typical of the hell he described in his poem on the Rape of Proserpine. Ovid, the poet of love, is put upon a pillar of copper, because copper was the metal of Venus; and Lucan, like Homer, has a pillar of iron allotted to him because he celebrated in his Pharsalia the wars of Cæsar and Pompey, and, as Chaucer says,

Iron Martes metal is, Which that god is of battaile.]

[Footnote 81: Wakefield supposes that "modest majesty" was suggested by Milton's phrase, "modest pride," in Par. Lost, iv. 310.]

[Footnote 82: For this expression Wakefield quotes Dryden, Æn. vi. 33.

There too in living sculpture might be seen The mad affection of the Cretan queen.]

[Footnote 83: The rhyme is dearly purchased by such an inexcusable inversion as "silver blight."]

[Footnote 84: Pindar being seated in a chariot, alludes to the chariot races he celebrated in the Grecian games. The swans are emblems of poetry, their soaring posture intimates the sublimity and activity of his genius. Neptune presided over the Isthmian, and Jupiter over the Olympian games.--POPE.]

[Footnote 85: A. Philips, Past. v. 95.

He sinks into the cords with solemn pace, To give the swelling tones a bolder grace.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 86: "Distorted," which is always used in an unfavourable sense, is a disparaging epithet by which to characterise the vehement eagerness of the champions. It is not clear who or what they "threaten," whether the horses or each other, and in either case there is nothing "great" in the image of a person uttering threats in a "distorted posture."]

[Footnote 87: This expresses the mixed character of the odes of Horace: the second of these verses alludes to that line of his,

Spiritum Graiæ tenuem camoenæ,

as another which follows, to

Exegi monumentum ære perennius.

The action of the doves hints at a passage in the fourth ode of his third book:

Me fabulosæ Vulture in Apulo Altricis extra limen Apuliæ, Ludo fatigatumque somno, Fronde nova puerum palumbes Texêre; mirum quod foret omnibus-- Ut tuto ab atris corpore viperis Dormirem et ursis; ut premerer sacra Lauroque, collataque myrto, Non sine Dîs animosus infans.

Which may be thus Englished:

While yet a child, I chanced to stray, And in a desert sleeping lay; The savage race withdrew, nor dared To touch the muses' future bard; But Cytherea's gentle dove Myrtles and bays around me spread, And crowned your infant poet's head Sacred to music and to love.--POPE.

In addition to these passages, he had in his mind Hor. Epist. lib. i. 19, quoted by Wakefield:

Temperat Archilochi Musam pede mascula Sappho, Temperat Alcæus.]

[Footnote 88: Horace speaking, in his ode to Augustus, of the relative glory of different families, says that the Julian star shone among all the rest as the moon shines among the lesser lights. The star referred to the comet which appeared for seven days the year after the death of Julius Cæsar, and which was supposed to indicate that he had become a deity in the heavens. A star was sculptured in consequence on his statue in the forum.]

[Footnote 89: Surely he might have selected for the basso rilievos about the statue of Horace ornaments more manly and characteristical of his genius.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 90: A very tame and lifeless verse indeed, alluding to the treatise of Aristotle "concerning animals."--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 91: Pope here refers to Aristotle's treatise on the Heavens.]

[Footnote 92: This beautiful attitude is copied from a statue in the collection which Lady Pomfret presented to the University of Oxford.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 93: Addison's translation of some lines from Sannazarius:

And thou whose rival tow'rs invade the skies.

[Footnote 94: Chaucer in a passage, not quoted by Pope, represents Fame as enthroned upon "a seat imperial," which was formed of rubies.]

[Footnote 95:

Methoughte that she was so lite That the length of a cubite Was longer than she seemed to be; But thus soon in a while she, Herself tho wonderly straight, That with her feet she carthe reight, And with her head she touched heaven.--POPE.]

[Footnote 96: This notion of the enlargement of the temple is also from Chaucer, who says that it became in length, breadth, and height, a thousand times bigger than it was at first.]

[Footnote 97: The corresponding passage in Chaucer is not quoted by Pope, who translated from their common original, Virg. Æn. iv. 181:

Cui quot sunt corpore plumæ, Tot vigiles oculi subter, mirabile dictu, Tot lunguæ, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit auris.]

[Footnote 98:

I heard about her throne y-sung That all the palays walles rung; So sung the mighty Muse, she That cleped is Calliope, And her eighte sisters eke.--POPE.

Pope should have continued the extract; for his next four lines were prompted by the succeeding four in Chaucer:

And evermore eternally They sing of Fame as tho heard I; "Heried be thou and thy name Goddess of renown or fame."

"Heried" means praised.]

[Footnote 99:

I heard a noise approchen blive, That fared as bees done in a hive, Against their time of out flying; Right such a manere murmering, For all the world it seemed me. Tho gan I look about and see That there came entring into th' hall, A right great company withal; And that of sundry regions, Of all kind of conditions, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 100: This description is varied with improvements from Dryden, Æneis, vi. 958.

About the boughs an airy nation flew Thick as the humming bees that hunt the golden dew: The winged army roams the field around, The rivers and the rocks remurmer to the sound.--WAKEFIELD.

He was assisted by another passage in Dryden's Flower and Leaf:

Thick as the college of the bees in May, When swarming o'er the dusky fields they fly, Now to the flow'rs, and intercept the sky.]

[Footnote 101: So in Chaucer all degrees, "poor and rich" fall down on their knees before Fame and beg her to grant them their petition.]

[Footnote 102: "The tattling quality of age which, as Sir William Davenant says, is always narrative." Dryden's Dedication of Juvenal.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 103:

And some of them she granted sone, And some she warned well and fair, And some she granted the contrair-- Right as her sister dame Fortune Is wont to serven in commune.--POPE.

Chaucer and Pope describe Fame as bestowing reputation upon some, and traducing others, when their deserts were equal, but neither Pope nor Chaucer touch upon the truth that the same person is commonly both lauded and denounced. This is finely expressed by Milton, Samson Agonistes, ver. 971:--

Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed, And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds; On both his wings, one black, the other white, Bears greatest names in his wild aery flight.]

[Footnote 104: The idea is from Chaucer:

They hadde good fame each deserved Although they were diversely served.

Besides the passage in Chaucer, Pope evidently recalled Creech's translation of Juvenal, Sat. xiii. 132.

ev'ry age relates That equal crimes have met unequal fates; That sins alike, unlike rewards have found, And whilst this villain's crucified the other's crowned.]

[Footnote 105: In Chaucer, Fame sends for Eolus, who comes with two trumpets, a golden trumpet, from which he gives forth praises, and a black trumpet of brass, from which he sends forth blasts of slander. In Pope the golden trumpet is blown by the muses, and the trump of slander sounds without the mention of any agent.]

[Footnote 106:

Tho came the thirde companye, And gan up to the dees to hye, And down on knees they fell anone, And saiden: We ben everichone Folke that han full truely Deserved fame rightfully, And prayen you it might be knowe Right as it is, and forthe blowe. I grant, quoth she, for now me list That your good works shall be wist. And yet ye shall have better loos, Right in despite of all your foos, Than worthy is, and that anone. Let now (quoth she) thy trumpe gone-- And certes all the breath that went Out of his trumpes mouthe smel'd As men a pot of baume held Among a basket full of roses.--POPE.]

[Footnote 107: Prior, Carmen Seculare:

In comely rank call ev'ry merit forth, Imprint on ev'ry act its standard worth.]

[Footnote 108: The whole tribe of the "good and just," who obtain any fame at all, are said by Pope to get more than they deserve. For this notion there is certainly no foundation, unless he meant that the fact of desiring reputation deprived virtue of the title to it.]

[Footnote 109:

Therewithal there came anone Another huge companye, Of good folke-- What did this Eolus, but he Took out his black trump of brass, That fouler than the devil was: And gan this trumpe for to blowe, As all the world should overthrowe. Throughout every regione Went this foule trumpes soune, As swift as pellet out of gunne, When fire is in the powder runne. And such a smoke gan oute wende, Out of the foule trumpes ende, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 110: In his account of the reception given by Fame to her various suppliants, Pope is detailing the manner in which praise and blame are dispensed in this world, and it is a departure from reality to consign the entire race of conquerors to oblivion. However little they may deserve fame, they at least obtain it. The inconsistency is the more glaring that when he describes the temple in the opening of the poem, he tells us that,

Within stood heroes, who through loud alarms, In bloody fields pursued renown in arms.

[Footnote 111:

I saw anone the fifth route, That to this lady gan loute, And down on knees anone to fall, And to her they besoughten all, To hiden their good workes eke, And said, they yeven not a leke For no fame ne such renowne; For they for contemplacyoune, And Goddes love hadde ywrought, Ne of fame would they ought.--POPE.]

[Footnote 112:

What, quoth she, and be ye wood? And wene ye for to do good, And for to have of it no fame? Have ye despite to have my name? Nay, ye shall lien everichone: Blowe they trump, and that anone (Quoth she) thou Eolus yhote, And ring these folkes works be note, That all the world may of it hear; And he gan blow their loos so cleare, In his golden clarioune, Through the world went the soune, All so kenely, and eke so soft, That their fame was blowen aloft.--POPE.

Pope makes everybody obtain fame who seeks to avoid it, which is absurd. Chaucer keeps to truth. The first company came,

And saiden, Certes, lady bright, We have done well with all out might, But we ne kepen have for fame, Hide our workes and our name.

"I grant you all your asking," she replies; "let your works be dead." The second company arrive immediately afterwards, and prefer the same request in the lines versified by Pope, when Fame, with her usual capriciousness, refuses their prayer, and orders Eolus to sound their praises.]

[Footnote 113: An obvious imitation of a well-known verse in Denham:

Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 114: The reader might compare these twenty-eight lines following, which contain the same matter, with eighty-four of Chaucer, beginning thus:

Tho came the sixthe companye, And gan faste to Fame cry, &c.,

being too prolix to be here inserted.--POPE.]

[Footnote 115: "A pretty fame," says Dennis, "when the very smartest of these coxcombs is sure to have his name rotten before his carcase. When the author introduced these fellows into the temple of Fame, he ought to have made the chocolate-house, and the side-box, part of it." The criticism was just. The contemptible creatures who buzzed their profligate falsehoods for the hour, and were heard of no more, should have been introduced, if at all, into the Temple of Rumour, and not into the Temple of Fame. Pope followed Chaucer.]

[Footnote 116: Strokes of pleasantry and humour, and satirical reflections on the foibles of common life, are unsuited to so grave and majestic a poem. They appear as unnatural and out of place as one of the burlesque scenes of Heemskirk would do in a solemn landscape of Poussin. When I see such a line as

And at each blast a lady's honour dies

in the Temple of Fame, I lament as much to find it placed there as to see shops and sheds and cottages erected among the ruins of Diocletian's baths.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 117: Pope places the temple of Fame on a precipitous rock of ice, and Dennis charges him with departing from his allegory when he describes the self-indulgent multitude, who are "even fatigued with ease," as having toiled up the "steep and slippery ascent" to present themselves before the goddess. There is the same defect in Chaucer.]

[Footnote 118:

Tho come another companye That Lad ydone the treachery, &c.--POPE.

Pope in this paragraph had not only Chaucer in view, but the passage of Virgil where he describes the criminals in the infernal regions. The second line of Pope's opening couplet was suggested by Dryden's translation, Æneis, vi. 825:

Expel their parents and usurp the throne.]

[Footnote 119: A glance at the Revolution of 1688.--CROKER.]

[Footnote 120: The scene here changes from the Temple of Fame to that of Rumour, which is almost entirely Chaucer's. The particulars follow:

Tho saw I stonde in a valey, Under the castle faste by A house, that Domus Dedali That Labyrinthus cleped is, Nas made so wonderly I wis, Ne half so queintly ywrought; And evermo, as swift as thought, This queinte house aboute went, That never more stille it stent-- And eke this house hath of entrees As fele of leaves as ben on trees In summer, when they grene ben; And in the roof yet men may sene A thousand holes, and well mo To letten well the soune out go; And by day in every tide Ben all the doores open wide, And by night each one unshet; No porter is there one to let No manner tydings in to pace: Ne never rest is in that place.--POPE.]

[Footnote 121: This thought is transferred thither out of the second book of Fame, where it takes up no less than one hundred and twenty verses, beginning thus:

Geffray, thou wottost well this, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 122: From Chaucer:

If that thou Throw on water now a stone, Well wost thou it will make anon A little roundel as a circle, Paraunture broad as a covercle, And right anon thou shalt see wele, That circle will cause another wheel, And that the third, and so forth, brother, Every circle causing other, And multiplying evermoe, Till that it so far ygo That it at bothe brinkes be.

* * * * * * * * * *

And right thus every word, ywis, That loud or privy y-spoken is, Moveth first an air about, And of this moving, out of doubt, Another air anon is moved, As I have of the water proved That every circle causeth other.

A "covercle" was the cover or lid of a pot.]

[Footnote 123: Dryden's version of Ovid, Met. xii.:

Whence all things, though remote, are viewed around And hither bring their undulating sound.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 124:

Of werres, of peace, of marriages, Of rest, of labour, of voyages, Of abode, of dethe, of life, Of love and hate, accord and strife, Of loss, of lore, and of winnings, Of hele, of sickness, and lessings, Of divers transmutations Of estates and eke of regions, Of trust, of drede, of jealousy, Of wit, of winning, of folly, Of good, or bad governement, Of fire, and of divers accident.--POPE.

The dismissal of Lord Oxford, the death of Queen Anne immediately afterwards, on August 1, 1714, and the overthrow of Bolingbroke, were events which had recently happened when Pope published his poem, and there never was a time when "changes in the state," "the falls of favourites," and "old mismanagements" were a more universal topic of conversation.]

[Footnote 125:

But such a grete congregation Of folke as I saw roame about, Some within, and some without. Was never seen, ne shall be eft-- And every wight that I saw there Rowned everich in others ear A newe tyding privily, Or elles he told it openly Right thus, and said, Knowst not thou That is betide to night now? No, quoth he, tell me what And then he told him this and that, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 126:

Thus north and south Went every tiding fro mouth to mouth, And that encreasing evermo, As fire is wont to quicken and go From a sparkle sprong amiss, Till all the citee brent up is.--POPE.]

[Footnote 127: Dryden, Ovid, Met. xii.:

Fame sits aloft.

In Ovid the scene is laid in the house of Fame. Pope lays it in the house of Rumour, and having left Fame enthroned in her own temple, he now represents her as permanently "sitting aloft" in a totally different edifice.]

[Footnote 128:

And sometime I saw there at once, A lesing and a sad sooth saw That gonnen at adventure draw Out of a window forth to pace-- And no man be he ever so wrothe, Shall have one of these two, but bothe, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 129: The hint is taken from a passage in another part of the third book, but here more naturally made the conclusion, with the addition of a moral to the whole. In Chaucer, he only answers, "he came to see the place;" and the book ends abruptly, with his being surprized at the sight of a man of great authority, and awaking in a fright.--POPE.

This is an imperfect representation. While Chaucer is standing in the House of Fame, a person goes up to him,

And saide, Friend, what is thy name, Artow come hither to have fame?

The poet disclaims any such intention, and protests that he has no desire that his name should be known to a single soul. He is then asked what he does there, and he replies that he who brought him to the place promised him that he should learn new and wonderful things, in which, he says, he has been disappointed, for he was aware before that people coveted fame, though he was not hitherto acquainted with the dwelling of the goddess, nor with her appearance and condition. His interrogator answers that he perceives what it is he desires to know, and conducts him to the house of Rumour. There he has revealed to him the falsehood of the world, and especially of pilgrims and pardoners, which was an important doctrine to be inculcated in those days. When the scene has been fully disclosed, "a man of great authority" appears, and the poet starts up from his sleep, by which he seems to intimate that the wise and serious frown upon those who listen to idle tales. His awaking "half afraid," is the result of his

Remembring well what I had seen, And how high and far I had been In my ghost.

Pope, by reserving the inquiry addressed to him for the end of the poem, represents himself as being asked in the temple of Rumour whether he has come there for fame, which, is not more, but much less natural than the arrangement of Chaucer, who supposes the question to be put in the temple of Fame itself. Nor would it have been congenial to Chaucer's modest disposition to make himself the climax of the piece.]

[Footnote 130: Garth, in the preface to his Dispensary: "Reputation of this sort is very hard to be got, and very easy to be lost."--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 131: Cowley's Complaint:

Thou who rewardest but with popular breath And that too after death.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope's moral is inconsistent with the previous tone of his poem. He has not treated the "second life in others' breath" as "vain," but speaks of the position of Homer, Aristotle, &c. in the temple of Fame as though it were a substantial triumph, a real dignity, and a glorious reward. The purport of his piece is to enforce, and not to depreciate, the value of literary renown. His whole life attests that this was his genuine opinion. He was not endowed with the equanimity which neither covets nor despises reputation, and it was pure affectation when he pretended, in the concluding paragraph, that he did not "call for the favours of fame," and that he held posthumous fame, in particular, to be a worthless possession.]

[Footnote 132: Dryden, in Palamon and Arcite, says of women that they

Still follow fortune where she leads the way.]

PASTORALS,

WITH A

DISCOURSE ON PASTORAL.

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1704.

Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes, Flumina amem, sylvasque, inglorius!--VIRG.

These Pastorals were written at the age of sixteen, and then passed through the hands of Mr. Walsh, Mr. Wycherley, G. Granville, afterwards Lord Lansdowne, Sir William Trumbull, Dr. Garth, Lord Halifax, Lord Somers, Mr. Mainwaring, and others. All these gave our author the greatest encouragement, and particularly Mr. Walsh, whom Mr. Dryden, in his postscript to Virgil, calls the best critic of his age. "The author," says he, "seems to have a particular genius for this kind of poetry, and a judgment that much exceeds his years. He has taken very freely from the ancients. But what he has mixed of his own with theirs is no way inferior to what he has taken from them. It is not flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age. His preface is very judicious and learned." Letter to Mr. Wycherley, Ap. 1705. The Lord Lansdowne, about the same time, mentioning the youth of our poet, says, in a printed letter of the character of Mr. Wycherley, that "if he goes on as he hath begun in the pastoral way, as Virgil first tried his strength, we may hope to see English poetry vie with the Roman." Notwithstanding the early time of their production, the author esteemed these as the most correct in the versification, and musical in the numbers, of all his works. The reason for his labouring them into so much softness, was, doubtless, that this sort of poetry derives almost its whole beauty from a natural ease of thought and smoothness of verse: whereas that of most other kinds consist in the strength and fulness of both. In a letter of his to Mr. Walsh about this time, we find an enumeration of several niceties in versification, which perhaps have never been strictly observed in any English poem, except in these Pastorals. They were not printed till 1709.--POPE.

The sycophancy of A. Philips, who had prejudiced Mr. Addison against Pope, occasioned those papers[1] in the Guardian, written by the latter, in which there is an ironical preference given to the Pastorals of Philips above his own, in order to support the profound judgment of those who could not distinguish between the rural and the rustic, and on that account condemned the Pastorals of Pope for wanting simplicity. These papers were sent by an unknown hand to Steele, and the irony escaping him, he communicated them to Mr. Pope, declaring he would never publish any paper where one of the club was complimented at the expense of another. Pope told him he was too delicate, and insisted that the papers should be published in the Guardian. They were so. And the pleasantry escaped all but Addison, who, taking Pope aside,[2] said to him in his agreeable manner, "You have put your friends here in a very ridiculous light, as will be seen when it is understood, as it soon must be, that you were only laughing at the admirers of Philips." But this ill conduct of Philips occasioned a more open ridicule of his Pastorals in the mock poem called the Shepherd's Week, written by Gay. But though more open, the object of it was ill understood[3] by those who were strangers to the quarrel. These mistook the Shepherd's Week for a burlesque of Virgil's Pastorals. How far this goes towards a vindication of Philips's simple painting, let others judge.--WARBURTON.

In 1704 Pope wrote his Pastorals, which were shown to the poets and critics of that time. As they well deserved, they were read with admiration, and many praises were bestowed upon them and upon the preface, which is both elegant and learned in a high degree. They were, however, not published till five years afterwards. Cowley, Milton, and Pope are distinguished among the English poets by the early exertion of their powers; but the works of Cowley alone were published in his childhood, and, therefore, of him only can it be certain that his juvenile performances received no improvement from his maturer studies. The Pastorals were at last printed [1709] in Tonson's Miscellany, in a volume which began with the Pastorals of Philips, and ended with those of Pope. It seems natural for a young poet to initiate himself by pastorals, which, not professing to imitate real life, require no experience, and exhibiting only the simple operation of unmingled passions, admit no subtle reasoning or deep inquiry. Pope's Pastorals are not, however, composed but with close thought; they have reference to the time of the day, the seasons of the year, and the periods of human life. The last, that which turns the attention upon age and death, was the author's favourite. To tell of disappointment and misery, to thicken the darkness of futurity, and perplex the labyrinth of uncertainty, has been always a delicious employment of the poets. His preference was probably just. I wish, however, that his fondness had not overlooked the line in which the _Zephyrs_ are made _to lament in silence_. To charge these pastorals with want of invention is to require what was never intended. The imitations are so ambitiously frequent that the writer evidently means rather to show his literature than his wit. It is surely sufficient for an author of sixteen, not only to be able to copy the poems of antiquity with judicious selection, but to have obtained sufficient power of language and skill in metre to exhibit a series of versification which had in English poetry no precedent, nor has since had an imitation.--JOHNSON.

It is somewhat strange that in the pastorals of a young poet there should not be found a single rural image that is new; but this, I am afraid, is the case in the Pastorals before us. The ideas of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser are, indeed, here exhibited in language equally mellifluous and pure; but the descriptions and sentiments are trite and common. To this assertion, formerly made, Dr. Johnson answered, "that no invention was intended." He, therefore, allows the fact and the charge. It is a confession of the very fault imputed to them. There _ought_ to have been invention. It has been my fortune from my way of life,[4] to have seen many compositions of youths of sixteen years old, far beyond these Pastorals in point of genius and imagination, though not perhaps of correctness. Their excellence, indeed, might be owing to having had such a predecessor as Pope.[5] A mixture of British and Grecian ideas may justly be deemed a blemish in these Pastorals, and propriety is certainly violated when he couples Pactolus with Thames, and Windsor with Hybla.[6] Complaints of immoderate heat, and wishes to be conveyed to cooling caverns, when uttered by the inhabitants of Greece, have a decorum and consistency, which they totally lose in the character of a British Shepherd,[7] and, Theocrites, during the ardors of Sirius, must have heard the murmurings of a brook, and the whispers of a pine, with more home-felt pleasure than Pope could possibly experience upon the same occasion. Pope himself informs us, in a note, that he judiciously omitted the following verse:

And list'ning wolves grow milder as they hear

on account of the absurdity, which Spenser overlooked, of introducing wolves into England. But on this principle, which is certainly a just one, may it not be asked, why he should speak, the scene lying in Windsor Forest, of the "sultry Sirius," of the "grateful clusters of grapes," of "a pipe of reeds," the antique fistula, of "thanking Ceres for a plentiful harvest," of "the sacrifice of lambs," with many other instances that might be adduced to this purpose? That Pope, however, was sensible of the importance of adapting images to the scene of action, is obvious from the following example of his judgment; for in translating

Audiit Eurotas, jussitque ediscere lauros,

he has dexterously dropped the laurels appropriated to Eurotas, as he is speaking of the river Thames, and has rendered it

Thames heard the numbers as he flowed along, And bade his willows learn the moving song.

