for his collection of natural curiosities, now in the British Museum. 13-22. Sir Visto; Sir Robert Walpole, for twenty years Whig Prime Minister of England. He made a large fortune in politics, and lavished much of it on his magnificent house and gardens at Houghton. Pope detested him, and never lost a chance to satirize him. Ripley was an architect, a henchman of Walpole's, and built the house at Houghton. Bubo, in Latin, means Owl.' Here it stands for Bubb Doddington (Lord Melcombe), a close friend of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and a favorite object for Pope's satire. 23-38. You show us Rome was glorious. The Earl of Burlington was then publishing the Designs of Inigo Jones and the Antiquities of Rome by Palladio.' - Pope. Palladian. Andrea Palladio was an Italian architect who died in 1580. He introduced a tawdry style of architecture, in which the Roman orders are used not for constructive, but for decorative, purposes. Do any of the public buildings you are familiar with answer to Pope's description in these lines? How about those in your own town? 39-46. the seven. The Schoolmen's list of the Seven Sciences is Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy. Jones; Inigo Jones (d. 1653), the most famous English architect of his day. Le Nôtre (d. 1700), the favorite landscape gardener of Louis XIV. He laid out the grounds at Versailles; also St. James' and Greenwich Parks. 47-64. All the three rules of gardening are reducible to three heads the contrasts, the management of surprises, and the concealment of the bounds.' - Pope. 65-70. Stowe; Lord Cobham's country seat in Buckinghamshire. 'Though some of the buildings are far from beautiful, yet the rich landscapes occasioned by the multiplicity of temples and obelisks and the various pictures that present themselves as we shift our situation occasion surprise and pleasure, sometimes recalling Albano's landscapes to our mind, and oftener to our fancy the idolatrous and luxuriant vales of Daphne and Tempe.' Horace Walpole. Golden House.' Nero's Cobham; see 71-78. Versailles; see note on 'Le Nôtre,' line 46. terraces; see Brewer, article note on Stowe,' line 70. cut wide views. This was done in Hertfordshire by a wealthy citizen at the expense of above £5,000, by which means (merely to overlook a dead plain) he let in the north wind upon his house and pasture, which were before adorned and defended by beautiful woods.'- Pope. Samuel Clarke, D.D., was a favorite of Queen Caroline's, who made him one of her chaplains, and after his death (1729) had his bust placed in the Hermitage. This was a famous grotto which the Queen had constructed in Richmond Gardens in the summer of 1735. She called it "Merlin's Cave," and filled it with figures of the wizard and his votaries, copied from members of her court. Pope here implies that there was a grotesque incongruity between a grotto and the likeness of an assiduous courtier like Dr. Clarke. 79-88. quincunx; espaliers; parterres. All these words nave interesting etymologies. supports; here used in the technical sense, signifying the art by which objects are made in a picture to assume their proper relative proportions.' - E. and C.'s Pope, iii. 178. 89-98. Dryads; Cl. Myths, § 47 (2) and § 121. In line 95 the construction is elliptical: Having destroyed his father's work, he views,' etc. The boundless Green is condemned as monotonous : the flourished Carpet as cramped and stiff in design. In the parks of some of our large cities you can see these flourished carpets.' 99-112. Timon. Pope's enemies declared that he had once received a present of £500 from the Duke of Chandos, and that in Timon he held up his benefactor to ridicule. Both these charges Pope hotly and- as the evidence shows truthfully denied. Pope's note on lines 99-168 explains that 'This description is intended to comprise the principles of a false taste of [for] magnificence, and to exemplify what was said before, that nothing but good sense can attain it.' Brobdignag; the land of giants: familiar to readers of Gulliver's Travels, which was published five years before the first edition of this Epistle. 113-126. Amphitrite; Cl. Myths, § 52. Notice how the ludicrous effects in this famous passage are produced by the juxtaposition of things incongruous. 127-140. Aldus; Aldo Manuzio (whence Aldine), a famous Venetian printer of the 16th Century. De Sueil; a Parisian Locke. His famous Essay on the Human Understanding had been published some forty years when this Epistle came binder. out. 141-150. Verrio (Antonio) painted many ceilings, etc., at Windsor, Hampton Court, etc., and Laguerre at Blenheim Castle and other places.' - Pope. 151-168. Tritons. See note on Sancho's dread doctor. See Don Herald of the Sea,' Lycidas 89. Quixote, Part ii. Book iii. ChapGod Bless the King. The English National Air, often played at the close of musical and theatrical entertainments. ter 47. 169-180. Ceres. Cl. Myths, § 45. Bathurst. Allen Apsley, Lord Bathurst, a man of learning, courtesy and feeling' (Sterne), to whom Pope addressed his Third Epistle. 