In the passages which Pope has imitated from Theocritus, and his Latin translator, Virgil, he has merited but little applause. Upon the whole, the principal merit of these Pastorals consists in their correct and musical versification, musical to a degree of which rhyme could hardly be thought capable, and in giving the truest specimen of that harmony in English verse, which is now become indispensably necessary, and which has so forcibly and universally influenced the public ear as to have obliged every moderate rhymer to be at least melodious. Pope lengthened the abruptness of Waller, and at the same time contracted the exuberance of Dryden.--WARTON.

Dr. Johnson does not appear sufficiently attentive to the true character and nature of pastoral poetry. No doubt it is natural for a young poet to initiate himself by pastorals; for what youthful heart does not glow at the descriptions of rural nature, and scenes that accord with its own innocency and cheerfulness; but although pastorals do not, in the sense of Dr. Johnson, imitate real life, nor require any great insight into human passions and characters, yet there are many things necessary in this species of composition, more than Dr. Johnson seems to require. The chief thing is an eye for picturesque and rural scenery, and an intimate acquaintance with those minute and particular appearances of nature, which alone can give a lively and original colour to the painting of pastoral poetry. To copy the common descriptions of spring or summer, morning or evening, or to iterate from Virgil the same complaints of the same shepherds, is not surely to write pastoral poetry. It is also difficult to conceive where is "the close thought" with which Johnson says Pope's Pastorals are composed. They are pleasing as copies of "the poems of antiquity," although they exhibit no striking taste in the "selection," and they certainly exhibit a series of musical versification, which, till their appearance, had no precedent in English poetry. If in particular passages, I have ventured to remark that Pope has introduced false thoughts and conceits, let us remember that we ought not so much to wonder that he admitted any, as that they were not more. Dryden's earlier poems are infinitely more vitiated in this respect.

Warton's observations are very just, but he does not seem sufficiently to discriminate between the softness of individual lines, which is the chief merit of these Pastorals, and the general harmony of poetic numbers. Let it, however, be always remembered, that Pope gave the first idea of mellifluence, and produced a softer and sweeter cadence than before belonged to the English couplet. Dr. Johnson thinks it will be in vain, after Pope, to endeavour to improve the English versification, and that it is now carried to the _ne plus ultra_ of excellence.[8] This is an opinion the validity of which I must be permitted to doubt. Pope certainly gave a more correct and finished tone to the English versification, but he sometimes wanted a variety of pause, and his nice precision of every line prevented, in a few instances, a more musical flow of modulated passages. But we are to consider what he did, not what might be done, and surely there cannot be two opinions respecting his improvement of the couplet though it does not follow that his general rhythm has no imperfection. Johnson seems to have depreciated, or to have been ignorant of, the metrical powers of some writers prior to Pope. His ear seems to have been caught chiefly by Dryden, and as Pope's versification was more equably (couplet with couplet being considered, not passage with passage) connected than Dryden's, he thought therefore that nothing could be added to Pope's versification. I should think it the extreme of arrogance and folly to make my own ear the criterion of music; but I cannot help thinking that Dryden, and of later days, Cowper, are much more harmonious in their general versification than Pope. I ought also to mention a neglected poem, not neglected on account of its versification, but on account of its title and subject--Prior's Solomon. Whoever candidly compares these writers together, unless his ear be habituated to a certain recurrence of pauses precisely at the end of a line, will not (though he will give the highest praise for compactness, skill, precision, and force, to the undivided couplets of Pope, separately considered)--will not, I think, assent to the position, that in versification "what he found brickwork he left marble." I am not afraid to own, that with the exception of the Epistle to Abelard, as musical as it is pathetic, the verses of Pope want variety, and on this account in some instances they want both force and harmony. In variety, and variety only, let it be remembered, I think Pope deficient. It has been doubted whether couplet verses ought ever to be broken. I will appeal to Pope himself. Whenever he has done so, is there a judge of poetical cadence who will not say it is harmonious? The instances are few; but where they occur, are they not beautiful? If they had been too often repeated the effect would be destroyed. But in long compositions might not a greater variety of pauses have effect? Does not the ear feel a lassitude at times? An idea has been started by some critics that "you might as well have unequal columns to your house, as unequal couplets in verse." This comparison, however, if it proves anything, proves too much; for no one will say that every two verses in a long poem should in quantity be exactly the same, the syllables the same, the pause the same. This will not hold a moment in versification. If it did, then Johnson's assertion falls to the ground; for then Dr. Darwin is a far better versifier than Pope, and a very little pains would make a much more consummate versificator than Dr. Darwin.--BOWLES.

Of all Pope's various and very freely-censured writings, there are none that appear to have met with a harsher or more fastidious reception at the hands of his commentators and critics than his Pastorals. Without regarding them with a sufficient reference, either to the time of life of the author, or the objects he had in view in their composition, they have considered them as deficient in originality and strength of thought, because they do not more greatly abound in new and striking images. But to say nothing of the unreasonableness of requiring "new and striking images," on a subject which has been obvious from the earliest ages to all mankind, and has been the general theme of poetry in every country, period, and language, it must be observed, that it was not the intention of Pope to rely upon the strength of his own powers, or to attempt an original style of pastoral composition. On the contrary, he informs us at the close of his discourse, that if those pastorals have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, "whose works," says he, "as I have had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate." In conceding then to Pope, that he has exhibited "the ideas of Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser, in language equally mellifluous and pure," Dr. Warton has granted every thing which Pope endeavoured to accomplish; and the observation of Johnson, "that no invention was intended," is, as far as the remark of Warton affects the genius and character of Pope, a decisive answer. Nor although the scene be laid in Windsor Forest, does there appear to be any impropriety in referring to a pipe of reeds, the clusters of grapes, the bounty of Ceres, and other objects connected with pastoral life, and for which the poet has himself assigned a sufficient reason in the following discourse. "If," he observes, "we would copy nature, it would be useful to carry this idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age; so that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been when the best of men followed the employment;" to which he adds, that "an air of piety to the gods should shine through the poem, which so visibly appears in all the works of antiquity, and it ought to preserve some relish of the old way of writing."--ROSCOE.

The manuscript of Pope's Pastorals is still preserved among the Richardson papers. It was lent by Mr. T. B. Hollis to Wakefield, who has noted the variations from the published text with minute fidelity. Richardson has done the same in his copy of the quarto of 1717, and gives this correct description of the handwriting of the original:--"The manuscript title of the Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, viz., An Essay on Pastoral, and the title of the Pastorals, are written by Mr. Pope in printing capitals so perfectly beautiful, and so exactly imitated, that one can hardly believe they are not really from the press; the same of all the words which would have been printed in italics throughout the whole, which are in common printing character, the general being in italics, beautifully formed, so as in all to imitate a printed book, but in a fine taste of type, and form of the page and margin." Pope has written upon the manuscript, "Mem. This copy is that which passed through the hands of Mr. Walsh, Mr. Congreve, Mr. Mainwaring, Dr. Garth, Mr. Granville, Mr. Southern, Sir H. Sheers, Sir William Trumbull, Lord Halifax, Lord Wharton, Marquis of Dorchester, Duke of Bucks, &c. Only the third Eclogue was written since some of these saw the other three, which were written as they here stand with the Essay, anno 1704. Ætatis meæ 16. The alterations from this copy were upon the objections of some of these, or my own." In his published list of the persons who had read the Pastorals in manuscript, Pope has added the names of Wycherley and Lord Somers, and omitted the names of Congreve, Southern, Sir H. Sheers, Lord Wharton, the Marquis of Dorchester, and the Duke of Buckingham. His chief adviser seems to have been Walsh, who, of all his admiring friends, gave him, he says, the greatest encouragement. "I cannot," Pope wrote to him July 2, 1706, "omit the first opportunity of making you my acknowledgments for reviewing these papers of mine. You have no less right to correct me than the same hand that raised a tree has to prune it." The Richardson collection contains a manuscript in which the poet has transcribed from his Pastorals the various lines he thought defective, and after stating his own objection to them, and subjoining amended readings, he referred the task of selection to Walsh, who has jotted down his decisions at the bottom of Pope's remarks. Both will be found in the notes on the passages to which the comments of the author and his critic relate.

There is no evidence, except the poet's own assertion, to prove that the Pastorals were composed at the age of sixteen. They had been seen by Walsh before April 20, 1705, if any dependence could be placed upon the letter of that date which he wrote to Wycherly, when returning the manuscript, but the letter rests on the authority of Pope alone, and there is reason to question the correctness of the date. The letter of Walsh to Wycherley concludes with the expression of a desire to be made acquainted with Pope. "If," adds Walsh, "he will give himself the trouble any morning to call at my house I shall be very glad to read the verses over with him." The next letter is from Walsh to Pope, and the opening sentence shows that his correspondence with the poet had only just commenced. It appears from what follows that they had met in London, that Walsh had carried Pope's verses into the country, and that these verses were three of the Pastorals. Walsh expresses a hope that when he returns to town, Pope will have some fresh verses to show him, "for I make no doubt," he says, "but any one who writes so well, must write more." These particulars evidently refer to the period when Walsh first became acquainted with the Pastorals, and undertook to criticise them. But the correspondence on the subject begins on June 24, 1706, whence we should infer that it was in April, 1706, and not in 1705, that Wycherley introduced Pope and his Pastorals to Walsh. The poet would have departed from his usual practice if he had not falsified dates to exaggerate his precocity. That he was past seventeen when he first exhibited his Pastorals to his friends is confirmed by a passage from the letter, in which George Granville sketches the character of Wycherley, and invites an unnamed correspondent to meet him. "He shall bring with him, if you will," says Granville, "a young poet, newly inspired in the neighbourhood of Cooper's Hill, whom he and Walsh have taken under their wing. His name is Pope. He is not above seventeen or eighteen years of age, and promises miracles. If he goes on as he has begun in the Pastoral way, as Virgil first tried his strength, we may hope to see English poetry vie with the Roman, and this swan of Windsor sing as sweetly as the Mantuan."[9] Whatever may be the true date of the Pastorals, a portion of them certainly existed before April 20, 1706, on which day Tonson, the bookseller, wrote to Pope, "I have lately seen a pastoral of yours in Mr. Walsh's and Congreve's hands, which is extremely fine, and is generally approved of by the best judges in poetry. I remember I have formerly seen you at my shop, and am sorry I did not improve my acquaintance with you. If you design your poem for the press, no person shall be more careful in printing of it, nor no one can give a greater encouragement to it." Three years elapsed before the Pastorals saw the light, when Tonson became the publisher, and they appeared on May 2, 1709, in his Sixth Miscellany. The preface, which Walsh had read in manuscript, and which he calls "very learned and judicious," did not come out till 1717, and then bore the title of A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. Johnson, repeating the language of Walsh, says that it is "learned in a high degree;" whereas it was avowedly compiled from two or three recent essayists, and demanded nothing from the poet to which the term learning could be properly applied. He owed to his second-hand authorities the arbitrary and pedantic rules which were framed from the practice of the ancients, and which were employed by the mechanical critics of his day to repress the free forms of modern genius. The style would have been remarkable for its maturity, if, as Pope professed, it had been the produce of sixteen, but the Discourse was not printed till he was twenty-nine, and he certainly did not send it uncorrected into the world.

"It must appear strange," says De Quincey, "that Pope at twenty-one should choose to come forward for the first time with a work composed at sixteen. A difference of five years at that stage of life is of more effect than of twenty at a later; and his own expanding judgment could hardly fail to inform him that his Pastorals were by far the worst of his works. In reality, let us not deny, that had Pope never written anything else, his name would not have been known as a name even of promise, but would probably have been redeemed from oblivion by some satirist or writer of a Dunciad."[10] "Expanding judgment" is often a feeble antidote to the partiality of an author for his own compositions, and Pope always spoke of his Pastoral effusions with fond complacency. He did, indeed, pretend to regret their publication. There was some delay in bringing out the Miscellany, and on November 1, 1708, he wrote thus to Cromwell: "But now I talk of the critics, I have good news to tell you concerning myself, for which I expect you should congratulate with me; it is, that beyond all my expectations, and far above my demerits, I have been most mercifully reprieved by the sovereign power of Jacob Tonson from being brought forth to public punishment, and [have been] respited from time to time from the hands of those barbarous executioners of the muses, whom I was just now speaking of. It often happens that guilty poets, like other guilty criminals, when once they are known and proclaimed, deliver themselves into the hands of justice only to prevent others from doing it more to their disadvantage, and not out of any ambition to spread their fame by being executed in the face of the world, which is a fame but of short continuance." Pope was in his twenty-first year, an age at which frankness commonly preponderates, and he already abounded in the ostentatious profession of sentiments he did not entertain. He had circulated the Pastorals among numerous authors, he had invited their criticisms, he had continued to correct the poems with fastidious care, he retained to the last a high opinion of their merit, and it is impossible to credit his insinuation, that he did not design them for the press, and that he only printed them to avoid a surreptitious edition which nobody gave any sign of preparing. The hypocrisy broke out again when the Miscellany had appeared. "Nothing," wrote Wycherley, May 17, 1709, "has lately been better received by the public than your part of it. You have only displeased the critics by pleasing them too well, having not left them a word to say for themselves against you and your performances. In earnest, all the best judges of good sense or poetry are admirers of yours, and like your part of the book so well that the rest is liked the worse." Pope replied, "I shall be satisfied if I can lose my time agreeably this way, without losing my reputation. As for gaining any, I am as indifferent in the matter as Falstaff was, and may say of fame as he did of honour, 'If it comes, it comes unlooked for; and there's an end on't.'" This affectation of indifference was kept up by him to the end of his days. Yet he was all the time composing, polishing, and publishing; his whole existence was passed in painstaking, and almost drudging authorship; he left no means untried, dishonest as well as fair, to sustain, extend, and perpetuate his reputation; and he pursued every person with inveterate malice who presumed to question his poetical supremacy. In spite of his boasted apathy, there cannot be found in the annals of the irritable race a more anxious, jealous, intriguing candidate for fame.

In his letter to Wycherley, Walsh remarked of Pope's Pastorals, "It is no flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age." Walsh must have been thinking of Virgil's Eclogues, which are his most juvenile productions, though he is not supposed to have commenced them till he was thirty years old. Pope admired them to excess, and in his manhood he held to the belief that "it was difficult to find any fault in them."[11] His desire was to repeat, with slight variations, this ancient pattern, which he thought perfection. Virgil himself was a plagiarist, but the Eclogues have more originality than the Pastorals. The descriptions of both Virgil and Pope are artificial, but Virgil has heart-felt touches from the life, of which the Pastorals afford no trace. The taste of both was unformed, but the conceits of Virgil are accompanied by a poetic vein which was not yet equally developed in Pope. Since the Pastorals are an imitation of the Eclogues, it might be expected, as usually happens in such cases, that the copy would have the defects of the model in an exaggerated degree. Pope could not disguise from himself that his verses were the echo of an echo; and in a letter of July 2, 1706, he begged Walsh to tell him sincerely whether he had not stretched the license of borrowing too far. Walsh admitted in his answer, that some persons to whom he had shown the manuscript had made this objection, but he professed not to share it, and comforted his friend by the assurance, "that in all the common subjects of poetry the thoughts are so obvious that whoever writes last must write things like what have been said before." Roscoe has repeated the plea, and speaks of "the unreasonableness" of expecting new images on a topic which "has been the general theme of poetry in every country, period, and language." He forgot that rural scenery and life had furnished abundant novelty to Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Crabbe, whose pictures are as fresh and unhacknied as if Theocritus and Virgil had never lived. "He that walks behind," said Michael Angelo "can never go before;" and originality was impossible when Pope's only notion of legitimate pastoral was a slavish mimicry of classical remains. Had he drawn his materials from the English landscape before his eyes, from the English characters about his doors, and from the English usages and modes of thought in his own day, he would have discovered a thousand particulars in which he had not been anticipated by Greeks and Romans. He neglected this inexhaustible territory, and bestowed so little attention upon the realities around him, that though his descriptions are confined to the barest generalities, they are not unfrequently false.

After contending that the triteness of the Pastorals was inevitable, Roscoe puts forth a second defence to save the precocity of their author. "The observation," he says, "of Johnson, that no invention was intended, is, as far as the remark of Warton affects the genius and character of Pope, a decisive answer." This must mean that he copied from choice, and not from necessity, which is contradicted by the confession of Pope himself, who acknowledges that he leant upon his masters because he was unable to go alone.[12] Without his testimony we should have been driven to the same conclusion, since every great poet whose youthful verses have been preserved, began by imitating his predecessors, and it would be absurd, in defiance of a general law, to assume that Pope was gifted with a juvenile originality which his early works belie. If he had been capable of higher flights, it would have done him no honour to have employed his melodious verse in piecing together stale, vapid, and often paltry ideas.

Johnson, to be sure, was of opinion that Pope in his Pastorals had copied "the poems of antiquity with judicious selection," but this approbation he does not seem to deserve. A large volume might be composed consisting solely of faults which had their counterpart in works of genius. The homage Pope paid to famous names seduced his immature taste into the admiration of many a vicious passage, and he endeavoured to emulate or outdo the frigid and hyperbolical conceits of his prototypes. Throughout the Pastorals, for instance, the phenomena, which are the effects of the seasons, are ascribed to the presence or absence of the nymphs whom his minstrels celebrate. In spring, the skies mourn in showers, the birds are hushed, and the flowers are closed till Delia smiles, when forthwith the skies brighten, the flowers bloom, and the birds sing. In summer, the shepherd boasts that the breezes shall wait upon his heroine, and blow in the places where she walks; that the trees where she sits shall crowd into a shade; that the flowers shall rise up from the soil where she treads; and that vegetation shall flourish where she turns her eyes. In autumn, the birds neglect their song, the leaves fall from the trees, and the flowers droop because Delia has gone away. In winter, the heavens are obscured by clouds, the verdure has withered, the flocks refuse to graze the meadows, the bees neglect their honey, and the streams overflow with tears because Daphne is dead. This last pastoral, which was Pope's favourite, turns mainly on the notion that winter is the consequence of heaven and earth deploring the death of Mrs. Tempest. "Such," says Sandys, "is the sweetness and power of poesy, as it makes that appear which were in prose both false and ridiculous, to resemble the truth." Poetic fancy is separated from extravagance by narrow boundaries; but there must be some affinity to truth, or the understanding is repelled instead of the imagination being captivated. No ideas can have less to recommend them than the hollow rhapsodies of the Pastorals, for they are at once obvious and absurd. "Poetry," said Wordsworth, "is the image of man and nature," and Pope's fantastic superlatives are the image of neither. They never approximate to the exaggeration of fervid passion, but both grief and love are without the semblance of genuine feeling, and only excited the derision of those who looked for a meaning beneath the glitter of words. "Pray tell me the name of him I love," wrote Lady Mary Pierrepont, afterwards the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley, "that I may sigh to the woods and groves hereabouts, and teach it to the echo. Above all, let me know whether it is most proper to walk in the woods, increasing the winds with my sighs, or to sit by a purling stream, swelling the rivulet with my tears."[13] This happy ridicule of a style of composition, which Pope acknowledged ought "to be full of the greatest simplicity, in nature," was written a few months after the Pastorals were published, and appears to have been suggested by them. The clever girl drew her notions from life, and the perceptions of the young author were sophisticated by books. Bowles believed that Pope was influenced "by the false taste of Cowley at that time prevalent." Cowley's popularity, however, had ceased for some years; the fashion he set had passed away; and Dryden reigned in his stead. "He is sunk in his reputation," said this illustrious successor in 1700, "because he could never forego any conceit which came in his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small. For this reason, though he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer, and for ten impressions which his works have had in many successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely purchased once a twelvemonth."[14] The conceits in Pope's Pastorals were derived from other sources. He took little from Cowley, and borrowed none of his peculiarities.

Pope says, in his Discourse, that his Pastorals "have as much variety in respect of the several seasons as Spenser's; that to add to this variety, the several times of the day are observed, the rural employments in each season or time of day, and the rural scenes or places proper to such employments, not without some regard to the several ages of man, and the different passions proper to each age." Johnson has in consequence accorded to the Pastorals the praise of being composed with "close thought;" but the conception was very imperfectly executed, and in part is puerile. Spring and morning, summer and noon, autumn and evening, winter and night, are coupled together, as if each season was specially characterised by a single portion of the day, selected for no other reason than because the order of succession is the same. Between the several ages of man, and the seasons, there is an obvious resemblance, which has furnished similes from time immemorial, but there is no propriety in peopling a spring scene with children, and a winter scene with the old, since all ages figure together in the world, and manifest the feelings which belong to their years, whether it happens to be winter or spring. If the plan had any merit, Pope did not conform to it. The shepherds who sing in spring are grown up. The shepherd who sings in summer is a boy. Winter is a funereal lament for a young lady who was cut off in her prime, and has not the most distant reference to old age. The different passions proper to each time of life, which Pope professes to have distinguished, are altogether overlooked. Love is the sole passion which animates the actors in Spring, Summer, and Autumn; and the shepherd in Winter celebrates the departed Daphne in the same lover-like rhapsodies which prevail throughout the three preceding poems. The rural employments proper to each season have been equally forgotten. Sheep-keeping and verse-making are the only occupations, though the poet declares he had changed the scene to suit the changing employment, and represents the first pastoral as sung in a valley, the second on the banks of a stream, the third on a hill, and the fourth in a grove. In place of the variety to which he lays claim, we have a general sameness, and if he had kept faithfully to the outline he sketched, he would, with his mode of composition, have done little towards diversifying the series. He wanted the "intimate acquaintance with those minute and particular appearances of nature which," as Bowles says, "can alone give a lively and original colour to the painting of pastoral poetry." The scenes of his four lays,--the valley, the stream, the hill, and the grove,--are just mentioned, and nothing more. There is no attempt to depict them to the mind, and it does not contribute to variety simply to tell the reader that he is now in a valley, and now upon a hill. The seasons themselves are only marked by the superficial, notorious circumstances which convey no pleasure in the repetition, unless they are accompanied by the nice discriminating touches of an exact observer. To say that showers descend, that birds sing, that crocuses blow, and that trees put forth their leaves in spring, supplies the mind with no fresh ideas, nor assists in giving a new beauty and a more definite form to the ideas we possessed before. The genius of Pope was in another direction; and when we contrast the picturesque details of Thomson's Seasons with the blank common-places of the Pastorals, we perceive how wide is the interval between the elegant, harmonious versifier, and the genuine poet of nature. Sheep are twice mentioned in Pope's Winter, once at ver. 5,

Now sleeping flocks in their soft fleeces lie;

and again at ver. 37,

For her the flocks refuse their verdant food.

Widely different in life and vividness are the lines in which Thomson paints the flocks under their true wintry aspect, when the snow is falling, and has buried up the herbage.

The bleating kind Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glist'ning earth, With looks of dumb despair.

In a verse which is not original, but which is more descriptive than usual, Pope speaks of the breezes which, in spring, blow gently among the osiers:

Let vernal airs through trembling osiers play.

This is flat by the side of the passage in Thomson's Spring, where he describes the effects of the lightest current of air upon the aspen:

Not a breath Is heard to quiver through the closing woods, Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves Of aspen tall.

The epithet "closing" is happily applied to woods just bursting into foliage, and the epithet "many-twinkling" is exquisitely appropriate to the leaves of the aspen, which, when every other tree is still, and the air can hardly be felt to stir, dance up and down incessantly, with an endless play of light and shadow, and rustle as they wave joyously to and fro. Nature scarce affords a prettier sight, or a more soothing sound. These comparisons might be extended through pages, and they are fair examples of Pope's inferiority in a style which was unsuited to his turn of mind, and of which he had never formed adequate ideas.

Roscoe could perceive no impropriety in transferring classical customs and mythology to the plains of Windsor. He conceived that every objection was obviated by the announcement of Pope, "that pastoral is an image of the golden age," which leaves us to infer, that during this happy interlude our British shepherds adopted the manners and religion of Greece. But the golden age was itself an exploded fable, which had lost its hold on the imagination, and even if Englishmen in the eighteenth century could have been beguiled by the dream, they could not at least have been enthralled by the fiction, that Paradise was renewed in England under the auspices of heathenism. The theory of a golden age introduced a second inconsistency into the Pastorals without remedying the first. Bad as is the defence, it cannot be pleaded on Pope's behalf; for discarding in his Winter the notion of some remote and undefined era, he has laid the scene in a particular year of the reign of Queen Anne, and makes Lycidas declare that he will often sacrifice a lamb to the deceased Mrs. Tempest, who died in 1703. There are several other incongruities. "Zodiac" is too hard a term to be remembered correctly by one of Pope's shepherds, a circumstance which is intended to denote the little learning he possessed; and the same ignorant shepherd proceeds to talk as glibly of Hybla, and Cynthus, and Idalia'a groves as if they had been neighbouring parishes.

One characteristic of the Pastorals has been universally allowed--the peculiar softness of the versification, which was considered by Pope to be an essential quality of this species of composition. He told Spence that he had scarce ever bestowed more labour in tuning his lines.[15] He must have had less facility when he was learning the art than when he was thoroughly practised in it; and since authors are apt to estimate the result by the amount of toil it has cost them, the greater pains he expended upon his early efforts may have been the reason that "he esteemed the Pastorals as the most correct in the versification, and musical in the numbers, of all his works." He certainly went forwards in some of his later pieces. Windsor Forest, and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, are finer specimens of melody than the Pastorals. The poetic harmony displayed by Pope in his youth refuted an axiom which Dryden propounded in his lines to the memory of Oldham.

O early ripe! to thy abundant store What could advancing age have added more? It might, what nature never gives the young, Have taught the smoothness of thy native tongue. But satire needs not this, and wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.

Many examples might be quoted in support of Dryden's position, but he had failed to discover, what the later history of poetry has rendered clear, that where there is not a defective ear, the softness or ruggedness of juvenile verses depends upon the model. The imitative faculty of boyhood is never more at home than in catching the trick of metrical harmony. Dryden had used the heroic measure with consummate skill, and no one who came after him could fall into the "harsh cadence" of Oldham's Satires, and Cowley's Davideis, or rest satisfied with the combination of rough and smooth in the productions of Sandys and Denham. The music of the "mighty master" was on every tongue when Pope began "to lisp in numbers." "I learned versification," he said to Spence, "wholly from Dryden's works, who had improved it much beyond any of our former poets; and would, probably, have brought it to its perfection, had not he been unhappily obliged to write so often in haste."[16] What Dryden did for Pope, Pope did for the next generation, and to compose mellifluous verses became the common attainment of ordinary scribblers. Cowper, in his Table Talk, has specially noticed this effect of Pope's writings.

But he (his musical finesse was such, So nice his ear, so delicate his touch) Made poetry a mere mechanic art, And every warbler has his tune by heart.

In metrical skill Pope was thought by most persons to have surpassed all his predecessors. "He is the most harmonious poet," said Voltaire, "that England ever had. He has reduced the sharp hissings of the English trumpet to the sweet sounds of the flute."[17] Voltaire doubtless found this opinion prevalent in the circle he frequented during his residence in England, from 1720 to 1728; for his own knowledge of our language would not have enabled him to distinguish the nicer shades of melody. The English critics confirm his decision. Johnson declared that the versification of the Pastorals had "no precedent, nor has since had an imitation." Warton pronounced "that it was musical to a degree of which rhyme could hardly be thought capable," and Bowles admitted that Pope "had made the English couplet infinitely more smooth." To the few who "censured his poetry as too uniformly musical, and as glutting the ear with unvaried sweetness," Johnson replied, "I suspect this objection to be the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception; and who would even themselves have less pleasure in his works, if he had tried to relieve attention by studied discords, or affected to break his lines, and vary his pauses."[18] Bowles sided with the cavillers, as Johnson deemed them, and held that the want of breaks and of variety in the pauses produced a monotony of sound. Lord Kames, on the contrary, asserted that Pope was "eminent for variety of versification," and that the variety of his pauses was the source of the "variety of his melody."[19] I agree with the dissentients who think that his metre is prone to a cloying mannerism, but I believe that the defect is ascribed by Bowles to the wrong cause. Any one who compares the imperial march of the metre in the Vanity of Human Wishes, with the sweet, but less majestic Deserted Village, will perceive that the swell of the heroic measure is capable of wide degrees. A poet judges of the harmony of his verses by trying them on his ear, and the tendency is to set them all to the same tune. This was Pope's error. He has in general, though not always, intermixed the pauses, but he has not varied sufficiently the swell and movement of his lines. Dryden, "in whose admirable ear," as Gray remarks, "the music of our old versification still sounded,"[20] rings the changes with wonderful ease and spirit, and is by turns soft and stately, lively and solemn, familiar and sonorous, while he preserves through all his transitions a freedom, a flow, and an elasticity which never flag. His negligent lines, which are often imputed to haste, have been thought by good writers to be intended to avoid the surfeit of an equable strain. "Sometimes," says Dr. Trapp, "it is not only allowable, but beautiful, to run into harsh and unequal numbers. Mr. Dryden himself does it; and we may be sure he knew when he did it as well as we could tell him. In a work intended for pleasure, variety justifies the breach of almost any rule, provided it be done but rarely."[21] There is extreme exaggeration in the language of Bowles when he states that Pope "gave the first idea of mellifluence." Lines as melodious may be counted in Dryden by the hundred. Pope only maintained a more continuous softness, or, as Johnson puts it, "he discovered, by perusing the works of Dryden, the most perfect fabric of English verse, and habituated himself to that only which he found the best."[22] This constantly recurring note, however attractive in itself, must always appear a retrograde system, to those who appreciate the richer music of more diversified modulations. The sameness of Pope's metre was the reason that "every warbler had his tune by heart," and imitated it so readily. There was a complexity in the incessant rise and fall of Dryden's lines which mechanical verse-makers could only copy imperfectly. The uniformity of Pope gave them little trouble. The repetition soon fixed the brief lesson in their minds, and the petty warblers almost rivalled their original in sound, though they were far enough from approaching the beauty of his language, the terseness of his style, the felicity of his ideas, and the weight of his sense.

As the Pastorals of Philips opened the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellany, De Quiucey conjectures that Pope's Pastorals may have been placed at the end of the volume by his own desire. Both sets of verses, by this arrangement, were more likely to attract attention, and invite comparison. Pope appears not to have felt any jealousy at the outset. Speaking of Philips's Pastorals in a letter to Cromwell, on October 28, 1710, a year and a half after the Miscellany was published, he said "he agreed with the Tatler that we had no better eclogues in our language." He particularly commended the lines which describe the musician playing on the harp, and added that "nothing could be objected to them, except that they were too lofty for pastoral." He changed his tone after the essays on pastoral poetry had appeared in the Guardian. These papers commenced with No. 22, and in No. 23, for April 7, 1713, some passages are quoted from Philips to illustrate the qualities appropriate to the pastoral style. In No. 30 there are more quotations from Philips to the same purpose, and he and Spenser are singled out as the sole cultivators of this species of composition, who "have copied and improved the beauties of the ancients." The eulogium reached its climax in No. 32, where it is asserted that there have been only four true masters of the art in above two thousand years,--"Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born Philips." It is not known who contributed the essays, but it has been conjectured, without any evidence, that they proceeded from Tickell. There cannot be a question that the author had a friendship for Philips, or he would not have ranked him with Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser; and it is equally certain that he was not an admirer of the Pastorals of Pope, which are passed over in silence, and which violate the canons laid down by the critic. "I must observe," he says, "that our countrymen have so good an opinion of the ancients, and think so modestly of themselves, that the generality of pastoral writers have either stolen all from the Greeks and Romans, or so servilely imitated their manners and customs as makes them very ridiculous."[23] The method of Philips is adduced in advantageous contrast. He is commended for changing the details with the scene, and introducing English ideas into English eclogues. A few months earlier similar praise had been bestowed upon him by Addison, in the Spectator for October 30, 1712. "When we are at school," said Addison in his essay, "it is necessary for us to be acquainted with the system of pagan theology, and we may be allowed to enliven a theme or point an epigram with a heathen god; but no thought is beautiful which is not just, and no thought can be just which is not founded in truth, or at least in that which passes for such. If any are of opinion that there is a necessity of admitting these classical legends into our serious compositions, in order to give them a more poetical turn, I would recommend to their consideration the Pastorals of Mr. Philips. One would have thought it impossible for this kind of poetry to have subsisted without fauns and satyrs, wood-nymphs and water-nymphs, with all the tribe of rural deities. But we see he has given a new life, and a more natural beauty, to this way of writing, by substituting in the place of these antiquated fables the superstitious mythology which prevails among the shepherds of our own country." Addison had previously commenced the reformation by excluding pagan machinery from his Campaign. It needed but a small amount of taste to share his opinions, and the writer in the Guardian can hardly be charged with hostility to Pope for not commending Pastorals which, apart from their melodious language, were little better than a medley of unnatural compliments, and unmeaning mythology. Contemporary criticism is more often corrupted by the kindness of friendship than by the spite of enmity, but the effect is sometimes the same, and the undue exaltation of Philips increased the comparative contempt which was cast upon Pope. He had reason to be annoyed, and it was not much compensation that the prettiest lines of his January and May were quoted in one of the papers on Pastoral, to show that fairies could be rendered attractive in verse.

The scheme Pope devised for redressing the wrong, was to send a paper to the Guardian in which he ridiculed the Pastorals of his rival and applauded his own. "With an unexampled and unequalled artifice of irony," says Dr. Johnson, "though he himself has always the advantage, he gives the preference to Philips." In the opening sentence of the essay Pope is described as "a gentleman whose character it is, that he takes the greatest care of his works before they are published, and the least concern for them afterwards."[24] He followed his invariable habit of boasting his pre-eminence in the very virtue he was defying, and attached this vaunt to a criticism in which his morbid "concern" for his works had induced him to become his own reviewer and eulogist. He was liberal in his self-laudation, and assured the public that though his Pastorals might not fulfil the strict definition laid down in the Guardian, they were, like Virgil's, "something better." To prove the inferiority of Philips he selected three of his worst passages, and contrasted them with three of his own. He picked out a dozen foolish lines from his rival, and alleged that they were specimens of his ordinary manner. He subjoined some ludicrous imitations of his style, which are only not an outrageous caricature because they have no resemblance at all to the original. The faults of Philips did not require to be exaggerated. The absurdities of his satirist are different in kind, but they are not less in degree. Some defects they had in common, and as self-love is blind, Pope did not perceive that most of his comments recoiled upon himself. He objected that Philips had introduced wolves into England, where they formerly existed, and the critic forgot that the imaginary golden age, which he maintained in his Discourse was the only era of Pastoral, must be assigned to a period long anterior to their extirpation. Or if the piping shepherds, who composed and chanted poems, were to be considered as existing personages, credibility was not more violated in supposing that Windsor Forest was still haunted by wolves than by heathen gods and goddesses,--in imagining the lambs to be preyed upon by a wild beast, than in picturing Christian bards employed in sacrificing them to Mrs. Tempest with an exact observance of pagan rites. He took especial credit for having kept to the circumstances proper to a particular season of the year, and a certain time of the day, and exposed the ignorance of Philips, who, says he, "by a poetical creation, hath raised up finer beds of flowers than the most industrious gardener; his roses, lilies, and daffodils blow in the same season." Pope might have remembered that in his own Pastorals he had made roses, violets, and crocuses bloom together, which drew from George Steevens the remark, that he has rarely mentioned flowers without some mistake of the kind. The nicest observers of nature are not exempt from these oversights. The swine in Ivanhoe feed on acorns under the trees in the middle of summer, and though Walter Scott, at the end of the Monastery, alluded playfully to the anachronism, he never cared to correct the error. A more important charge, in which Pope is most of all open to retaliation, was that Philip's Pastorals "gave manifest proof of his knowledge of books." While it was admitted that "his competitor had imitated some single thoughts of the ancients," Philips was held up as a wholesale depredator. He does, indeed, abound in the stock ideas which had served a hundred versifiers. He is a warbler who whistles an old tune, but he is not without a few notes which have a semblance of originality, and these are wanting in his accuser. Inferior to the Pastorals of Pope in polish and versification, the Pastorals of Philips are, on the whole, superior in their substance. The trial of skill between the musician and the nightingale, which forms the subject of the fifth Pastoral, is narrated with singular sweetness, and may still be read with pleasure. In true poetic feeling it is much beyond anything in the Pastorals of his scoffing critic. Philips owed his advantage to his maturer years, and not to the brilliancy of his talents; he was thirty-four when Tonson's Miscellany appeared, and Pope was but twenty-one. The powers of Philips remained stationary, and he ranks low among the minor poets. Pope quickly ripened into genius, and reigned without a competitor. The exaggerated panegyrics of the Guardian could not confer a reputation upon Philips he did not deserve, and Pope derived none of his celebrity from the gross expedient of exalting himself, and decrying his antagonist. There is nothing which is less affected by unjust praise and unjust detraction than an author's works. They are there to speak for themselves, and no amount of petty artifices can long raise them higher or sink them lower than they merit.

Pope was a contributor to the Guardian, and on cordial terms with the editor, but he could not ask to have a paper inserted in which he had drawn a comparison between his own Pastorals and those of his rival, and awarded himself the palm. He therefore sent the criticism anonymously, and Steele, as we are told by Warburton, not discovering that the praise of Philips and the censure of Pope were both ironical, showed the manuscript to the latter, and assured him that he would "never publish any paper where one of the club was complimented at the expense of another." His ingenuous ally affected magnanimity, and prevailed upon Steele to print the essay. The irony which could not be detected by the wits at Button's might well escape less cultivated minds. Ayre, in his Memoirs of Pope, in 1745, and Dilworth, in 1760, both believed that the criticism was to be interpreted literally, that Steele was the author of it, and that it was dictated by friendship for Philips. Small as was the ability of these biographers, they may be supposed to have shared the common opinion. This continued to be the accepted doctrine in the next generation; and the celebrated circle in which Hannah More lived were unanimous in holding that the essay was not satirical. "The whole criticism," she wrote August 4, 1783, "appears to me a burlesque, but I have some reason to think I am in the wrong, as I have all the world against me. That a writer of so pure a taste could be in earnest when he talks of the elegance of Diggon Davy, and exalts all that trash of Philips's, whose simplicity is silliness, I cannot bring myself to believe." She found it still more difficult to believe that the author could be serious in asserting that Hobbinol and Lobbin are names agreeable to the delicacy of an English ear.[25] Hannah More judged of Philips by the wretched extracts in the Guardian. Her accomplished friends could hardly have admired them; and it must have been for a different reason that the purpose of the essay was misunderstood. Warton says that the misapprehension arose from "the skill with which the irony was conducted." It would be more natural to infer that the execution was defective when the vast majority of literary men mistook the design. The satire, in fact, is imperfectly sustained, and passages, which the author intended for irony, appeared to the reader to be plain common sense. "Mr. Pope," he says of himself, "hath fallen into the same error with Virgil. His names are borrowed from Theocritus and Virgil, which are improper to the scenes of his Pastorals. He introduces Daphnis, Alexis, and Thyrsis on British plains, as Virgil had done before him on the Mantuan." Habit had reconciled Pope to the affectation of calling English shepherds Daphnis and Thyrsis, but "the names," as De Quincey says, "are rank with childishness," and the public, who felt the practice to be absurd, concluded that the censure was real. "It may," said Pope, "be observed, as a farther beauty of this pastoral, that the words nymph, dryad, naiad, faun, Cupid, or satyr, are not once mentioned through the whole," which was a sneer at Addison's commendation of Philips for rejecting those dreary nonentities; but the public, who had been nauseated with them, could not detect a covert sarcasm in the repetition of the praise by the writer in the Guardian. The circumstance which seemed to Warton to render the irony transparent was the remark, that "Philips had with great judgment described wolves in England," but the ridicule was based upon ignorance, and must have been lost upon every one who was aware that wolves abounded in the antique period to which the pastorals referred. Bowles, who knew that the paper was ironical, yet imagined that Pope was serious in the opening portion, where it is asserted that Virgil has not above a couple of "true pastorals," and that Theocritus has scarcely more. This part, however, of the essay was in the same sarcastic vein with the rest. The previous critic in the Guardian had laid down the rule that a pastoral should reflect "the golden age of innocence," and Pope, to deprive Philips of the benefit of the definition, endeavoured to show that Theocritus and Virgil had hardly ever conformed to it. He did not mean seriously to admit that his competitor was a more genuine pastoral poet than Virgil and Theocritus. His object was to throw ridicule on the definition itself, albeit he adopted it in his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry when he was no longer engaged in disparaging Philips.

Nothing can be clearer than that Pope was instigated to write the essay in the Guardian by his jealousy of the praise which had been bestowed upon his rival. The course he took was discreditable, and Warburton, without attempting a direct apology, pretends that the incident which influenced the poet was the misrepresentations made of him to Addison by Philips. Ruffhead adds that the calumny consisted in the assertion that Pope was "engaged in the intrigues of the tory ministry." This would be a good reason for his exposing the mis-statement, but would be a poor excuse for his writing an anonymous attack upon Philips's Pastorals, and a panegyric upon his own. The defence, which would be inadequate if it was true, is indubitably incorrect. The account of Warburton did not appear till Philips was dead. Pope, while Philips was living, published an account, in the shape of a letter to Caryll, the date and contents of which prove that Philips did not bring his charge against Pope till a full year after the paper had been printed in the Guardian.[26] The poet adds that when they meet he will inform Caryll "of the secret grounds of Philips's malignity," and Warburton himself subjoins in a note "These grounds were Mr. Pope's writing the ironical comparison between his own and Philips's Pastorals." The strong presumption from the nature of the case that Pope was actuated by literary envy is thus confirmed. The criticism in the Guardian was not provoked by the malignity of Philips, but the bitterness of Philips was the consequence of the criticism. In 1790, Mr. J. C. Walker, the Italian scholar, sent to the Gentleman's Magazine an alleged remark of Philips to the same effect. "When the comparison," says Mr. Walker, "between the Pastorals of Pope and Philips appeared, Philips was secretary to Primate Boulter, and then in Ireland. Dining one day with the officers of the Prerogative Court, the comparison became the subject of conversation, and Philips said he knew it was written by Pope, adding, 'I wonder why the little crooked bastard should attack me, who never offended him either in word or deed?' This I had from a gentleman who was present."[27] If the conversation ever occurred, the gentleman was mistaken in supposing that the criticism was recent, for the paper in the Guardian came out in 1713, and it was not till more than ten years afterwards that Philips went with Archbishop Boulter to Ireland. The story is unnecessary to prove that Pope was the aggressor, which is sufficiently evident from independent testimony. Unhappily for himself, he began at the outset of his career to stir up those enmities which were the torment of his existence. By his attack upon Dennis, in the Essay on Criticism, he invited the scurrility of that rabid pamphleteer, and by what Bowles calls his "unmanly hostility" to Philips he was reduced to the shame of being scared away from Button's by the no less unmanly retaliation of his victim, who, at some period of the quarrel, hung up a birch, and declared that he would use it on "his rival Arcadian," if he showed his face in the coffee-room.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: There was only one paper.]

[Footnote 2: Warburton implies that Addison's remark to Pope was made immediately after the essay appeared in the Guardian, in which case Pope could have lost no time in avowing that he was the author of the criticism when once it was in print, for Addison had no suspicion of him from internal evidence. "He did not," says Spence, "discover Mr. Pope's style in the letter on Pastorals, which he published in the Guardian; but then that was a disguised style."]

[Footnote 3: The effect of reality and truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them grovelling and degraded. Gay's pastorals became popular, and were read with delight as just representations of rural manners and occupations, by those who had no interest in the rivalry of the poets, nor knowledge of the critical dispute.--JOHNSON.]

[Footnote 4: Warton was master of Winchester school.]

[Footnote 5: But if Pope had no invention, and had exhibited in his Pastorals no new or striking images, how could his example have led the way to others, "in point of genius and imagination," whatever it might have done in point of correctness?--ROSCOE.]

[Footnote 6: They are not coupled but contra-distinguished, and surely the poet might draw a contrast from Greece without being chargeable with a faulty mixture of British and Grecian ideas.--RUFFHEAD.]

[Footnote 7: That such causes of complaint will more frequently occur in the Grecian climate is unquestionable; but is it necessary to make a complaint of this kind consistent that every day should be a dog-day? The British shepherd might very consistently describe what he often felt, and we have days in England which might make even a Grecian faint.--RUFFHEAD.]

[Footnote 8: "New sentiments and new images," says Johnson, in his Life of Pope, "others may produce; but to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous. Art and diligence have done their best, and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity."]

[Footnote 9: Works of Lord Lansdowne, vol. ii. p. 113.]

[Footnote 10: De Quincey's Works, vol. xv. p. 114.]

[Footnote 11: Singer's Spence, p. 162.]

[Footnote 12: Spence, p. 211.]

[Footnote 13: Works of Lady Mary Wortley, ed. Thomas, vol. i. p. 166.]

[Footnote 14: Dryden, Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern.]

[Footnote 15: Spence, p. 236.]

[Footnote 16: Spence, p. 212.]

[Footnote 17: Oeuvres, ed. Beuchot, tom. xxxvii. p. 258.]

[Footnote 18: Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, vol. iii. p. 136. The principle which Johnson derided in his Life of Pope he had upheld in No. 86 of the Rambler: "We are soon wearied with the perpetual recurrence of the same cadence. Necessity has therefore enforced the mixed measure, in which some variation of the accents is allowed. This, though it always injures the harmony of the line considered by itself, yet compensates the loss by relieving us from the continual tyranny of the same sound, and makes us more sensible of the harmony of the pure measure."]

[Footnote 19: Elements of Criticism, 6th ed. vol. ii. p. 143, 155.]

[Footnote 20: Gray's Works, ed. Mitford, vol. v. p. 303.]

[Footnote 21: Trapp's Virgil, vol. i. p. lxxix.]

[Footnote 22: Lives of the Poets, vol. iii. p. 136.]

[Footnote 23: Guardian, No. 30, April 15, 1713.]

[Footnote 24: Guardian, No. 40, April 27, 1713.]

[Footnote 25: Life of Hannah More, vol. i. p. 301.]

[Footnote 26: Pope to Caryll, June 8, 1714.]

[Footnote 27: Nichols, Illustrations of Lit. Hist. vol. vii. 713.]

A DISCOURSE

ON

PASTORAL POETRY.[1]

There are not, I believe, a greater number of any sort of verses than of those which are called pastorals; nor a smaller, than of those which are truly so. It therefore seems necessary to give some account of this kind of poem; and it is my design to comprise in this short paper the substance of those numerous dissertations the critics have made on the subject, without omitting any of their rules in my own favour. You will also find some points reconciled, about which they seem to differ, and a few remarks, which, I think, have escaped their observation.

The original of poetry is ascribed to that age which succeeded the creation of the world: and as the keeping of flocks seems to have been the first employment of mankind, the most ancient sort of poetry was probably pastoral.[2] It is natural to imagine, that the leisure of those ancient shepherds admitting and inviting some diversion, none was so proper to that solitary and sedentary life as singing; and that in their songs they took occasion to celebrate their own felicity. From hence a poem was invented, and afterwards improved to a perfect image of that happy time; which, by giving us an esteem for the virtues of a former age, might recommend them to the present. And since the life of shepherds was attended with more tranquillity than any other rural employment, the poets chose to introduce their persons, from whom it received the name of pastoral.

A pastoral is an imitation of the action of a shepherd, or one considered under that character. The form of this imitation is dramatic, or narrative, or mixed of both[3]; the fable simple; the manners not too polite nor too rustic: the thoughts are plain, yet admit a little quickness and passion, but that short and flowing: the expression humble, yet as pure as the language will afford; neat, but not florid; easy, and yet lively. In short, the fable, manners, thoughts, and expressions are full of the greatest simplicity in nature.

The complete character of this poem consists in simplicity[4], brevity, and delicacy; the two first of which render an eclogue natural, and the last delightful.

If we would copy nature, it may be useful to take this idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been; when the best of men followed the employment.[5] To carry this resemblance yet further, it would not be amiss to give these shepherds some skill in astronomy, as far as it may be useful to that sort of life. And an air of piety to the gods should shine through the poem, which so visibly appears in all the works of antiquity; and it ought to preserve some relish of the old way of writing; the connection should be loose, the narrations and descriptions short,[6] and the periods concise. Yet it is not sufficient, that the sentences only be brief, the whole eclogue should be so too. For we cannot suppose poetry in those days to have been the business of men, but their recreation at vacant hours.[7]

But with respect to the present age, nothing more conduces to make these composures natural, than when some knowledge in rural affairs is discovered.[8] This may be made to appear rather done by chance than on design, and sometimes is best shown by inference; lest by too much study to seem natural, we destroy that easy simplicity from whence arises the delight. For what is inviting in this sort of poetry, as Fontenelle observes, proceeds not so much from the idea of that business, as of the tranquillity of a country life.

We must therefore use some illusion to render a pastoral delightful; and this consists in exposing the best side only of a shepherd's life, and in concealing its miseries.[9] Nor is it enough to introduce shepherds discoursing together in a natural way: but a regard must be had to the subject, that it contain some particular beauty in itself, and that it be different in every eclogue. Besides, in each of them a designed scene or prospect is to be presented to our view, which should likewise have its variety.[10] This variety is obtained in a great degree by frequent comparisons, drawn from the most agreeable objects of the country; by interrogations to things inanimate; by beautiful digressions, but those short; sometimes by insisting a little on circumstances; and lastly, by elegant turns on the words, which render the numbers extremely sweet and pleasing. As for the numbers themselves, though they are properly of the heroic measure, they should be the smoothest, the most easy and flowing imaginable.

It is by rules like these that we ought to judge of pastoral. And since the instructions given for any art are to be delivered as that art is in perfection, they must of necessity be derived from those in whom it is acknowledged so to be. It is therefore from the practice of Theocritus and Virgil (the only undisputed authors of pastoral) that the critics have drawn the foregoing notions concerning it.

Theocritus excels all others in nature and simplicity. The subjects of his Idyllia are purely pastoral; but he is not so exact in his persons, having introduced reapers and fishermen[11] as well as shepherds.[12] He is apt to be too long in his descriptions, of which that of the cup in the first pastoral is a remarkable instance.[13] In the manners he seems a little defective, for his swains are sometimes abusive and immodest, and perhaps too much inclining to rusticity; for instance, in his fourth and fifth Idyllia. But it is enough that all others learnt their excellencies from him, and that his dialect alone has a secret charm in it, which no other could ever attain.

Virgil, who copies Theocritus, refines upon his original;[14] and in all points, where judgment is principally concerned, he is much superior to his master. Though some of his subjects are not pastoral in themselves, but only seem to be such, they have a wonderful variety in them,[15] which the Greek was a stranger to.[16] He exceeds him in regularity and brevity, and falls short of him in nothing but simplicity and propriety of style; the first of which perhaps was the fault of his age, and the last of his language.

Among the moderns, their success has been greatest who have most endeavoured to make these ancients their pattern. The most considerable genius appears in the famous Tasso, and our Spenser. Tasso in his Aminta has far excelled all the pastoral writers, as in his Gierusalemme he has outdone the epic poets of his country. But as this piece seems to have been the original of a new sort of poem, the pastoral comedy, in Italy, it cannot so well be considered as a copy of the ancients.[17] Spenser's Calendar, in Mr. Dryden's opinion, is the most complete work of this kind which any nation has produced ever since the time of Virgil.[18] Not but that he may be thought imperfect in some few points. His Eclogues are somewhat too long, if we compare them with the ancients.[19] He is sometimes too allegorical, and treats of matters of religion in a pastoral style, as the Mantuan had done before him. He has employed the lyric measure, which is contrary to the practice of the old poets. His stanza is not still the same, nor always well chosen. This last may be the reason his expression is sometimes not concise enough: for the tetrastic has obliged him to extend his sense to the length of four lines, which would have been more closely confined in the couplet.

In the manners, thoughts, and characters, he comes near to Theocritus himself; though, notwithstanding all the care he has taken, he is certainly inferior in his dialect: for the Doric had its beauty and propriety in the time of Theocritus; it was used in part of Greece, and frequent in the mouths of many of the greatest persons, whereas the old English and country phrases of Spenser were either entirely obsolete, or spoken only by people of the lowest condition.[20] As there is a difference betwixt simplicity and rusticity, so the expression of simple thoughts should be plain, but not clownish. The addition he has made of a calendar to his Eclogues, is very beautiful; since by this, besides the general moral of innocence and simplicity, which is common to other authors of pastoral, he has one peculiar to himself; he compares human life to the several seasons, and at once exposes to his readers a view of the great and little worlds, in their various changes and aspects.[21] Yet the scrupulous division of his pastorals into months, has obliged him either to repeat the same description, in other words, for three months together; or, when it was exhausted before, entirely to omit it: whence it comes to pass that some of his Eclogues (as the sixth, eighth, and tenth, for example) have nothing but their titles to distinguish them. The reason is evident, because the year has not that variety in it to furnish every month with a particular description, as it may every season.

Of the following Eclogues I shall only say, that these four comprehend all the subjects which the critics upon Theocritus and Virgil will allow to be fit for pastoral: that they have as much variety of description, in respect of the several seasons, as Spenser's: that in order to add to this variety, the several times of the day are observed, the rural employments in each season or time of day, and the rural scenes or places proper to such employments; not without some regard to the several ages of man, and the different passions proper to each age. But after all, if they have any merit, it is to be attributed to some good old authors, whose works as I had leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to imitate.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Written at sixteen years of age.--POPE.

This sensible and judicious discourse written at so early an age is a more extraordinary production than the Pastorals that follow it. Our author has chiefly drawn his observations from Rapin, Fontenelle, and the preface to Dryden's Virgil. A translation of Rapin's Discourse had been some years before prefixed to Creech's translation of Theocritus, and is no extraordinary piece of criticism. And though Hume highly praises the Discourse of Fontenelle, yet Dr. Hurd thinks it only rather more tolerable than his Pastorals.--WARTON.

Hume had said that there could not be a finer piece of criticism than Fontenelle's Dissertation on Pastorals, but that the Pastorals themselves displayed false taste, and did not exemplify the rules laid down in the criticism.]

[Footnote 2: Fontenelle's Discourse of Pastorals.--POPE.]

[Footnote 3: Heinsius in Theocr.--POPE.]

[Footnote 4: Rapin de Carm. Past., P. 2.--POPE.]

[Footnote 5: I cannot easily discover why it is thought necessary to refer descriptions of a rural state to the golden age, nor can I perceive that any writer has consistently preserved the Arcadian manners and sentiments. The only reason that I have read on which this rule has been founded is that, according to the customs of modern life, it is improbable that shepherds should be capable of harmonious numbers, or delicate sentiments; and therefore, the reader must exalt his ideas of the pastoral character by carrying his thoughts back to the age in which the care of herds and flocks was the employment of the wisest and greatest men. These reasoners seem to have been led into their hypothesis by considering pastoral, not in general, as a representation of rural nature, and consequently as exhibiting the ideas and sentiments of those, whoever they are, to whom the country affords pleasure or employment, but simply as a dialogue or narrative of men actually tending sheep, and busied in the lowest and most laborious offices; from whence they very readily concluded, since characters must necessarily be preserved, that either the sentiments must sink to the level of the speakers, or the speakers must be raised to the height of the sentiments. In consequence of these original errors, a thousand precepts have been given, which have only contributed to perplex and confound.--JOHNSON.]

[Footnote 6: Rapin, Reflex. sur l'Art. Poet. d'Arist., P. ii. Refl. xxvii.--POPE.]

[Footnote 7: Pope took this remark from Dr. Knightly Chetwood's Preface to the Pastorals in Dryden's Virgil: "Not only the sentences should be short and smart, but the whole piece should be so too, for poetry and pastime was not the business of men's lives in those days, but only their seasonable recreation after necessary hours." The rule is purely fanciful. By continuing the same subject from week to week, a shepherd could as easily find leisure to compose a single piece of a thousand lines as ten pieces of a hundred lines each. Most of the laws of pastoral poetry which Pope has collected are equally unfounded.]

[Footnote 8: Pref. to Virg. Past. in Dryd. Virg.--POPE.]

[Footnote 9: Fontenelle's Disc. of Pastorals.--POPE.]

[Footnote 10: See the forementioned Preface.--POPE.]

[Footnote 11: [Greek: THERISTAI], Idyl. x. and [Greek: ALIEIS], Idyl. xxi.--POPE.

Pope's definition of Pastoral is too confined. In fact, his Pastoral Discourse seems made to fit _his_ Pastorals. For the same reason he would not class as a true Pastoral the most interesting of all Virgil's Eclogues,--I mean the first, which is founded on fact, which has the most tender and touching strokes of nature, and the plot of which is entirely pastoral, being the complaint of a shepherd obliged to leave the fields of his infancy, and yield the possession to soldiers and strangers. Pope says, because it relates to soldiers, it is not pastoral; but how little of a military cast is seen in it. The soldier is mentioned, but only as far as was absolutely necessary, and always in connection with the rural imagery from whence the most exquisite touches are derived. Pope's pastoral ideas, with the exception of the Messiah, seem to have been taken from the least interesting and poetic scenes of the ancient eclogue,--the Wager, the Contest, the Riddle, the alternate praises of Daphne or Delia, the common-place complaint of the lover, &c. The more interesting and picturesque subjects were excluded, as not being properly pastoral according to his definition.--BOWLES.

In saying that Pope would not allow Virgil's first eclogue to be "a true pastoral," Bowles refers to the paper in the Guardian, where the design was to laugh at the strict definition which would exclude a poem from the pastoral class on such frivolous grounds. In the same jesting tone, Pope asserts that the third eclogue must be set aside, because it introduces "calumny and railing, which are not proper to a state of concord," and the eighth, because it has a shepherd "whom an inviting precipice tempts to self-destruction."]

[Footnote 12: The tenth and twenty-first Idyll here alluded to contain some of the most exquisite strokes of nature and true poetry anywhere to be met with, as does the beautiful description of the carving on the cup, which, indeed is not a cup, but a very large pastoral vessel or cauldron.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 13: In what does the great father of the pastoral excel all others? In "simplicity, and nature." I admit with Pope, but more particularly in one circumstance, which seems to have escaped general attention, and that circumstance is the picturesque. Pope says he is too long in his descriptions, particularly of the cup. Was not Pope, a professed admirer of painting, aware that the description of that cup contains touches of the most delightful and highly-finished landscape? The old fisherman, and the broken rock in one scene; in another, the beautiful contrast of the little boy weaving his rush-work, and so intent on it, that he forgets the vineyard he was set to guard. We see him in the foreground of the piece. Then there is his scrip, and the fox eyeing it askance; the ripe and purple vineyard, and the other fox treading down the grapes whilst he continues at his work. Add to these circumstances the wild and beautiful Sicilian scenery, and where can there be found more perfect landscapes in the works, which these pictures peculiarly resemble, of Vernet or Gainsborough? Considered in this view, how rich, wild, and various are the landscapes of the old Sicilian, and we cannot but wonder that so many striking and original traits should be passed over by a "youthful bard," who professed to select from, and to copy the ancients.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 14: He refines indeed so much, as to make him, on this very account, much inferior to the beautiful simplicity of his original.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 15: It is difficult to conceive where is the "wonderful variety" in Virgil's Eclogues which "the Greek was a stranger to." Many of the more poetical parts of Virgil are copied literally from Theocritus; but are weakened by being made more general, and often lose much of their picturesque and poetical effect from that circumstance.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 16: Rapin. Refl. on Arist., P. ii. Refl. xxvii. Pref. to the Ecl. in Dryden's Virgil.--POPE.]

[Footnote 17: The Aminta of Tasso is here erroneously mentioned by Pope as the very first pastoral comedy that appeared in Italy. But it is certain that Il Sacrificio of Agostino Beccari was the first, who boasts of it in his prologue, and who died very old in 1590.--WARTON.

"There were," says Roscoe, "several writers of pastoral in Italy prior to those mentioned either by Pope or Warton." Roscoe mistook the question, which was, who was the first author of the pastoral _drama_? None of the prior pastoral writers he enumerates produced a drama, and Warton was right in giving the precedency to Beccari.]

[Footnote 18: Dedication to Virg. Ecl.--POPE.]

[Footnote 19: In the manuscript Pope had added, "Some of them contain two hundred lines, and others considerably exceed that number."]

[Footnote 20: Johnson remarks that while the notion that rustic characters ought to use rustic phraseology, led to the adoption in pastorals "of a mangled dialect which no human being ever could have spoken," the authors had the inconsistency to invest their personages with a refinement of thought which was incompatible with coarse and vulgar diction. "Spenser," he continues, "begins one of his pastorals with studied barbarity:

Diggon Davie, I bid her good day; Or Diggon her is, or I missay.

_Dig._ Her wus her while it was day-light, But now her is a most wretched wight.

What will the reader imagine to be the subject on which speakers like these exercise their eloquence? Will he not be somewhat disappointed when he finds them met together to condemn the corruptions of the church of Rome? Surely at the same time that a shepherd learns theology, he may gain some acquaintance with his native language."]

[Footnote 21: "It was from hence," the poet went on to say in his manuscript, "I took my first design of the following eclogues. For, looking upon Spenser as the father of English pastoral, I thought myself unworthy to be esteemed even the meanest of his sons, unless I bore some resemblance of him. But, as it happens with degenerate offspring, not only to recede from the virtues, but to dwindle from the bulk of their ancestor; so I have copied Spenser in miniature, and reduced his twelve months into four seasons." When Pope published his Pastorals he stated that three of them were imitated from Virgil and Theocritus, which occasioned his cancelling this passage where he speaks as if he had taken Spenser alone for his model.]

SPRING:

THE FIRST PASTORAL,

OR

DAMON.

TO SIR WILLIAM TRUMBULL.[1]

First in these fields I try the sylvan strains,[2] Nor blush to sport on Windsor's blissful plains:[3] Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring,[4] While on thy banks Sicilian[5] muses sing; Let vernal airs through trembling osiers play,[6] 5 And Albion's cliffs resound the rural lay.[7] You, that too wise for pride, too good for pow'r,[8] Enjoy the glory to be great no more, And carrying with you all the world can boast,[9] To all the world illustriously are lost! 10 O let my muse her slender reed inspire, Till in your native shades[10] you tune the lyre: So when the nightingale to rest removes, The thrush may chant to the forsaken groves,[11] But, charmed to silence, listens while she sings, 15 And all th' aërial audience clap their wings.[12] Soon as the flocks shook off the nightly dews,[13] Two swains, whom love kept wakeful, and the muse, Poured o'er the whit'ning[14] vale their fleecy care, Fresh as the morn, and as the season fair:[15] 20 The dawn now blushing on the mountain's side, Thus Daphnis spoke, and Strephon thus replied.[16]

DAPHNIS.

Hear how the birds, on ev'ry bloomy spray,[17] With joyous music wake the dawning day![18] Why sit we mute, when early linnets sing, 25 When warbling Philomel salutes the spring?[19] Why sit we sad, when Phosphor[20] shines so clear, And lavish nature paints the purple[21] year?[22]

STREPHON.

Sing then, and Damon shall attend the strain, While yon slow oxen turn the furrowed plain. 30 Here the bright crocus and blue vi'let glow,[23] Here western winds on breathing[24] roses blow.[25] I'll stake yon lamb that near the fountain plays, And from the brink his dancing shade surveys.[26]

DAPHNIS.

And I this bowl, where wanton ivy twines,[27] 35 And swelling clusters bend the curling vines:[28] Four figures rising from the work appear,[29] The various seasons of the rolling year;[30] And what is that, which binds the radiant sky, Where twelve fair signs in beauteous order lie?[31] 40

DAMON.

Then sing by turns, by turns the muses sing;[32] Now hawthorns blossom, now the daisies spring, Now leaves the trees, and flow'rs adorn the ground; Begin, the vales shall ev'ry note rebound.[33]

STREPHON.

Inspire me, Phoebus, in my Delia's praise,[34] 45 With Waller's strains, or Granville's moving lays![35] A milk-white bull shall at your altars stand, That threats a fight, and spurns the rising sand.[36]

DAPHNIS.

O Love! for Sylvia let me gain the prize,[37] And make my tongue victorious as her eyes: 50 No lambs or sheep for victims I'll impart, Thy victim, Love, shall be the shepherd's heart.

STREPHON.

Me gentle Delia beckons from the plain, Then hid in shades, eludes her eager swain;[38] But feigns a laugh to see me search around, 55 And by that laugh the willing fair is found.[39]

DAPHNIS.

The sprightly Sylvia trips along the green, She runs, but hopes she does not run unseen,[40] While a kind glance at her pursuer flies,[41] How much at variance are her feet and eyes![42] 60

STREPHON.[43]

O'er golden sand let rich Pactolus flow,[44] And trees weep amber on the banks of Po;[45] Bright Thames's shores the brightest beauties yield, Feed here, my lambs, I'll seek no distant field.

DAPHNIS.

Celestial Venus haunts Idalia's groves; 65 Diana Cynthus, Ceres Hybla loves; If Windsor-shades delight the matchless maid, Cynthus and Hybla yield to Windsor-shade.[46]

STREPHON.

All nature mourns, the skies relent in show'rs,[47] Hushed are the birds, and closed the drooping flow'rs; 70 If Delia smile, the flow'rs begin to spring, The skies to brighten, and the birds to sing.[48]

DAPHNIS.

All nature laughs,[49] the groves are fresh and fair, The sun's mild lustre warms the vital air; If Sylvia smiles, new glories gild the shore, 75 And vanquished nature seems to charm no more.[50]

STREPHON.

In spring the fields, in autumn hills I love, At morn the plains, at noon the shady grove, But Delia always; absent from her sight, Nor plains at morn, nor groves at noon delight. 80

DAPHNIS.

Sylvia's like autumn ripe, yet mild as May, More bright than noon, yet fresh as early day;[51] Ev'n spring displeases, when she shines not here; But blest with her, 'tis spring throughout the year.

STREPHON.

Say, Daphnis, say, in what glad soil appears, 85 A wondrous tree that sacred monarchs bears;[52] Tell me but this, and I'll[53] disclaim the prize, And give the conquest to thy Sylvia's eyes.

DAPHNIS.

Nay tell me first, in what more happy fields[54] The thistle springs, to which the lily yields:[55] 90 And then a nobler prize I will resign; For Sylvia, charming Sylvia shall be thine.

DAMON.

Cease to contend; for, Daphnis, I decree The bowl to Strephon, and the lamb to thee.[56] Blest swains, whose nymphs in ev'ry grace excel; 95 Blest nymphs, whose swains those graces sing so well! Now rise, and haste to yonder woodbine bow'rs, A soft retreat from sudden vernal show'rs; The turf with rural dainties shall be crowned,[57] While op'ning blooms diffuse their sweets around. 100 For see! the gath'ring flocks to shelter tend, And from the Pleiads[58] fruitful show'rs descend.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Our author's friendship with this gentleman commenced at very unequal years; he was under sixteen, but Sir William above sixty, and had lately resigned his employment of secretary of state to King William.--POPE.

This amiable old man, who had been a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and doctor of civil law, was sent by Charles II. judge advocate to Tangier, and afterwards in a public character to Florence, to Turin, to Paris; and by James II. ambassador to Constantinople; to which city he went through the continent on foot. He was afterwards a lord of the treasury, and secretary of state, with the Duke of Shrewsbury, which office he resigned 1697, and retiring to East Hampstead, died there in December, 1716, aged seventy-seven. Nothing of his writing remains but an elegant character of Archbishop Dolben.--WARTON.

Pope says that Sir William Trumbull had "lately" resigned his office at the period of their acquaintance, but seven years had elapsed after the date of Sir William's retirement, before Pope had reached the age of sixteen.]

[Footnote 2:

Prima Syracusio dignata est ludere versu, Nostra nec erubuit sylvas habitare Thalia.

Ecl. vi. 1.

This is the general exordium and opening of the Pastorals, in imitation of the sixth of Virgil, which some have therefore not improbably thought to have been the first originally. In the beginnings of the other three Pastorals, he imitates expressly those which now stand first of the three chief poets in this kind, Spenser, Virgil, Theocritus.

A shepherd's boy (he seeks no better name)-- Beneath the shade a spreading beech displays,-- Thyrsis, the Music of that murm'ring Spring,--

are manifestly imitations of

"--A shepherd's boy (no better do him call)."

"--Tityre, tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi."

"--[Greek: Hadu ti to psithyrisma kai ha pitys, aitole, têna.]"--POPE.]

[Footnote 3: Pope not only imitated the lines he quotes from Virgil, but, as Wakefield points out, was also indebted to Dryden's translation of them.

I first transferred to Rome Sicilian strains: Nor blushed the Doric muse to dwell on Mantuan plains.

Originally Pope had written,

First in these fields I sing the sylvan strains, Nor blush to sport in Windsor's peaceful plains.

Upon this he says to Walsh, "Objection that the letter is hunted too much--_sing the sylvan_--_peaceful plains_--and that the word _sing_ is used two lines afterwards, _Sicilian muses sing_." He proposed to read "try" in the place of "sing;" "happy" instead of "peaceful," and adds, "Quære. If _try_ be not properer in relation to _first_, as we first attempt a thing; and more modest? and if _happy_ be not more than _peaceful_?" Walsh replies, "_Try_ is better than _sing_. _Happy_ does not sound right, the first syllable being short. Perhaps you may find a better word than _peaceful_ as _flow'ry_." Pope rejected all three epithets, and substituted "blissful."]

[Footnote 4: Evidently imitated from Spenser's Prothalamion:

Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 5: Because Theocritus, the father of Pastoral Poetry, was a Sicilian.--PROFESSOR MARTYN.]

[Footnote 6: Paradise Regained, ii. 27:

Where winds with reeds and osiers whisp'ring play.

Dryden, Theodore and Honoria:

The winds within the quiv'ring branches played.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 7: Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse:

And Albion's rocks repeat his rural song.--WAKEFIELD.

The term "Albion's cliffs," which is usually appropriated to the steeps that bound the sea-shore, is applied by Pope to the hills about Windsor.]

[Footnote 8: The expression in this verse is philosophically just. True wisdom is the knowledge of ourselves, which terminates in a conviction of our absolute insignificancy with respect to God, and our relative inferiority in many instances to the accomplishments of our own species: and power is encompassed with such a multiplicity of dangerous temptations as to be almost incompatible with virtue. A passage in Lucan, viii. 493, is very apposite:

exeat aula Qui vult esse pius. Virtus et summa potestas Non coëunt.

He who would spotless live from courts must go: No union power supreme and virtue know.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 9: Waller, The Maid's Tragedy Altered:

Happy is she that from the world retires, And carries with her what the world admires.--WILKES.]

[Footnote 10: Sir W. Trumbull was born in Windsor-forest, to which he retreated after he had resigned the post of secretary of state of King William III.--POPE.

The address to Trumbull was not in the original manuscript which passed through his hands, and the lines were probably added when the Pastorals were prepared for the press. "Little Pope," wrote Sir William to the Rev. Ralph Bridges on May 2, 1709, "was here two days ago, always full of poetry and services to Mr. Bridges. I saw in the advertisement, after he was gone, the Miscellany is published, or publishing, by Jacob Tonson, wherein are his Pastorals, and which is worse, I am told one of them is inscribed to my worship." A more inappropriate panegyric could not have been devised than to pretend that Trumbull was among poets what the nightingale was among birds. The retired statesman had a true taste for literature, but his efforts as a versifier had been limited to a dozen lines translated from Martial.]

[Footnote 11: Warton observes that the nightingale does not sing till the other birds are at rest. This is a mistake; the nightingale sings by day as well as at night, but the expressions "to rest removes" and "forsaken groves" give an idea of evening, in which case there would be certainly an error in making the thrush "chant" after the nightingale. As to the thrush being "charmed to silence" at any time by the nightingale, and the "aërial audience" applauding, it is allowable as a fanciful allusion, perhaps, though the circumstance is contrary to nature and fact.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 12: Concanen, in a pamphlet called A Supplement to the Profound, objected to the use of an image borrowed from the theatre, and Pope, in vindication of his line, has written "Dryden" in the margin, alluding doubtless to a couplet in Dryden's verses to the Duchess of York:

Each poet of the air her glory sings And round him the pleased audience clap their wings.

Every one must feel the image to be burlesque, and even Dryden's authority cannot recommend it.]

[Footnote 13: The scene of this Pastoral a valley, the time the morning. It stood originally thus,

Daphnis and Strephon to the shades retired, Both warmed by love, and by the muse inspired, Fresh as the morn, and as the season fair, In flow'ry vales they fed their fleecy care; And while Aurora gilds the mountain's side, Thus Daphnis spoke, and Strephon thus replied.--POPE.

There was in the manuscript a still earlier, and perhaps better, version of the first two lines:

Daphnis and Strephon led their flocks along, Both famed for love and both renowned in song.

They were however borrowed from Lycon, an Eclogue, in the fifth part of Tonson's Miscellany:

Strephon and Damon's flocks together fed, Both famed for wit, and famed for beauty both.

Wakefield points out that the opening verse of the couplet, as it stands in the text, was indebted to Congreve's Tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas:

When woolly flocks their bleating cries renew, And from their fleecy sides first shake the silver dew.]

[Footnote 14: The epithet "whitening" most happily describes the progressive effect of the light.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 15: Dryden's Palamon and Arcite:

Fresh as the month, and as the morning fair.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 16: From Virgil, Ecl. vii. 20:

Hos Corydon, illos referebat in ordine Thyrsis.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 17: Milton's first sonnet:

O! nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray Warblest at eve!--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 18: Congreve's Tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas:

When grateful birds prepare their thanks to pay, And warble hymns to hail the dawning day.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 19: Waller's Chloris and Hylas:

Hylas, oh Hylas! why sit we mute Now that each bird saluteth the spring.--WAKEFIELD.

Concanen having commented in the Supplement to the Profound upon the impropriety "of making an English clown call a well-known bird by a classical name," Pope wrote in the margin, "Spenser and Ph." The remainder of the second name has been cut off by the binder. Pope's memory deceived him if A. Philips was meant, for the nightingale is not once called Philomela in his Pastorals.]

[Footnote 20: Phosphor was the Greek name for the planet Venus when she appeared as a morning star.]

[Footnote 21: Purple is here used in the Latin sense of the brightest, most vivid colouring in general, not of that specific tint so called.--WARBURTON.]

[Footnote 22: Dryden in his Cock and Fox:

See, my dear! How lavish nature has adorned the year.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 23: In the manuscript this verse ran

There the pale primrose and the vi'let glow,

which was evidently borrowed from a line in Dryden's Cock and Fox, quoted by Wakefield:

How the pale primrose and the vi'let spring.

The first edition of the Pastorals had

Here on green banks the blushing vi'lets glow,

and this reading was retained till the edition of Warburton. It probably at last occurred to the poet that as people do not blush blue or purple, the epithet "blushing" was inapplicable to the violet.]

[Footnote 24: "Breathing" means breathing odours, and Wakefield quotes Paradise Lost, ii. 244:

his altar breathes Ambrosial odours and ambrosial flowers.]

[Footnote 25: Pope rarely mentions flowers without being guilty of some mistake as to the seasons they blow in. Who ever saw roses, crocuses, and violets in bloom at the same time?--STEEVENS.]

[Footnote 26: The first reading was,

And his own image from the bank surveys.--POPE.

Pope submitted the reading in the note, and that in the text to Walsh, and asked which was the best. Walsh preferred the text.]

[Footnote 27:

Lenta quibus torno facili superaddita vitis, Diffusos edera vestit pallente corymbos. Virg.--POPE.]

[Footnote 28: Variation:

And clusters lurk beneath the curling vines.--POPE.

Dryden's Virgil, Eclogues:

The grapes in clusters lurk beneath the vines.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 29: Dryden, Æn. viii. 830:

And Roman triumphs rising on the gold.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 30: The subject of these Pastorals engraven on the bowl is not without its propriety. The Shepherd's hesitation at the name of the zodiac imitates that in Virgil, Ecl. iii. 40:

et quis fuit alter, Descripsit radio totum qui gentibus orbem?--POPE.

Creech's translation of Eclogue iii.:

And showed the various seasons of the year.

Pope also drew upon Dryden's version of the passage:

Two figures on the sides embossed appear, Conon, and what's his name who made the sphere, And showed the seasons of the sliding year?

Virgil's commentators cannot agree upon the name which the shepherd had forgotten, but they unite in commending the stroke of nature which represents a rustic poet as unable to recall the name of a man of science.]

[Footnote 31: Dryden, Georg. i. 328.

And cross their limits cut a sloping way, Which the twelve signs in beauteous order sway.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 32: Literally from Virgil, Ecl. iii. 59:

Alternis dicetis: amant alterna Camoenæ, Et nunc omnis ager, nunc omnis parturit arbos, Nunc frondent sylvæ, nunc formosissimus annus.--POPE.

Creech's translation:

play By turns, for verse the muses love by turns.

The usage was for the second speaker to imitate the idea started by the first, and endeavour to outdo him in his vaunt. All the speeches throughout the contest consisted of the same number of lines. In the third eclogue of Virgil we have two rivals and an umpire. One of the antagonists stakes a carved bowl, the other a cow; and the final effort of each poet is to propound a riddle, upon which the umpire interposes, and declares that the candidates are equal in merit. Pope keeps close to his original.]

[Footnote 33: Dryden, Ecl. x. 11.

And echo, from the vales, the tuneful voice rebound.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 34: In place of this couplet the original manuscript read,

Ye fountain nymphs, propitious to the swain, Now grant me Phoebus', or Alexis' strain.

Pope imitated Virgil, Ecl. vii. 21:

Mihi carmen, Quale meo Codro, concedite: proxima Phoebi Versibus ille facit.]

[Footnote 35: George Granville, afterwards Lord Lansdowne, known for his poems, most of which he composed very young, and proposed Waller as his model.--POPE.]

[Footnote 36: Virgil, Ecl. iii. 86:

Pascite taurum, Qui cornu petat, et pedibus jam spargat arenam.--POPE.

Dryden, Æn. ix. 859:

A snow-white steer before thy altar led: And dares the fight, and spurns the yellow sands.--WAKEFIELD.

The second line of the couplet in the text ran thus in the original manuscript:

With butting horns, and heels that spurn the sand.

This also was from Dryden, Ecl. iii. 135:

With spurning heels, and with a butting head.]

[Footnote 37: Originally thus in the manuscript:

Pan, let my numbers equal Strephon's lays, Of Parian stone thy statue will I raise; But if I conquer and augment my fold, Thy Parian statue shall be changed to gold.--WARBURTON.

This he formed on Dryden's Vir. Ecl. vii. 45:

Thy statue then of Parian stone shall stand; But if the falling lambs increase my fold, Thy marble statue shall be turned to gold.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 38: Pope had at first written,

The lovely Chloris beckons from the plain, Then hides in shades from her deluded swain.

"Objection," he says, in the paper he submitted to Walsh, "that _hides_ without the accusative _herself_ is not good English, and that _from her deluded swain_ is needless. Alteration:

The wanton Chloris beckons from the plain, Then, hid in shades, eludes her eager swain.

Quære. If _wanton_ be more significant than _lovely_; if _eludes_ be properer in this case than _deluded_; if _eager_ be an expressive epithet to the swain who searches for his mistress?"

Walsh. "_Wanton_ applied to a woman is equivocal, and therefore not proper. _Eludes_ is properer than _deluded_. _Eager_ is very well."]

[Footnote 39: He owes this thought to Horace, Ode i. 9, 21.--WAKEFIELD.

Or rather to the version of Dryden, since the lines of Pope have a closer resemblance to the translation than to the original:

The laugh that guides thee to the mark, When the kind nymph would coyness feign, And hides but to be found again.]

[Footnote 40: Imitation of Virgil, Ecl. iii. 64:

Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella, Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri.--POPE.

He probably consulted Creech's translation of the passage in Virgil:

Sly Galatea drives me o'er the green, And apples throws, then hides, yet would be seen.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 41: Dryden's Don Sebastian;

A brisk Arabian girl came tripping by; Passing, she cast at him a sidelong glance, And looked behind, in hopes to be pursued.--STEEVENS.]

[Footnote 42: A very trifling and false conceit.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 43: In place of the next speech of Strephon, and the reply of Daphnis, the dialogue continued thus in the original manuscript:

STREPHON.

Go, flow'ry wreath, and let my Silvia know, Compared to thine how bright her beauties show; Then die; and dying, teach the lovely maid How soon the brightest beauties are decayed.

DAPHNIS.

Go, tuneful bird, that pleased the woods so long, Of Amaryllis learn a sweeter song; To heav'n arising then her notes convey, For heav'n alone is worthy such a lay.

The speech of Strephon is an echo of Waller's well-known song:

Go, lovely rose, Tell her that wastes her time and me, That now she knows When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Then die, that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee; How small a part of time they share, That are so wondrous sweet and fair.

The speech of Daphnis is from Dryden's Virgil, Ecl. iii. 113:

Winds, on your wings to heav'n her accents bear, Such words as heav'n alone is fit to hear.]

[Footnote 44: It stood thus at first:

Let rich Iberia golden fleeces boast, Her purple wool the proud Assyrian coast, Blest Thames's shores, &c.--POPE.]

[Footnote 45: It is evident from the mention of the "golden sands" of Pactolus, and the "amber" of the poplars in connection with the Thames, that he had in view Denham's description in Cooper's Hill:

Though with those streams he no resemblance hold, Whose foam is amber, and their gravel gold.--WAKEFIELD.

The sisters of Phæton, according to the classical fable, were, upon the death of their brother, turned into poplars on the banks of the Po, and the tears which dropt from these trees were said to be converted into amber.]

[Footnote 46: This couplet is a palpable imitation of Virgil, Ecl. vii. 67:

Sæpius at si me, Lycida formose, revisas, Fraxinus in silvis cedet tibi, pinus in hortis.--WAKEFIELD.

The entire speech is a parody of the lines quoted by Wakefield, and of the lines which immediately precede them in Virgil's Eclogue. The passage omitted by Wakefield is thus translated in vol. i. of Tonson's Miscellany:

Bacchus the vine, the laurel Phoebus loves; Fair Venus cherishes the myrtle groves; Phyllis the hazel loves, while Phyllis loves that tree, Myrtles and laurels of less fame shall be.]

[Footnote 47: Virg. Ecl. vii. 57:

Aret ager, vitio moriens sitit aëris herba [&c.] Phyllidis adventu nostræ nemus omne virebit.--POPE.]

[Footnote 48: These verses were thus at first:

All nature mourns, the birds their songs deny, Nor wasted brooks the thirsty flow'rs supply; If Delia smile, the flow'rs begin to spring, The brooks to murmur, and the birds to sing.--POPE.

Wakefield remarks that the last couplet of the original version, which is but slightly modified in the text, was closely imitated from Addison's Epilogue to the British Enchanters:

The desert smiles, the woods begin to grow, The birds to warble, and the springs to flow.]

[Footnote 49: Dryden, Ecl. vii. 76:

And lavish nature laughs.]

[Footnote 50: Pope had at first written,

If Sylvia smiles she brightens all the shore, The sun's outshined, and nature charms no more.

This he submitted to Walsh. Pope. "Quære, whether to say the sun is outshined be too bold and hyperbolical?" Walsh. "For pastoral it is." Pope. "If it should be softened with _seems_? Do you approve any of these alterations?

If Sylvia smile, she brightens all the shore, { All nature seems outshined, and charms no more. { Light seems outshined, and nature charms no more. { And vanquished nature seems to shine no more.

Quære, which of these three?" Walsh. "The last of these three I like best."]

[Footnote 51: Cowley, Davideis, iii. 553:

Hot as ripe noon, sweet as the blooming day, Like July furious, but more fair than May.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 52: An allusion to the royal oak, in which Charles II. had been hid from the pursuit after the battle of Worcester.--POPE.

This wretched pun on the word "bears" is called "dextrous" by Wakefield, but Warton says that it is "one of the most trifling and puerile conceits" in all Pope's works, and is only exceeded in badness by the riddle "which follows of the thistle and the lily."]

[Footnote 53: The contraction "I'll," which often occurs in these pastorals, is familiar and undignified.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 54: It was thus in the manuscript:

Nay, tell me first what region canst thou find In which by thistles lilies are outshined? If all thy skill can make the meaning known, The prize, the victor's prize, shall be thy own.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope submitted the first two lines to Walsh in conjunction with the version in the text. "Quære, which of these couplets is better expressed, and better numbers? and whether it is better here to use _thistle_ or _thistles_, _lily_ or _lilies_, singular or plural? The epithet _more happy_ refers to something going before." Walsh. "The second couplet [the text] is best; and singular, I think better than plural."]

[Footnote 55: Alludes to the device of the Scots' monarchs, the thistle, worn by Queen Anne; and to the arms of France, the _fleur de lys_. The two riddles are in imitation of those in Virg. Ecl. iii. 106:

Dic quibus in terris inscripti nomina regum Nascantur flores, et Phyllida solus habeto.--POPE.

Thus translated by Dryden;

Nay, tell me first in what new region springs A flow'r that bears inscribed the names of kings; And thou shalt gain a present as divine As Phoebus' self, for Phyllis shall be thine.

Either the commentators on Virgil have not hit upon the true solution of his riddles, or they are not at all superior to the parody of Pope.]

[Footnote 56: This is from Virg. Ecl. iii. 109:

Et vitula tu dignus, et hic.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 57: Originally:

The turf with country dainties shall be spread, And trees with twining branches shade your head.--POPE.]

[Footnote 58: The Pleiades rose with the sun in April, and the poet ascribes the April showers to their influence.]

SUMMER:

THE SECOND PASTORAL,

OR

ALEXIS.[1]

TO DR. GARTH.[2]

A shepherd's boy (he seeks no better name)[3] Led forth his flocks[4] along the silver Thame,[5] Where dancing sun-beams on the waters played,[6] And verdant alders formed a quiv'ring[7] shade;[8] Soft as he mourned, the streams forgot to flow,[9] 5 The flocks around a dumb compassion show,[10] The Naïads wept in ev'ry wat'ry bow'r, And Jove consented in a silent show'r.[11] Accept, O GARTH! the muse's early lays, That adds this wreath of ivy to thy bays;[12] 10 Hear what from love unpractised hearts endure, From love, the sole disease thou canst not cure. Ye shady beeches, and ye cooling streams, Defence from Phoebus', not from Cupid's beams,[13] To you I mourn; nor to the deaf I sing,[14] 15 "The woods shall answer, and their echo ring."[15] The hills and rocks attend my doleful lay, Why art thou prouder and more hard than they?[16] The bleating sheep with my complaints agree, They parched with heat, and I inflamed by thee.[17] 20 The sultry Sirius burns the thirsty plains,[18] While in thy heart eternal winter reigns.[19] Where stray ye, muses, in what lawn or grove,[20] While your Alexis pines in hopeless love? In those fair fields where sacred Isis glides, 25 Or else where Cam his winding vales divides?[21] As in the crystal stream I view my face,[22] Fresh rising blushes paint the wat'ry glass; But since those graces please thy eyes no more, I shun the fountains which I sought before. 30 Once I was skilled in ev'ry herb that grew, And ev'ry plant that drinks the morning dew;[23] Ah wretched shepherd, what avails thy art, To cure thy lambs, but not to heal thy heart![24] Let other swains attend the rural care, 35 Feed fairer flocks, or richer fleeces shear:[25] But nigh yon' mountain[26] let me tune my lays, Embrace my love, and bind my brows with bays.[27] That flute is mine which Colin's[28] tuneful breath Inspired when living, and bequeathed in death:[29] 40 He said; Alexis, take this pipe,[30] the same That taught the groves my Rosalinda's name:[31] But now the reeds shall hang on yonder tree,[32] For ever silent, since despised by thee. Oh! were I made by some transforming pow'r 45 The captive bird that sings within thy bow'r![33] Then might my voice thy list'ning ears employ, And I those kisses he receives enjoy. And yet my numbers please the rural throng,[34] Rough satyrs dance, and Pan applauds the song:[35] 50 The nymphs, forsaking ev'ry cave and spring,[36] Their early fruit, and milk-white turtles bring![37] Each am'rous nymph prefers her gifts in vain, On you their gifts are all bestowed again.[38] For you the swains their fairest flow'rs design, 55 And in one garland all their beauties join; Accept the wreath which you deserve alone, In whom all beauties are comprised in one. See what delights in sylvan scenes appear! Descending gods have found Elysium here.[39] 60 In woods bright Venus with Adonis strayed; And chaste Diana haunts the forest-shade. Come, lovely nymph, and bless the silent hours, When swains from shearing seek their nightly bow'rs; When weary reapers quit the sultry field,[40] 65 And crowned with corn their thanks to Ceres yield. This harmless grove no lurking viper hides,[41] But in my breast the serpent love abides.[42] Here bees from blossoms sip the rosy dew, But your Alexis knows no sweets but you. 70 O deign to visit our forsaken seats, The mossy fountains, and the green retreats![43] Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade; Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade; Where'er you tread, the blushing flow'rs shall rise,[44] 75 And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.[45] O! how I long with you to pass my days,[46] Invoke the muses, and resound your praise! Your praise the birds shall chant in ev'ry grove,[47] And winds shall waft it to the pow'rs above.[48] 80 But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain,[49] The wond'ring forests soon should dance[50] again, The moving mountains hear the pow'rful call, And headlong streams hang list'ning in their fall.[51] But see, the shepherds shun the noon-day heat, 85 The lowing herds to murm'ring brooks retreat,[52] To closer shades the panting flocks remove; Ye gods! and is there no relief for love?[53] But soon the sun with milder rays descends To the cool ocean, where his journey ends:[54] 90 On me love's fiercer flames for ever prey,[55] By night he scorches, as he burns by day.[56]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The scene of this Pastoral by the river side, suitable to the heat of the season: the time noon.--POPE.]

[Footnote 2: Dr. Samuel Garth, author of the Dispensary, was one of the first friends of the author, whose acquaintance with him began at fourteen or fifteen. Their friendship continued from the year 1703 to 1718, which was that of his death.--POPE.

He was a man of the sweetest disposition, amiable manners, and universal benevolence. All parties, at a time when party violence was at a great height, joined in praising and loving him. One of the most exquisite pieces of wit ever written by Addison, is a defence of Garth against the Examiner, 1710. It is unfortunate that this second Pastoral, the worst of the four, should be inscribed to the best judge of all Pope's four friends to whom they were addressed.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 3: This was one of the passages submitted to Walsh. "Objection," remarks Pope, "against the parenthesis, _he seeks no better name_. Quære. Would it be anything better to say,

A shepherd's boy, who sung for love, not fame, etc.

Or,

A shepherd's boy, who fed an amorous flame.

Quære, which of all these is the best, or are none of them good." Walsh preferred the parenthesis in the text. "It is Spenser's way," he said, "and I think better than the others."]

[Footnote 4: Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar:

A shepherd boy (no better do him call) Led forth his flock.--BOWLES.

Pope's second Pastoral is an ostensible imitation of Spenser's first eclogue, which is devoted to a lover's complaint, but though Pope has echoed some of the sentiments of Spenser, and appropriated an occasional line, his style has little resemblance to that of his model.]

[Footnote 5: "An inaccurate word," says Warton, "instead of Thames;" and rendered confusing by the fact that there is a real river Thame, which is a tributary of the Thames. Milton has used the same licence, and speaks of the "royal towered Thame" in his lines on the English rivers.]

[Footnote 6: Originally thus in the MS.:

There to the winds Headrigg plained his hapless love, And Amaryllis filled the vocal grove.--WARBURTON.]

[Footnote 7: Dryden's Theodore and Honoria:

The winds within the quiv'ring branches played, And dancing trees a mournful music made.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 8: Ver. 1, 2, 3, 4, were thus printed in the first edition:

A faithful swain, whom Love had taught to sing, Bewailed his fate beside a silver spring; Where gentle Thames his winding waters leads Through verdant forests, and through flow'ry meads.--POPE.]

[Footnote 9: Dryden's Virg. Ecl. viii. 3:

To which the savage lynxes list'ning stood; The rivers stood on heaps, and stopped the running flood.

Milton, Comus, 494:

Thyrsis, whose artful strains have oft delayed The puddling brook to hear his madrigal.--WAKEFIELD.

Garth, in his Dispensary, canto iv., says that, when Prior sings,

The banks of Rhine a pleased attention show, And silver Sequana forgets to flow.]

[Footnote 10: Milton, Comus:

That dumb things shall be moved to sympathise.--STEEVENS.

In the tears of Amaryllis for Amyntas, Congreve says of the tigers and wolves, that

They dumb distress and new compassion show.]

[Footnote 11: Virg. Ecl. vii. 60:

Jupiter et læto descendet plurimus imbri.--POPE.

In the original manuscript the couplet was slightly different:

Relenting Naïads wept in ev'ry bow'r, And Jove consented in a silent show'r.

Pope. "Objection, that the Naïads weeping in bowers is not so proper, being water nymphs, and that the word _consented_ is doubted by some to whom I have shown these verses. Alteration:

The Naïads wept in ev'ry wat'ry bow'r, And Jove relented in a silent show'r.

Quære. Which of these do you like best?" Walsh. "The first. Upon second thoughts I think the second is best." Pope ended by adopting the first line of the second version, and the second line of the first.]

[Footnote 12: This is taken from Virg. Ecl. viii. 12.--WAKEFIELD.

Dryden's translation, ver. 17:

Amidst thy laurels let this ivy twine, Thine was my earliest muse.

Ivy, with the Romans, was the emblem of literary success, and the laurel crown was worn by a victorious general at a triumph. As Pollio, to whom Virgil addressed his eighth eclogue, was both a conqueror and a poet, the double garland allotted to him was appropriate, but there was no fitness in the application of the passage to Garth.]

[Footnote 13: A harsh line, and a false and affected thought.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 14: Virg. Ecl. x. 8.

Non canimus surdis: respondent omnia sylvæ.--POPE.

Ogilby's translation of the verse in Virgil:

Nor to the deaf do we our numbers sing, Since woods, in answ'ring us, with echoes ring.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 15: A line out of Spenser's Epithalamion.--POPE.]

[Footnote 16: A line unworthy our author, containing a false and trivial thought; as is also the 22nd line.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 17: Pope says his merit in these Pastorals is his copying from the ancients. Can anything like this, and other conceits, be found in the natural and unaffected language of Virgil? No such thing. But what do we find in Dryden's imitation of Virgil, Ecl. ii. 13:

The creaking locusts with my voice conspire, They fried with heat, and I with fierce desire.

This is Virgil's:

Sole sub ardenti resonant arbusta cicadis.

And Pope had the imitation in his eye, not the original.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 18: So Virgil says of Sirius, or the dog-star, Geor. ii. 353:

hiulca siti findit Canis æstifer arva.

"Gassendi has well remarked," says Arnauld in his Logic, "that nothing could be less probable than the notion that the dog-star is the cause of the extraordinary heat which prevails in what are called the dog days, because as Sirius is on the other side of the equator, the effects of the star should be greatest at the places where it is most perpendicular, whereas the dog days here are the winter season there. Whence the inhabitants of those countries have much more reason to believe that the dog-star brings cold than we have to believe that it causes heat."]

[Footnote 19: The Shepherd's Calendar of Spenser:

Such rage as winter's reigneth in my heart.]

[Footnote 20: Virg. Ecl. x. 9, out of Theocritus:

Quæ nemora, aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellæ Naïades, indigno cum Gallus amore periret? Nam neque Parnassi vobis juga, nam neque Pindi, Ulla moram fecere, neque Aoniæ Aganippe.--POPE.

Ogilby's translation:

Say, Naïades, where were you, in what grove, Or lawn, when Gallus fell by ill-matched love.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 21: Addison's Campaign:

Or where the Seine her flow'ry fields divides, Or where the Loire through winding vineyards glides.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope wrote at random. The Cam does not divide vales, but runs, or rather creeps, through one of the flattest districts in England.]

[Footnote 22:

Oft in the crystal spring I cast a view, And equalled Hylas, if the glass be true; But since those graces meet my eyes no more, shun, etc.

Virgil again (Ecl. ii. 25), from the Cyclops of Theocritus:

nuper me in littore vidi, Cum placidum ventis staret mare; non ego Daphnim, Judice te, metuam, si nunquam fallit imago.--POPE.

In his first version, which is closer to Virgil than the second, Pope had in his mind Dryden's translation, Ecl. ii. 33:

and if the glass be true, With Daphnis I may vie.]

[Footnote 23: Milton, Penseroso, ver. 172:

And every herb that sips the dew.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 24: This is an obvious imitation of those trite lines in Ovid, Met. i. 522:

herbarum subjecta potentia nobis. Hei mihi, quod nullis amor est medicabilis herbis; Nec prosunt domino, quæ prosunt omnibus, artes.--WAKEFIELD.

Dryden's translation:

What herbs and simples grow In fields and forests, all their pow'rs I know. To cure the pains of love no plant avails, And his own physic the physician fails.

It is remarkable that the imitation in the text of some of the most hacknied lines in classical literature, should be one of four passages quoted by Ruffhead, to prove that all the images in Pope's Pastorals had not been borrowed from preceding poets.]

[Footnote 25: The only faulty rhymes, _care_ and _shear_, perhaps in these poems, where the versification is in general so exact and correct.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 26: The scene is laid upon the banks of the Thames, and "mountain" is a term inapplicable to any of the neighbouring hills. Pope was too intent upon copying Virgil to pay much regard to the characteristics of the English landscape.]

[Footnote 27: It is not easy to conceive a more harsh and clashing line than this. There is the same imagery in Theocritus (Idyll viii. 55), but it is made more striking by the circumstances and picturesque accompaniments, as well as by the extraordinary effect of the lines adapted to the subject.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 28: The name taken by Spenser in his Eclogues, where his mistress is celebrated under that of Rosalinda.--POPE.]

[Footnote 29: Virg. Ecl. ii. 36:

Est mihi disparibus septem compacta cicutis Fistula, Damoetas dono mihi quam dedit olim, Et dixit moriens, Te nunc habet ista secundum.--POPE.

Pope's couplet originally ran thus:

Of slender reeds a tuneful flute I have. The tuneful flute which dying Colin gave.

"Objection," he says to Walsh, "that the first line is too much transposed from the natural order of the words, and that the rhyme is inharmonious." He subjoined the couplet in the text, and asked, "Which of these is best?" to which Walsh replies, "The second."]

[Footnote 30: Dr. Johnson says, "that every intelligent reader sickens at the mention of the crook and the pipe, the sheep and the kids." This appears to be an unjust and harsh condemnation of all pastoral poetry.--WARTON.

Surely Dr. Johnson's decrying the affected introduction of "crook and pipe," &c., into English pastorals, is not a condemnation of all pastoral poetry. Dr. Johnson certainly could not very highly relish this species of poetry, witness his harsh criticisms on Milton's exquisite Lycidas; but we almost forgive his severity on several genuine pieces of poetic excellence, when we consider that he has done a service to truth and nature in speaking with a proper and dignified contempt for such trite puerilities.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 31: Virg. Ecl. i. 5:

Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 32: Imitated from Virg. Ecl. vii. 24:

Hic arguta sacra pendebit fistula pinu.--WAKEFIELD.

Dryden's translation:

The praise of artful numbers I resign, And hang my harp upon the sacred pine.]

[Footnote 33: This thought is formed on one in Theocritus iii. 12, and our poet had before him Dryden's translation of that Idyllium:

Some god transform me by his heav'nly pow'r, E'en to a bee to buzz within your bow'r.--WAKEFIELD.

Warton prefers the image of Theocritus, as more wild, more delicate, and more uncommon. It is natural for a lover to wish that he might be anything that could come near to his lady. But we more naturally desire to be that which she fondles and caresses, than to be that which she avoids, at least would neglect. The superior delicacy of Theocritus I cannot discover, nor can indeed find, that either in the one or the other image there is any want of delicacy.--JOHNSON.

Pope had at first written:

Some pitying god permit me to be made The bird that sings beneath thy myrtle shade.

He submitted this couplet and the emendation in the text to Walsh, and said, "The epithet _captive_ seems necessary to explain the thought, on account of _those kisses_ in the last line [of the paragraph]. Quære. If these be better than the other?" Walsh. "The second are the best, for it is not enough to _permit_ you to be made, but to make you."]

[Footnote 34: Virg. Ecl. ix. 33:

me quoque dicunt Vatem pastores.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 35: Milton's Lycidas, ver. 34:

Rough satyrs danced.

Dryden's Virgil, Ecl. vi. 42:

He raised his voice, and soon a num'rous throng Of tripping satyrs crowded to the song.

Pan was the god of shepherds, the inventor of the pastoral pipe of reeds, and himself a skilful musician. "The ancient images," says Archbishop Whately, "represent him as partly in the human form, and partly in that of a goat, with horns and cloven hoofs. And hence it is that, by a kind of tradition, we often see, even at this day, representations of Satan in this form. For the early christians seem to have thought that it was he whom the pagans adored under the name of Pan."]

[Footnote 36: Spenser's Elegy on the death of Sir P. Sidney:

Come forth, ye nymphs, forsake your wat'ry bowers, Forsake your mossy caves.]

[Footnote 37: Spenser's Astrophel:

And many a nymph both of the wood and brook, Soon as his oaten pipe began to shrill, Both chrystal wells, and shady groves forsook To hear the charms of his enchanting skill; And brought him presents, flow'rs if it were prime, Or mellow fruit if it were harvest time.]

[Footnote 38: From the Shepherd's Calendar of Spenser:

His clownish gifts and courtsies I disdain, His kids, his cracknels, and his early fruit; Ah, foolish Hobbinol, thy gifts been vain, Colin them gives to Hobbinol again.]

[Footnote 39: Virg. Ecl. ii. 60:

habitarunt dii quoque sylvas.

Ecl. x. 18:

Et formosus oves ad flumina pavit Adonis.--POPE.

Dryden's translation of the first line is

The gods to live in woods have left the skies.

The second line he expanded into a couplet:

Along the streams, his flock Adonis led, And yet the queen of beauty blest his bed.

This last verse has nothing answering to it in Virgil, but it suggested ver. 63 of the pastoral to Pope, who copied Dryden, and not the original.]

[Footnote 40: This is formed from Virg. Ecl. ii. 10:

rapido fessis messoribus æstu. The reapers tired with sultry heats.--Ogilby.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 41: He had in his mind Virg. Ecl. iii. 93:

Frigidus, O pueri, fugite hinc! latet anguis in herba.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 42: I think these two lines would not have passed without animadversion in any of our great schools.--WARTON.

Another couplet followed in the manuscript:

Here Tereus mourns, and Itys tells his pain, Of Progne they, and I of you complain.

The horrible mythological story of Progne killing her son Itys, and serving up his flesh to her husband Tereus out of revenge for his violence to her sister Philomela, had no connection with the plaintive sighs of a love-sick swain for an absent mistress. The inappropriateness of the allusion was no doubt the reason why Pope omitted the couplet.]

[Footnote 43: Virg. Ecl. vii. 45:

Muscosi fontes--mossy fountains.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 44: This thought occurs in several authors. Persius, Sat. ii. 39,

Quicquid calcaverit hic, rosa fiat.

Butler finely ridicules this trite fancy of the poets:

Where'er you tread your foot shall set The primrose and the violet.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 45: The six lines from ver. 71 to ver. 76 stood thus in the original manuscript:

Oh, deign to grace our happy rural seats, Our mossy fountains, and our green retreats; While you your presence to the groves deny, Our flowers are faded, and our brooks are dry; Though with'ring herbs lay dying on the plain, At your return they shall be green again.

The two last couplets were copied from Dryden's Virg. Ecl. vii. 77:

But if Alexis from our mountains fly, Ev'n running rivers leave their channels dry.

And ver. 81:

But, if returning Phyllis bless the plain, The grass revives, the woods are green again.

In Pope's next version, the four lines "While you, &c.," ran as follows:

Winds, where you walk, shall gently fan the glade,

Or,

Where'er you walk fresh gales shall fan the glade, Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade, Flow'rs where you tread in painted pride shall rise,

Or,

Where'er you tread the purple flow'rs shall rise, And all things flourish where you turn your eyes!

Walsh preferred the second form of the passage to the original draught; and of the variations in the second form he preferred the lines beginning "Where'er you walk," and "Where'er you tread."]

[Footnote 46: He had in view Virg. Ecl. x. 43:

hic ipso tecum consumerer ævo.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 47:

Your praise the tuneful birds to heav'n shall bear, And list'ning wolves grow milder as they hear.

So the verses were originally written. But the author, young as he was, soon found the absurdity which Spenser himself overlooked, of introducing wolves into England.--POPE.

There was no absurdity upon the principle of Pope, that the scene of pastorals was to be laid in the golden age, which could not be supposed to be subsequent to the reign of Edward I. when wolves still existed in this island. They lingered in Scotland in the reign of Charles II., and in Ireland in the reign of Queen Anne.]

[Footnote 48: Virg. Ecl. iii. 73:

Partem aliquam, venti, Divum referatis ad aures.--POPE.]

[Footnote 49: In place of this couplet and the next, the original MS. had these lines:

Such magic music dwells within your name, The voice of Orpheus no such pow'r could claim; Had you then lived, when he the forests drew, The trees and Orpheus both had followed you.]

[Footnote 50: This verse is debased by the word _dance_. But he followed Dryden in Ecl. iii. 69:

Where Orpheus on his lyre laments his love, With beasts encompassed, and a dancing grove.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 51: Lucan vi. 473:

de rupe pependit Abscissa fixus torrens; amnisque cucurrit Non qua pronus erat.

Streams have run back at murmurs of her tongue, And torrents from the rock suspended hung. Rowe.--STEEVENS.

"The line _And headlong streams_," says Ruffhead, "surely presents a new image and a bold one too." Bold indeed! Pope has carried the idea into extravagance when he makes the stream not only "listening," but "hang listening in its headlong fall." An idea of this sort will only bear just touching; the mind then does not perceive its violence; if it be brought before the eyes too minutely, it becomes almost ridiculous.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 52: In the MS.:

But see the southing sun displays his beams, See Tityrus leads his herd to silver streams.]

[Footnote 53: Virg. Ecl. ii. 68:

Me tamen urit amor, quis enim modus adsit amori?--POPE.

He had Dryden's translation of the passage in Virgil before him:

Cool breezes now the raging heats remove: Ah, cruel heav'n, that made no cure for love.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 54: The phrase "where his journey ends" is mean and prosaic, nor by any means adequately conveys the sentiment required, which is this,--The sun grows milder by degrees, and is at length extinguished in the ocean, but my flames know neither abatement nor intermission.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 55: Variation:

Me love inflames, nor will his fires allay.--POPE.]

[Footnote 56: This is certainly the poorest of Pope's pastorals, and it has many false thoughts and conceits. But the ingenuous and candid critic will always bear in mind the early age at which they were written, and the false taste of Cowley at that time prevalent.--BOWLES.]

AUTUMN:

THE THIRD PASTORAL,[1]

OR

HYLAS AND ÆGON.

TO MR. WYCHERLEY.[2]

Beneath the shade a spreading beech displays,[3] Hylas and Ægon sung their rural lays; This mourned a faithless, that an absent love,[4] And Delia's name and Doris' filled the grove.[5] Ye Mantuan nymphs, your sacred succour bring; 5 Hylas and Ægon's rural lays I sing. Thou,[6] whom the nine, with Plautus' wit inspire, The art of Terence, and Menander's fire; Whose sense instructs us,[7] and whose humour charms, Whose judgment sways us, and whose spirit[8] warms! 10 Oh, skilled in nature![9] see the hearts of swains, Their artless passions, and their tender pains.[10] Now setting Phoebus shone serenely bright, And fleecy clouds were streaked with purple light; When tuneful Hylas with melodious moan, 15 Taught rocks to weep, and made the mountains groan.[11] Go, gentle gales, and bear my sighs away![12] To Delia's ear the tender notes convey. As some sad turtle[13] his lost love deplores And with deep murmurs fills the sounding shores; 20 Thus, far from Delia, to the winds I mourn, Alike unheard, unpitied, and forlorn. Go, gentle gales, and bear my sighs along! For her, the feathered quires neglect their song: For her, the limes their pleasing shades deny; 25 For her, the lilies hang their heads and die. Ye flow'rs that droop, forsaken by the spring, Ye birds that, left by summer, cease to sing, Ye trees that fade when autumn-heats remove, Say, is not absence death to those who love?[14] 30 Go, gentle gales, and bear my sighs away! Cursed be the fields that cause my Delia's stay; Fade ev'ry blossom, wither ev'ry tree,[15] Die ev'ry flower, and perish all but she. What have I said? where'er my Delia flies, 35 Let spring attend, and sudden flow'rs arise; Let op'ning roses knotted oaks adorn,[16] And liquid amber drop from ev'ry thorn. Go, gentle gales, and bear my sighs along! The birds shall cease to tune their ev'ning song, 40 The winds to breathe, the waving woods to move, And streams to murmur, ere I cease to love.[17] Not bubbling fountains to the thirsty swain,[18] Not balmy sleep to lab'rers faint with pain,[19] Not show'rs to larks, or sunshine to the bee, 45 Are half so charming as thy sight to me.[20] Go, gentle gales, and bear my sighs away! Come, Delia, come; ah, why this long delay? Through rocks and caves the name of Delia sounds, Delia, each cave and echoing rock rebounds. 50 Ye pow'rs, what pleasing frenzy soothes my mind! Do lovers dream, or is my Delia kind?[21] She comes, my Delia comes!--Now cease my lay,[22] And cease, ye gales, to bear my sighs away! Next Ægon sung, while Windsor groves admired; 55 Rehearse, ye muses, what yourselves inspired. Resound, ye hills, resound my mournful strain! Of perjured Doris, dying I complain:[23] Here, where the mountains, less'ning as they rise, Lose the low vales, and steal into the skies: 60 While lab'ring oxen, spent with toil and heat, In their loose traces from the field retreat:[24] While curling smokes from village tops are seen, And the fleet shades glide o'er the dusky green.[25] Resound, ye hills, resound my mournful lay! 65 Beneath yon poplar oft we passed the day: Oft on the rind I carved her am'rous vows,[26] While she with garlands hung the bending boughs: The garlands fade, the vows are worn away; So dies her love, and so my hopes decay. 70 Resound, ye hills, resound my mournful strain! Now bright Arcturus[27] glads the teeming grain, Now golden fruits on loaded branches shine, And grateful clusters swell with floods of wine;[28] Now blushing berries paint the yellow grove; 75 Just Gods! shall all things yield returns but love? Resound, ye hills, resound my mournful lay! The shepherds cry, "Thy flocks are left a prey"-- Ah! what avails it me, the flocks to keep, Who lost my heart while I preserved my sheep? 80 Pan came, and asked, what magic caused my smart,[29] Or what ill eyes[30] malignant glances dart?[31] What eyes but hers, alas, have pow'r to move![32] And is there magic but what dwells in love! Resound, ye hills, resound my mournful strains; 85 I'll fly from shepherds, flocks, and flow'ry plains, From shepherds, flocks, and plains, I may remove, Forsake mankind, and all the world--but love! I know thee, Love! on foreign mountains bred,[33] Wolves gave thee suck, and savage tigers fed.[34] 90 Thou wert from Ætna's burning entrails torn, Got by fierce whirlwinds, and in thunder born![35] Resound, ye hills, resound my mournful lay! Farewell, ye woods, adieu the light of day! One leap from yonder cliff shall end my pains,[36] 95 No more, ye hills, no more resound my strains! Thus sung the shepherds till th' approach of night, The skies yet blushing with departing light,[37] When falling dews with spangles decked the glade, And the low sun had lengthened ev'ry shade.[38] 100

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This Pastoral consists of two parts, like the eighth of Virgil: the scene, a hill; the time, at sunset.--POPE.]

[Footnote 2: Mr. Wycherley, a famous author of comedies; of which the most celebrated were the Plain-Dealer and Country-Wife. He was a writer of infinite spirit, satire, and wit. The only objection made to him was, that he had too much. However, he was followed in the same way by Mr. Congreve, though with a little more correctness.--POPE.]

[Footnote 3: Formed on Dryden's version of Ecl. i. 1:

Beneath the shade which beechen boughs diffuse.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 4: Before the edition of 1736 the couplet ran thus:

To whose complaints the list'ning forests bend, While one his mistress mourns, and one his friend.

In keeping with this announcement the song of Hylas, which forms the first portion of the Pastoral, was devoted to mourning an absent _shepherd_, and not, as at present, an absent _shepherdess_. When Pope made his lines commemorative of love, instead of friendship, he did little more than change the name of the man (Thyrsis) to that of a woman (Delia), and substitute the feminine for the masculine pronoun. The extravagant idea expressed in the first line of the rejected couplet is found in Oldham's translation of Moschus:

And trees leaned their attentive branches down.

There is nothing of the kind in the Greek text.]

[Footnote 5: From Dryden's version of Ecl. i. 5:

While stretched at ease you sing your happy loves, And Amaryllis fills the shady groves.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 6: Wycherley.]

[Footnote 7: He was always very careful in his encomiums not to fall into ridicule, the trap which weak and prostitute flatterers rarely escape. For "sense," he would willingly have said "moral;" propriety required it. But this dramatic poet's moral was remarkably faulty. His plays are all shamefully profligate, both in the dialogue and action.--WARBURTON.

Warburton's note has more the appearance of an insidious attack upon Pope than of serious commendation; for if, as Warburton assumes, the panegyric in the text has reference to the plays and not to the man, it was a misplaced "encomium" to say that Wycherley "instructed" the world by the "sense," and "swayed" them by the "judgment," which were manifested "in a shamefully profligate dialogue and action."]

[Footnote 8: The reading was "rapture" in all editions till that of 1736.]

[Footnote 9: Few writers have less nature in them than Wycherley.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 10: Till the edition of 1736 the following lines stood in place of the couplet in the text:

Attend the muse, though low her numbers be, She sings of friendship, and she sings to thee.]

[Footnote 11: Pope had Waller's Thyrsis and Galatea in his memory:

Made the wide country echo to your moan, The list'ning trees, and savage mountains groan.--WAKEFIELD.

The groans of the trees and mountains are, in Waller's poem, the echo of the mourner's lamentations, but to this Pope has added that the "moan" made "the rocks weep," which has no resemblance to anything in nature.]

[Footnote 12: The lines from verse 17 to 30 are very beautiful, tender, and melodious.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 13: It was a time-honoured fancy that the "moan" of the turtle-dove was a lament for the loss of its mate. _Turtur_, the Latin name for the bird, is a correct representation of its monotonous note. The poets commonly call it simply the turtle, but since the term, to quote the explanation of Johnson in his Dictionary, is also "used by sailors and gluttons for a tortoise" the description of its "deep murmurs" as "filling the sounding shores," calls up this secondary sense, and gives an air of ludicrousness to the passage.]

[Footnote 14: This whole passage is imitated from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, Book iii. p. 712, 8vo ed.:

Earth, brook, flow'rs, pipe, lamb, dove, Say all, and I with them, Absence is death, or worse, to them that love.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 15: Congreve's Mourning Muse of Alexis:

Fade all ye flow'rs, and wither all ye woods.]

[Footnote 16: Virg. Ecl. viii. 52:

aurea duræ Mala ferant quercus, narcisso floreat alnus; Pinguia corticibus sudent electra myricæ.--POPE.

His obligations are also due to Dryden's version of Ecl. iv. 21:

Unlaboured harvests shall the fields adorn, And clustered grapes shall blush on ev'ry thorn: And knotted oaks shall show'rs of honey weep, And through the matted grass the liquid gold shall creep.

Bowles, in his translation of Theocritus, Idyll. v., assisted our bard:

On brambles now let violets be born, And op'ning roses blush on ev'ry thorn.

He seems to have had in view also the third Eclogue of Walsh:

Upon hard oaks let blushing peaches grow, And from the brambles liquid amber flow.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 17: These four lines followed in the MS.:

With him through Libyia's burning plains I'll go, On Alpine mountains tread th' eternal snow; Yet feel no heat but what our loves impart, And dread no coldness but in Thyrsis' heart.--WARBURTON.

Wakefield remarks that the second line in this passage is taken from Dryden's Virg. Ecl. x. 71:

And climb the frozen Alps, and tread th' eternal snow.]

[Footnote 18: Virg. Ecl. v. 46:

Quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per æstum Dulcis aquæ saliente sitim restinguere rivo.--POPE.]

[Footnote 19: "Faint with pain" is both flat and improper. It is fatigue, and not pain that makes them faint.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 20: The turn of the last four lines is evidently borrowed from Drummond of Hawthornden, a charming but neglected poet.

To virgins flow'rs, to sun-burnt earth the rain, To mariners fair winds amid the main, Cool shades to pilgrims, whom hot glances burn, Are not so pleasing as thy blest return.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 21: Virg. Ecl. viii. 108:

an, qui amant, ipsi sibi somnia fingunt?--POPE.

In the first edition, conformably to the original plan of the Pastoral, the passage stood thus:

Do lovers dream, or is my shepherd kind? He comes, my shepherd comes.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 22: From Virg. Ecl. viii. 110:

Parcite, ab urbe venit, jam parcite carmina, Daphnis.

Stafford's translation in Dryden's Miscellany:

Cease, cease, my charms, My Daphnis comes, he comes, he flies into my arms.]

[Footnote 23: Dryden's Virg. Ecl. viii. 26, 29:

While I my Nisa's perjured faith deplore. Yet shall my dying breath to heav'n complain.]

[Footnote 24: This imagery is borrowed from Milton's Comus, ver. 290:

Two such I saw, what time the laboured ox In his loose traces from the furrow came.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 25: Variation:

And the fleet shades fly gliding o'er the green.--POPE.

These two verses are obviously adumbrated from the conclusion of Virgil's first eclogue, and Dryden's version of it:

For see yon sunny hill the shade extends And curling smoke from cottages ascends.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 26: This fancy he derived from Virgil, Ecl. x. 53:

tenerisque meos incidere amores Arboribus. The rind of ev'ry plant her name shall know. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.

Garth's Dispensary, Canto vi:

Their wounded bark records some broken vow, And willow garlands hang on ev'ry bough.]

[Footnote 27: According to the ancients, the weather was stormy for a few days when Arcturus rose with the sun, which took place in September, and Pope apparently means that rain at this crisis was beneficial to the standing corn. The harvest at the beginning of the last century was not so early as it is now.]

[Footnote 28: The scene is in Windsor Forest; so this image is not so exact.--WARBURTON.]

[Footnote 29: This is taken from Virg. Ecl. x. 26, 21:

Pan deus Arcadiæ venit . . . . Omnes, unde amor iste, rogant tibi.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 30: Virg. Ecl. iii. 103:

Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos.--POPE.

Dryden's version of the original:

What magic has bewitched the woolly dams, And what ill eyes beheld the tender lambs.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 31: It should be "darted;" the present tense is used for the sake of the rhyme.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 32: Variation:

What eyes but hers, alas! have pow'r on me; Oh mighty Love! what magic is like thee?--POPE.]

[Footnote 33: Virg. Ecl. viii. 43:

Nunc scio quid sit amor. Duris in cotibus illum, etc.--POPE.

Stafford's version of the original in Dryden's Miscellanies:

I know thee, Love! on mountains thou wast bred.

Pope was not unmindful of Dryden's translation:

I know thee, Love! in deserts thou wert bred, And at the dugs of savage tigers fed.

He had in view also a passage in the Æneid, iv. 366, and Dryden's version of it:

But hewn from hardened entrails of a rock, And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck.

Nor did our author overlook the parallel passage in Ovid's Epistle of Dido to Æneas, and Dryden's translation thereof:

From hardened oak, or from a rock's cold womb, At least thou art from some fierce tigress come; Or on rough seas, from their foundation torn, Got by the winds, and in a tempest born.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 34: Till the edition of Warburton, this couplet was as follows:

I know thee, Love! wild as the raging main, More fell than tigers on the Lybian plain.]

[Footnote 35: Were a man to meet with such a nondescript monster as the following, viz.: "Love out of Mount Ætna by a Whirlwind," he would suppose himself reading the Racing Calendar. Yet this hybrid creature is one of the many zoological monsters to whom the Pastorals introduce us.--DE QUINCY.

Sentiments like these, as they have no ground in nature, are of little value in any poem, but in pastoral they are particularly liable to censure, because it wants that exaltation above common life, which in tragic or heroic writings often reconciles us to bold flights and daring figures.--JOHNSON.]

[Footnote 36: Virg. Ecl. viii. 59:

Præceps aërii specula de montis in undas Deferar.

From yon high cliff I plunge into the main. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.

This passage in Pope is a strong instance of the abnegation of feeling in his Pastorals. The shepherd proclaims at the beginning of his chant that it is his dying speech, and at the end that he has resolved upon immediate suicide. Having announced the tragedy, Pope treats it with total indifference, and quietly adds, "Thus sung the shepherds," &c.]

[Footnote 37: Ver. 98, 100. There is a little inaccuracy here; the first line makes the time after sunset; the second before.--WARBURTON.

Pope had at first written:

Thus sung the swains while day yet strove with night, And heav'n yet languished with departing light.

"Quære," he says to Walsh, "if languish be a proper word?" and Walsh answers, "Not very proper."]

[Footnote 38: Virg. Ecl. ii. 67:

Et sol decedens crescentes duplicat umbras. The shadows lengthen as the sun grows low. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.

"Objection," Pope said to Walsh, "that to mention the sunset after twilight (_day yet strove with night_) is improper. Is the following alteration anything better?

And the brown ev'ning lengthened ev'ry shade."

Walsh. "It is not the evening, but the sun being low that lengthens the shades, otherwise the second passage is the best."]

WINTER:[1]

THE FOURTH PASTORAL,

OR

DAPHNE.

TO THE MEMORY OF MRS. TEMPEST.[2]

LYCIDAS.

Thyrsis, the music of that murm'ring spring Is not so mournful as the strains you sing;[3] Nor rivers winding through the vales below,[4] So sweetly warble, or so smoothly flow.[5] Now sleeping flocks on their soft fleeces lie, 5 The moon, serene in glory, mounts the sky, While silent birds forget their tuneful lays, Oh sing of Daphne's fate, and Daphne's praise![6]

THYRSIS.

Behold the groves that shine with silver frost, Their beauty withered, and their verdure lost! 10 Here shall I try the sweet Alexis' strain, That called the list'ning dryads to the plain?[7] Thames heard the numbers as he flowed along, And bade his willows learn the moving song.[8]

LYCIDAS.

So may kind rains[9] their vital moisture yield, 15 And swell the future harvest of the field. Begin; this charge the dying Daphne gave,[10] And said, "Ye shepherds sing around my grave!" Sing, while beside the shaded tomb I mourn, And with fresh bays her rural shrine adorn.[11] 20

THYRSIS.

Ye gentle muses, leave your crystal spring, Let nymphs and sylvans cypress garlands bring Ye weeping loves, the stream with myrtles hide,[12] And break your bows, as when Adonis died;[13] And with your golden darts, now useless grown, 25 Inscribe a verse on this relenting stone: "Let nature change, let heav'n and earth deplore, "Fair Daphne's dead, and love is now no more!"[14] 'Tis done, and nature's various charms decay,[15] See gloomy clouds obscure the cheerful day! 30 Now hung with pearls the dropping trees appear,[16] Their faded honours scattered on her bier.[17] See, where on earth the flow'ry glories lie, With her they flourished, and with her they die.[18] Ah what avail the beauties nature wore? 35 Fair Daphne's dead, and beauty is no more! For her the flocks refuse their verdant food, The thirsty heifers shun the gliding flood,[19] The silver swans her hapless fate bemoan, In notes more sad than when they sing their own;[20] 40 In hollow caves[21] sweet echo[22] silent lies,[23] Silent, or only to her name replies:[24] Her name with pleasure once she taught the shore, Now Daphne's dead, and pleasure is no more! No grateful dews descend from ev'ning skies, 45 Nor morning odours from the flow'rs arise; No rich perfumes refresh the fruitful field, No fragrant herbs their native incense yield.[25] The balmy zephyrs, silent since her death, Lament the ceasing of a sweeter breath;[26] 50 Th' industrious bees neglect their golden store![27] Fair Daphne's dead, and sweetness is no more![28] No more the mountain larks, while Daphne sings,[29] Shall list'ning in mid-air suspend their wings;[30] No more the birds shall imitate her lays,[31] 55 Or hushed with wonder, hearken from the sprays: No more the streams their murmurs shall forbear, A sweeter music than their own to hear,[32] But tell the reeds, and tell the vocal shore, Fair Daphne's dead, and music is no more! 60 Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze, And told in sighs to all the trembling trees; The trembling trees, in ev'ry plain and wood, Her fate remurmur to the silver flood;[33] The silver flood, so lately calm, appears 65 Swelled[34] with new passion, and o'erflows with tears;[35] The winds, and trees, and floods, her death deplore,[36] Daphne, our grief! our glory now no more! But see! where Daphne wond'ring mounts on high[37] Above the clouds, above the starry sky![38] 70 Eternal beauties grace the shining scene, Fields ever fresh, and groves for ever green! There while you rest in amaranthine bow'rs, Or from those meads select unfading flow'rs, Behold us kindly, who your name implore, 75 Daphne our goddess! and our grief no more!

LYCIDAS.

How all things listen, while thy muse complains![39] Such silence waits on Philomela's strains, In some still ev'ning, when the whisp'ring breeze Pants on the leaves, and dies upon the trees.[40] 80 To thee, bright goddess, oft a lamb shall bleed,[41] If teeming ewes increase my fleecy breed. While plants their shade, or flow'rs their odours give,[42] Thy name, thy honour, and thy praise shall live![43]

THYRSIS.

But see, Orion sheds unwholesome dews:[44] 85 Arise; the pines a noxious shade diffuse; Sharp Boreas blows, and nature feels decay, Time conquers all, and we must time obey,[45] Adieu ye vales, ye mountains, streams, and groves, Adieu ye shepherds' rural lays and loves; 90 Adieu, my flocks;[46] farewell, ye sylvan crew; Daphne, farewell; and all the word adieu![47]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This was the poet's favourite Pastoral.--WARBURTON.

It is professedly an imitation of Theocritus, whom Pope does not resemble, and whose Idylls he could only have read in a translation. The sources from which he really borrowed his materials will be seen in the notes.]

[Footnote 2: This lady was of ancient family in Yorkshire, and particularly admired by the author's friend Mr. Walsh, who having celebrated her in a Pastoral Elegy, desired his friend to do the same, as appears from one of his letters, dated Sept. 9, 1706. "Your last Eclogue being on the same subject with mine on Mrs. Tempest's death, I should take it very kindly in you to give it a little turn, as if it were to the memory of the same lady." Her death having happened on the night of the great storm in 1703, gave a propriety to this Eclogue, which in its general turn alludes to it. The scene of the Pastoral lies in a grove, the time at midnight.--POPE.

I do not find any lines that allude to the great storm of which the poet speaks.--WARTON.

Nor I. On the contrary, all the allusions to the winds are of the gentler kind,--"balmy Zephyrs," "whispering breezes" and so forth. Miss Tempest was the daughter of Henry Tempest, of Newton Grange, York, and grand-daughter of Sir John Tempest, Bart. She died unmarried. When Pope's Pastoral first appeared in Tonson's Miscellany, it was entitled "To the memory of a Fair Young Lady."--CROKER.]

[Footnote 3: This couplet was constructed from Creech's translation of the first Idyll of Theocritus:

And, shepherd, sweeter notes thy pipe do fill Than murm'ring springs that roll from yonder hill.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 4: Suggested by Virg. Ecl. v. 83:

nec quæ Saxosas inter decurrunt flumina valles.

For winding streams that through the valley glide. Dryden.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 5: Milton, Par. Lost, v. 195:

Fountains, and ye that warble, as ye flow, Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.]

[Footnote 6: Variation:

In the warm folds the tender flocks remain, The cattle slumber on the silent plain, While silent birds neglect their tuneful lays, Let us, dear Thyrsis, sing of Daphne's praise.--POPE.

It was originally,

Now in warm folds the tender flock remains.

Pope. "Objection to the word _remains_. I do not know whether these following be better or no, and desire your opinion.

Now while the groves in Cynthia's beams are dressed, And folded flocks in their soft fleeces rest; While sleeping birds, etc.

Or,

While Cynthia tips with silver all the groves, And scarce the winds the topmast branches moves.

or

While the bright moon with silver tips the grove, And not a breeze the quiv'ring branches move."

Walsh. "I think the last the best, but might not even that be mended?"]

[Footnote 7: Garth's Dispensary, Canto iv.:

As tuneful Congreve tries his rural strains, Pan quits the woods, the list'ning fauns the plains.

Dryden's Virgil, Ecl. vi. 100:

And called the mountain ashes to the plain.

Among the poems of Congreve is one entitled "The Mourning Muse of Alexis, a Pastoral lamenting the death of Queen Mary." This was the "sweet Alexis strain" to which Pope referred, and which the Thames "bade his willows learn."]

[Footnote 8: Virg. Ecl. vi. 83:

Audiit Eurotas, jussitque ediscere lauros.--POPE.

Admitting that a river gently flowing may be imagined a sensible being listening to a song, I cannot enter into the conceit of the river's ordering his laurels to learn the song. Here all resemblance to anything real is quite lost. This however is copied literally by Pope.--LORD KAMES.]

[Footnote 9: There is some connection implied between the "kind rains" and the "willows learning the song," but I cannot trace the idea.]

[Footnote 10: Virg. Ecl. v. 41:

mandat fieri sibi talia Daphnis.]

[Footnote 11: Rowe's Ambitious Step-Mother:

And with fresh roses strew thy virgin urn.--STEEVENS.]

[Footnote 12: Ver. 23, 24, 25. Virg. Ecl. v. 40, 42:

inducite fontibus umbras.... Et tumulum facite, et tumulo superaddite carmen.--POPE.

If the idea of "hiding the stream with myrtles" have either beauty or propriety, I am unable to discover them. Our poet unfortunately followed Dryden's turn of the original phrase in Virgil:

With cypress boughs the crystal fountains hide.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 13: This image is taken from Ovid's elegy on the death of Tibullus, Amor. iii. 9. 6:

Ecce! puer Veneris fert eversamque pharetram, Et fractos arcus, et sine luce facem.--WAKEFIELD.

Ovid copied Bion. Idyl. 1. The Greek poet represents the Loves as trampling upon their bows and arrows, and breaking their quivers in the first paroxysm of their grief for Adonis. In place of this natural burst of uncontrollable sorrow, the shepherd, in Pope, invokes the Loves to break their bows at his instigation. When their darts are said in the next line to be henceforth useless, the sense must be that nobody would love any woman again since Mrs. Tempest was dead. Such hyperboles can neither touch the heart nor gratify the understanding. The Pastorals were verse exercises in which every pretence to real emotion was laid aside, for Pope was not even acquainted with the lady of whom he utters these extravagances.]

[Footnote 14: This is imitated from Walsh's Pastoral on the death of Mrs. Tempest in Dryden's Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 323:

Now shepherds! now lament, and now deplore! Delia is dead, and beauty is no more.--WAKEFIELD.

Congreve's Mourning Muse of Alexis:

All nature mourns; the floods and rocks deplore And cry with me, Pastora is no more.]

[Footnote 15: Originally thus in the MS.

'Tis done, and nature's changed since you are gone; Behold the clouds have put their mourning on.--WARBURTON.

This low conceit, which our poet abandoned for the present reading, was borrowed from Oldham's version of the elegy of Moschus:

For thee, dear swain, for thee, his much-loved son, Does Phoebus clouds of mourning black put on.--WAKEFIELD.

When Pope submitted the rejected and the adopted reading to Walsh, the critic replied, "_Clouds put on mourning_ is too conceited for pastoral. The second is better, and _the thick_ or _the dark_ I like better than _sable_." The last verse of the couplet in the text was then

See sable clouds eclipse the cheerful day.]

[Footnote 16: Dryden's pastoral elegy on the death of Amyntas:

'Twas on a joyless and a gloomy morn, Wet was the grass and hung with pearls the thorn.

So in his version of Virgil, Ecl. x. 20:

And hung with humid pearls the lowly shrub appears.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 17: Spenser's Colin Clout:

The fields with faded flow'rs did seem to mourn.]

[Footnote 18: Oldham's translation of Moschus:

Each flower fades and hangs its withered head, And scorns to thrive or live now thou art dead.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 19: Variation:

For her the flocks the dewy herbs disdain, Nor hungry heifers graze the tender plain.--POPE.

Dryden's Virg. Ecl. v. 38:

The thirsty cattle of themselves abstained From water, and their grassy fare disdained.

Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, November, ver. 123, where

The feeble flocks in field refuse their former food,

because Dido is dead.]

[Footnote 20: Oldham's translation of Moschus:

Ye gentle swans.... In doleful notes the heavy loss bewail Such as you sing at your own funeral.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 21: Cowley in his verses on Echo:

Ah! gentle nymph! who lik'st so well In hollow solitary caves to dwell.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 22: This expression of "sweet echo" is taken from Comus.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 23: Oldham's translation of Moschus:

Sad echo too does in deep silence moan, Since thou art mute, since thou art speechless grown.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 24: The couplet was different in the early editions:

Echo no more the rural song rebounds; Her name alone the mournful echo sounds.]

[Footnote 25: In the MS.

Which but for you did all its incense yield.

This, with the reading in the text, was laid before Walsh, who selected the latter.]

[Footnote 26: Oldham's translation of Moschus:

Fair Galatea too laments thy death, Laments the ceasing of thy tuneful breath.

Sedley's Elegy:

Here sportive zephyrs cease their selfish play Despairing now to fetch perfumes away.--WAKEFIELD.

The couplet in the text is the third passage in Pope's Pastorals for which Ruffhead claims the merit of originality. The quotations of Wakefield show that the thought and the language are alike borrowed, and the only novelty is the bull, pointed out by Johnson, of making the _zephyrs_ lament in _silence_.]

[Footnote 27: Oldham's version of Moschus:

The painful bees neglect their wonted toil.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 28: The same:

Alas! what boots it now thy hives to store, When thou, that wast all sweetness, art no more.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 29: In the original draught Pope had again introduced the wolves, and the first four lines of this paragraph stood thus:

No more the wolves, when you your numbers try, Shall cease to follow, and the lambs to fly: No more the birds shall imitate your lays, Or, charmed to silence, listen from the sprays.]

[Footnote 30: The image of the birds listening with their wings suspended in mid-air is striking, and, I trust, new.--RUFFHEAD.

This circumstance of the lark suspending its wings in mid-air is highly beautiful, because there is a _veri similitudo_ in it, which is not the case where a waterfall is made to be suspended by the power of music.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 31: Oldham's translation of Moschus:

The feathered choir that used to throng In list'ning flocks to learn his well-tuned song.

The line in the text was the earliest reading in the manuscript, but did not appear in print till the edition of Warburton. The reading in the previous editions was,

No more the nightingales repeat her lays.

This idea of the nightingale repeating the lays is amplified by Philips in his Fifth Pastoral, who copied it, according to Pope in the Guardian, from Strada. Thence also it must have been borrowed by Pope, and he may have restored the primitive version to get rid of the coincidence.]

[Footnote 32: The _veri similitudo_, which Bowles commends in the description of the lark, is not to be found in the notion of the streams ceasing to murmur that they might listen to the song of Daphne. Milton does a similar violence to fact and imagination in his Comus, ver. 494, and many lesser poets, before and after him, adopted the poor conceit.]

[Footnote 33: Dryden's Æneis, vii. 1041:

Yet his untimely fate th' Angitian woods In sighs remurmured to the Fucine floods.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 34: This is barbarous: he should have written "swoln."--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 35: Ovid, Met. xi. 47:

lacrimis quoque flumina dicunt Increvisse suis.

Oldham's translation of Moschus:

The rivers too, as if they would deplore Her death, with grief swell higher than before.

Fenton in his pastoral on the Marquis of Blandford's death:

And, swoln with tears, to floods the riv'lets ride.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 36: Let grief or love have the power to animate the winds, the trees, the floods, provided the figure be dispatched in a single expression, but when this figure is deliberately spread out with great accuracy through many lines, the reader, instead of relishing it, is struck with its ridiculous appearance.--LORD KAMES.

All this is very poor, and unworthy Pope. First the breeze whispers the death of Daphne to the trees; then the trees inform the flood of it; then the flood o'erflows with tears; and then they all deplore together. The whole pastoral would have been much more classical, correct, and pure, if these lines had been omitted. Let us, however, still remember the youth of Pope, and the example of prior poets.--BOWLES.

Moschus in his third Idyll calls upon the nightingales to tell the river Arethusa that Bion is dead. Oldham in his imitation of Moschus exaggerated his original and commanded the nightingales to tell the news "to _all_ the British floods,"--to see that it was "conveyed to Isis, Cam, Thames, Humber, and utmost Tweed," and these in turn were to be ordered "to waft the bitter tidings on." Pope went further than Oldham, and describes one class of inanimate objects as conveying the intelligence to another class of inanimate objects till the whole uttered lamentations in chorus. Each succeeding copyist endeavoured to eclipse his predecessor by going beyond him in absurdity. Most of the ideas adopted by Pope in his Winter had been employed by scores of elegiac bards. "The numerous pastorals upon the death of princes or friends," says Dr. Trapp, "are cast in the same mould; read one, you read all. Birds, sheep, woods, mountains, rivers, are full of complaints. Everything in short is wondrous miserable."]

[Footnote 37: Virg. Ecl. v. 56:

miratur limen Olympi, Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.--POPE.

Dryden thus renders the passage in Virgil:

Daphnis, the guest of heav'n, with wond'ring eyes Views in the milky way the starry skies.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 38: In Spenser's November, and in Milton's Lycidas, there is the same beautiful change of circumstances.--WARTON.

It was one of the stereotyped common-places of elegiac poems, and was ridiculed in No. 30 of the Guardian. The writer might almost be thought to have had this passage of Pope in his mind, if his satire did not equally apply to a hundred authors besides. A shepherd announces to his fellow-swain that Damon is dead. "This," says the Guardian, "immediately causes the other to make complaints, and call upon the lofty pines and silver streams to join in the lamentation. While he goes on, his friend interrupts him, and tells him that Damon lives, and shows him a track of light in the skies to conform to it. Upon this scheme most of the noble families in Great Britain have been comforted; nor can I meet with any right honourable shepherd that doth not die and live again, after the manner of the aforesaid Damon."]

[Footnote 39: The four opening lines of the speech of Lycidas were as follows in the MS.:

Thy songs, dear Thyrsis, more delight my mind Than the soft whisper of the breathing wind, Or whisp'ring groves, when some expiring breeze Pants on the leaves, and trembles in the trees.

The first couplet of the original reading, and the phrase "trembles in the trees," in the second couplet, were from Dryden's Virg. Ecl. v. 128:

Not the soft whispers of the southern wind, That play through trembling trees, delight me more.]

[Footnote 40: Milton, Il Penseroso:

When the gust hath blown his fill Ending on the rustling leaves.]

[Footnote 41: Virg. Ecl. i. 7:

illius aram Sæpe tener, nostris ab ovilibus, imbuet agnus.--POPE.

He partly follows Dryden's translation of his original:

The tender firstlings of my woolly breed Shall on his holy altar often bleed.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 42: Originally thus in the MS.

While vapours rise, and driving snows descend. Thy honour, name, and praise shall never end.--WARBURTON.]

[Footnote 43: Virg. Ecl. v. 76:

Dum juga montis aper, fluvios dum piscis amabit, Dumque thymo pascentur apes, dum rore cicadæ, Semper honos, nomenque tuum, laudesque manebunt.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 44: Virg. Ecl. x. 75:

solet esse gravis cantantibus umbra; Juniperi gravis umbra.--POPE.

Dryden's version of the passage is,

From juniper unwholesome dews distil.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 45: Virg. Ecl. x. 69:

Omnia vincit amor; et nos cedamus amori.

Vid. etiam Sannazarii Ecl. et Spenser's Calendar.--WARBURTON.

Dryden's verse is:

Love conquers all, and we must yield to love.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 46: There is a passage resembling this in Walsh's third eclogue:

Adieu, ye flocks, no more shall I pursue; Adieu, ye groves; a long, a long adieu.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 47: These four last lines allude to the several subjects of the four Pastorals, and to the several scenes of them particularized before in each--POPE.

They should have been added by the poet in his own person, instead of being put into the mouth of a shepherd who is not presumed to have any knowledge of the previous pieces. The specific character which Pope ascribes to each of his Pastorals is not borne out by the poems themselves. There is as much about "flocks" in the first Pastoral as in the second; and there is as much about "rural lays and loves" in the second Pastoral as in the first. The third Pastoral contains no mention of a "sylvan crew," but a couple of shepherds are absorbed by the same "rural lays and loves" which occupied their predecessors.]

MESSIAH,

A SACRED ECLOGUE:

IN IMITATION OF

VIRGIL'S POLLIO.

ADVERTISEMENT.

In reading several passages of the Prophet Isaiah, which foretell the coming of Christ and the felicities attending it, I could not but observe a remarkable parity between many of the thoughts, and those in the Pollio of Virgil. This will not seem surprising, when we reflect, that the Eclogue was taken from a Sibylline prophecy on the same subject. One may judge that Virgil did not copy it line by line, but selected such ideas as best agreed with the nature of pastoral poetry, and disposed them in that manner which served most to beautify his piece. I have endeavoured the same in this imitation of him, though without admitting anything of my own; since it was written with this particular view, that the reader, by comparing the several thoughts, might see how far the images and descriptions of the prophet are superior to those of the poet. But as I fear I have prejudiced them by my management, I shall subjoin the passages of Isaiah, and those of Virgil, under the same disadvantage of a literal translation.[1]

This is certainly the most animated and sublime of all our author's compositions, and it is manifestly owing to the great original which he copied. Perhaps the dignity, the energy, and the simplicity of the original, are in a few passages weakened and diminished by florid epithets, and useless circumlocutions.--WARTON.

All things considered, the Messiah is as fine and masterly a piece of composition as the English language, in the same style of verse, can boast. I have ventured to point out a passage or two, for they are rare, where the sublimity has been weakened by epithets; and I have done this, because it is a fault, particularly with young writers, so common. In the most truly sublime images of Scripture, the addition of a single word would often destroy their effect. It is therefore right to keep as nearly as possible to the very words. No one understood better than Milton where to be general, and where particular; where to adopt the very expression of Scripture, and where it was allowed to paraphrase.--BOWLES.

The fourth eclogue of Virgil is devoted to celebrating the coming birth, while Pollio is Consul, of a boy whose infancy will usher in the golden age, and whose manhood will witness its fullness. Wars are to cease; the beasts of prey are to change their natures; the untilled earth is to bring forth fruits spontaneously; and peace, ease, and plenty are to reign supreme. The names of the parents of this expected child are not recorded, and the commentators are greatly divided upon the question. The most reasonable conjecture is that the intention was to do homage to the ruling genius at Rome, Augustus, or Cæsar Octavianus, as he was then called, whose wife Scribonia was pregnant at the time. Unhappily for the prognostications of the poet the infant "proved a daughter, and the infamous Julia."[2] Virgil grounds his glowing anticipations upon certain Cumæan or Sibylline verses; for, as Jortin well remarks, he would have deprived his announcement of all authority if he himself had set up for a prophet. He could only hope to accredit his promised marvels by appealing to an oracle that was popularly believed to be inspired. "The Sibylline books," says Prideaux, "were a main engine of state. When they were ordered to be consulted the keepers of them always brought forth such an answer as served their purpose, and in many difficulties the governors helped themselves this way."[3] Virgil was equally diplomatic. He probably had no faith in the wonders he announced. His object was to pay court to Augustus, and to assist in establishing his patron's power.

The resemblance which portions of the Pollio bear to passages in Isaiah is generally admitted. "This," says Pope, "will not seem surprising when we reflect that the Eclogue was taken from a Sibylline prophecy on the same subject." He does not attempt to explain how the Sibyl came by her knowledge, unless he means us to infer that she was divinely illuminated. This theory has been supported by learned men, and would be warranted if the eight books of Sibylline oracles, still extant in Greek verse, were anterior to the Christian era; for since they often go beyond the Old Testament predictions in historic precision, the insight into futurity could not have been gathered exclusively from the Scripture prophets. But the existing oracles, says Jortin, "are without any one exception, mere impostures. They abound with phrases, words, facts, and passages taken from the Septuagint and the New Testament, and are a remarkable specimen of astonishing impudence, and miserable poetry."[4] Still there remains the circumstance of the parallelism between parts of Isaiah and the Eclogue which Virgil based upon the Sibylline verses. It is easy to account for the coincidence. The original Sibylline books were accidentally burnt B. C. 83. A few years later the senate employed agents to glean together from Italy, Greece, Sicily and Africa a body of prophecies to replace the oracles which had perished. The collection was from private as well as public sources, and a vast number of the same or similar predictions were in the hands of individuals at Rome. The Jews were located everywhere; they abounded in Rome itself; they were animated by the expectation that the reign of the Messiah was approaching; their prophetic records were incomparable for poetic beauty, sublimity, and variety; the language of the Septuagint was well understood by lettered pagans, and was even the language of the new Sibylline oracles, which were embodied in Greek verse. When all these things are considered, it would be strange if the persons employed to pick up prophecies had not come across notions, which had either been derived from personal intercourse with Jews, or from their sacred books. Although the entire world had been sunk in stupid apathy, and not a single heathen had been attracted by curiosity to turn his attention to Hebrew literature and beliefs, it was yet inevitable that a crude conception should get abroad of the leading idea which fermented in the mind of the ubiquitous Jew, and nothing was more likely than that it should be put into Sibylline verse when Roman agents were searching far and wide for oracles, and inviting contributions from every quarter.

Pope's Messiah first appeared in the Spectator for May 14, 1712, No. 378, where it is prefaced by these words: "I will make no apology for entertaining the reader with the following poem, which is written by a great genius, a friend of mine, in the country, who is not ashamed to employ his wit in the praise of his Maker." After it was published, Steele wrote on June 1, 1712, to Pope, and said, "I have turned to every verse and chapter, and think you have preserved the sublime heavenly spirit throughout the whole, especially at 'Hark a glad voice,' and 'The lamb with wolves shall graze.' Your poem is better than the Pollio." Upon this Johnson remarks, "That the Messiah excels the Pollio is no great praise, if it be considered from what original the improvements are derived." Bowles and Warton thought that Pope had kept up his verse to the level of Isaiah, and had only here and there weakened the sublimity by epithets. Wordsworth was of another opinion. When he contended that the language of poetry should be a selection from the real language of men "in a state of vivid sensation," and repudiated the ornate conventional phraseology which passed for poetic diction, he pointed to the paraphrases on parts of the Bible in illustration of what he condemned, and to the passages as they exist in our authorised version for a specimen of what he approved. "Pope's Messiah throughout" was in his apprehension an adulteration of the original.[5] His criticism appears well founded. The pure and natural language of the prophet is sometimes exchanged for sickly, affected expressions. "Righteousness" becomes "dewy nectar," "sheep" the "fleecy care," and the call upon Jerusalem to "Arise and shine" is turned into an invocation to "exalt her tow'ry head." Apart from these mawkish phrases, the imitation is framed from first to last upon the mistaken principle that the original would be embellished by amplifications, by a profusion of epithets, and by a gaudier diction. The "fir-tree and box-tree" of Isaiah are called by Pope "the _spiry_ fir, and _shapely_ box." Where the sacred text announces that "instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree, and instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle-tree," Pope tells us that

"To _leafless_ shrubs the _flow'ring_ palms succeed, And _od'rous_ myrtle to the _noisome_ weed."

In his translation of the prediction, that in the kingdom of Christ, "the sucking-child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den," Pope makes the cockatrice a "_crested_ basilisk," and the asp a "_speckled_ snake;" they have both scales of a "_green_ lustre," and a "_forky_ tongue," and with this last the "_smiling_ infant shall _innocently_ play." "The leopard," says Isaiah, "shall lie down with the kid, and the young lion, and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them"; but Pope could not leave this exquisite picture undecorated, and with him "boys in _flow'ry_ bands the tiger lead." How grievously is the force and pathos of the passage impaired by the substitution of "boys" for the "little child"; how completely is the bewitching nature turned into masquerade by the engrafted notion that the beasts are led by "_flow'ry_ bands." The alteration is an example of the justice of De Quincey's observation that "the Arcadia of Pope's age was the spurious Arcadia of the opera theatre."[6] The prophet refers anew to the time when creatures of prey shall cease to be carnivorous, and relates that "the lion shall eat straw like the bullock, and dust shall be the serpent's meat." Pope converts the second clause into the statement that "harmless serpents lick the pilgrim's feet," which alters the meaning, and introduces a conception more noticeable for its grotesqueness than for the enchanting vision it should conjure up of universal peace.[7] Pope says he was induced to subjoin in his notes the passages he had versified by "the fear that he had prejudiced Isaiah and Virgil by his management." The reputation of Isaiah and Virgil was safe, and no one can doubt that his real reason for inviting the comparison was the belief that he had improved upon them. He imagined that he had enriched the text of the prophet, and did not suspect that the majesty and truth of the original were vitiated by his embroidery. Bowles has drawn attention to the finest parts of the poem, and it may be allowed that the piece in general is powerful of its kind. The fault is in the kind itself, which belongs to a lower style than the living strains of Isaiah, and borders too closely upon the meretricious to suit the lofty theme. The Messiah is a prophetic vision of a golden age, and on this account was classed by Pope among his Pastorals.[8]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Pope printed in his notes only those passages of Isaiah which had some resemblance to the ideas of Virgil. To the other portions of the prophet which he put into verse he merely gave references.]

[Footnote 2: Jortin's Remarks on Ecclesiastical History, vol. i, p. 323.]

[Footnote 3: Prideaux's Connection, ed. Wheeler, vol. ii, p. 518.]

[Footnote 4: Jortin's Remarks on Ecclesiastical History, vol. i. p. 318.]

[Footnote 5: Wordsworth's Works, ed. 1836, vol. ii. p. 343.]

[Footnote 6: De Quincey's Works, vol. xv. p. 115.]

[Footnote 7: Such is the difference of taste that Wakefield says of Pope's variation, "This is indeed a glorious improvement on the sublime original. The diction has the true doric simplicity in perfection, and poetic genius never gave birth to a more delicate and pleasing image."]

[Footnote 8: Singer's Spence, p. 236.]

MESSIAH,

A SACRED ECLOGUE:

IN IMITATION OF

VIRGIL'S POLLIO.

Ye Nymphs of Solyma![1] begin the song: To heav'nly themes sublimer strains[2] belong. The mossy fountains, and the sylvan shades, The dreams of Pindus[3] and th' Aonian maids, Delight no more[4]--O Thou my voice inspire Who touched Isaiah's hallowed lips with fire![5] Rapt[6] into future times, the bard begun:[7] A virgin shall conceive, a virgin bear a son![8] From Jesse's[9] root behold a branch arise, Whose sacred flow'r with fragrance fills the skies: 10 Th' ethereal Spirit o'er its leaves shall move, And on its top descends the mystic dove.[10] Ye heav'ns! from high the dewy nectar pour,[11] And in soft silence shed the kindly show'r![12] The sick[13] and weak the healing plant shall aid, 15 From storms a shelter, and from heat a shade. All crimes shall cease, and ancient fraud[14] shall fail; Returning Justice[15] lift aloft her scale; Peace o'er the world her olive wand extend, And white-robed Innocence from heaven descend. 20 Swift fly the years,[16] and rise th' expected morn! Oh spring to light, auspicious babe, be born![17] See Nature hastes her earliest wreaths to bring,[18] With all the incense of the breathing spring:[19] See lofty Lebanon[20] his head advance; 25 See nodding forests on the mountains dance:[21] See spicy clouds from lowly Saron rise, And Carmel's flow'ry top perfumes the skies! Hark! a glad voice the lonely desert cheers; Prepare the way![22] a God, a God appears: 30 A God, a God![23] the vocal hills reply, The rocks proclaim th' approaching deity. Lo, earth receives him from the bending skies! Sink down, ye mountains, and, ye valleys, rise; With heads declined, ye cedars, homage pay;[24] 35 Be smooth, ye rocks;[25] ye rapid floods, give way! The Saviour comes! by ancient bards foretold! Hear him, ye deaf, and all ye blind, behold![26] He from thick films shall purge the visual ray,[27] And on the sightless eye-ball pour the day: 40 'Tis he th' obstructed paths of sound shall clear,[28] And bid new music charm th' unfolding ear: The dumb shall sing, the lame his crutch forego, And leap exulting like the bounding roe.[29] No sigh, no murmur the wide world shall hear,[30] 45 From ev'ry face he wipes off ev'ry tear,[31] In adamantine[32] chains shall Death be bound, And hell's grim tyrant feel th' eternal wound. As the good shepherd tends his fleecy care, Seeks freshest pasture and the purest air, 50 Explores the lost, the wand'ring sheep directs, By day o'ersees them, and by night protects, The tender lambs he[33] raises in his arms,[34] Feeds from his hand, and in his bosom warms;[35] Thus shall mankind his guardian care engage, 55 The promised Father[36] of the future age. No more shall nation[37] against nation rise, Nor ardent warriors meet with hateful eyes, Nor fields with gleaming steel be covered o'er,[38] The brazen trumpets kindle rage no more;[39] 60 But useless lances into scythes shall bend, And the broad faulchion in a plow-share end. Then palaces shall rise; the joyful son[40] Shall finish what his short-lived sire begun;[41] Their vines a shadow to their race shall yield,[42] 65 And the same hand that sowed, shall reap the field. The swain in barren deserts[43] with surprise Sees lilies spring, and sudden verdure rise;[44] And starts, amidst the thirsty wilds, to hear New fells of water murm'ring in his ear.[45] 70 On rifted rocks, the dragon's late abodes, The green reed trembles, and the bulrush nods. Waste sandy valleys,[46] once perplexed with thorn, The spiry fir and shapely box adorn; To leafless shrubs the flow'ring palms succeed, 75 And od'rous myrtle to the noisome weed. The lambs with wolves shall graze the verdant mead,[47] And boys in flow'ry bands the tiger lead;[48] The steer and lion at one crib shall meet,[49] And harmless serpents lick the pilgrim's feet.[50] 80 The smiling infant in his hand shall take The crested basilisk and speckled snake, Pleased, the green lustre of the scales survey, And with their forky tongue shall innocently play.[51] Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem,[52] rise![53] 85 Exalt thy tow'ry head,[54] and lift thy eyes![55] See, a long race[56] thy spacious courts adorn; See future sons, and daughters yet unborn, In crowding ranks on ev'ry side arise, Demanding life, impatient for the skies! 90 See barb'rous nations[57] at thy gates attend, Walk in thy light, and in thy temple bend; See thy bright altars thronged with prostrate kings, And heaped with products of Sabæan[58] springs![59] For thee Idume's spicy forests blow, 95 And seeds of gold in Ophir's mountains glow. See heav'n its sparkling portals wide display, And break upon thee in a flood of day.[60] No more the rising sun[61] shall gild the morn, Nor ev'ning Cynthia[62] fill her silver horn; 100 But lost, dissolved in thy superior rays, One tide of glory,[63] one unclouded blaze O'erflow thy courts: the Light himself shall shine Revealed, and God's eternal day be thine![64] The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay,[65] 105 Rocks fall to dust, and mountains melt away; But fixed his word, his saving power remains: Thy realm for ever lasts, thy own MESSIAH reigns!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Solyma is the latter part of the Greek name for Jerusalem, [Greek: Hierosolyma].]

[Footnote 2: Dryden's Virg. Ecl. iv. 1.

Sicilian muse, begin a loftier strain--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 3: The poets of antiquity were thought to receive inspired dreams by sleeping on the poetic mountains.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 4: The pause and words are evidently from Dryden, a greater harmonist, if I may say so, than Pope:

The lovely shrubs and trees that shade the plain, Delight not all.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 5: Alluding to Isaiah vi. 6, 7. "Then flew one of the Seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar; and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo! this hath touched thy lips." Milton had already made the same allusion to Isaiah, at the close of his Hymn on the Nativity:

And join thy voice unto the angel quire, From out his sacred altar touched with hallowed fire.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 6: Rapt, that is, carried forwards from the present scene of things into a distant period, from the Latin _rapio_.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 7: The poet wrongly uses "begun," instead of the past, began.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 8: Virg. Ecl. iv. 6:

Jam redit et Virge, redeunt Saturnia regna; Jam nova progenies coelo demittitur alto.-- Te duce, si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri, Irrita perpetua solvent formidine terras.-- Pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem.

"_Now the Virgin returns, now the kingdom of Saturn returns, now a new progeny is sent down from high heaven. By means of thee, whatever reliques of our crimes remain, shall be wiped away, and free the world from perpetual fears. He shall govern the earth in peace, with the virtues of his father._"

Isaiah vii. 14. "_Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son._" Ch. ix. ver. 6, 7. "_Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given,--the Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government, and of his peace, there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it and to establish it with judgment and with justice, for ever and ever._"--POPE.

By "the virgin" Virgil meant Astræa, or Justice, who is said by the poets to have been driven from earth by the wickedness of mankind.--PROFESSOR MARTYN.]

[Footnote 9: Isaiah xi. i.--POPE. "_And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots._"]

[Footnote 10: Pope lowers the comparison when he follows it out into details, and likens the endowments of the Messiah to leaves, and his head to the top of a tree on which the dove descends.]

[Footnote 11: Isaiah xlv. 8.--POPE. "_Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness._"]

[Footnote 12: Dryden's Don Sebastian:

But shed from nature like a kindly show'r.--STEEVENS.]

[Footnote 13: Isaiah xxv. 4,--POPE. "_For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat._"]

[Footnote 14: Warburton says that Pope referred to the fraud of the serpent, but the allusion is more general, and the poet had probably in his mind the "priscæ vestigia fraudis," which Wakefield quotes from Virg. Ecl. iv. 31, and which Dryden renders

Yet of old fraud some footsteps shall remain.]

[Footnote 15: Isaiah ix. 7.--POPE.

For Justice was fabled by the poets to quit the earth at the conclusion of the golden age.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 16: This animated apostrophe is grounded on that of Virg. Ecl.