181-204. Jones; see line 46 and note. Palladio; see note on Palladian,' line 37. Vitruvius; see note on Dryden's Epistle to Congreve, line 15. a more artistic conclusion to an holds up a more admirable ideal. It would be difficult to imagine Epistle of this nature, or one that with those noble lines in which Vergil interprets the destiny of Rome : Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; Eneid vi. 851-853. Dryden's rendering of this has evidently suggested Pope's concluding line. But Rome, 'tis thine alone with awful sway, This Epistle (first published in 1737) is imitated from Horace's Epistles ii. 1. This you should read, if not in the original at least in Conington's translation. The King's name was George Augustus. Physical bravery seems to have been his only redeeming virtue; in all other respects he was a thoroughly contemptible creature, as you may read in Thackeray's Four Georges. The portions of the Epistle addressed directly to him are couched in a vein of subtle irony. Warton says that the irony was so artfully concealed that some of the highest rank in the Court' mistook it for serious praise (!); but this seems hardly credible. 1-6. open all the Main, seems to be used in a double sense: (1) You open all the sea to English trade; (2) you leave the sea open to the Spaniards. In the year this epistle was published, there was great excitement in England over the right of search' which Spain claimed to exercise and did exercise over English vessels. When Spain declined and when England became the leading naval power of the world, she claimed for herself this same 'right of search' against which she had formerly so vigorously protested. The connection between this claim and the war of 1812 is too well known to need elaboration here. chief in Arms, abroad defend; referring to the King's desire to command the army in person and to his repeated absences in his beloved Hanover. Morals, Arts and Laws. George II. had no morals, he cared nothing for what he called ‘Bainting and Boetry,' and he exercised no influence on legislation. Henry Henry V. 7-22. Edward Alfred the Great. = Edward III. base mankind to be grateful. Alfred = at finding how unwilling are Alcides Hercules, the grand son of Alcæus. Cl. Myths, § 139-143. The diction and the imagery of lines 19-22 could hardly be improved. VIII. tainly a more competent judge. 23-42. Skelton; died in 1529. He was a favorite of King Henry Erasmus thought better of him than Pope did, and was cerHeads of Houses. At Oxford and Cambridge, what we would call the President of a College is sometimes denominated the Head of a House. He is generally a clergyman. Christ's Kirk o' the Green; a ballad of low life by the Devil. 'The Devil Tavern, Lines 37-42 King James I. of Scotland. where Ben Jonson held his poetical Club.'- - Pope. are in illustration of 35 and 36. From this point to the end of 138, the argument is intended to ridicule that unreasoning public taste which belittles the literature of its own day while it extols that of the past. Perhaps Pope 'felt in his bones' that the literary sceptre which he had received from Dryden, and which he had so long swayed, was about to pass from him to a school of Romantic poets whose precursor was Thomson. If this be so, while we may not sympathize with his regret, we cannot help admiring the sharpness of his sarcasm, the brilliancy of his wit and the extraordinary acuteness of his literary judgments. 43-68. Courtesy of England; a legal phrase, applied to the tenure by which a widower holds the property of his deceased wife. The application here will be: We will allow that such a poet as you describe may, by courtesy, pass for a classic, though he has not a full right to do so.' the rule that made the Horse-tail bare. The word 'rule' in this expression seems based upon a misinterpretation of lines 45-46 of the Horatian Epistle from which this Epistle is imitated. In Horace, the plucking out single hairs from a horse's tail is used for illustration just as Pope uses it in line 64; Pope's rule' is Horace's 'ratione ruentis acervi' (mentioned in his line 47), a logical puzzle better known under its Greek name of Sorites. For etymology and explanation of this, consult an unabridged dictionary. Stowe; author of 'Annals of This Kingdom from the Time of the Ancient Britons to His Own' [1600]. 69-78. Shakespear. Shakespear and Ben Jonson may truly be said not much to have thought [sic] of this Immortality, the one in many pieces composed in haste for the stage: the other in his latter works in general, which Dryden called his Dotages.' — Pope. Cowley, who died the year Paradise Lost was published, was considered by his contemporaries the greatest poet of his day. His Pindaric Odes do not remind one of Pindar in any way, and his Epic (the Davideis) would hardly be considered a compliment by so good a poet as David. Pope has an imitation of Cowley called The Garden. 79-88.... the whole paragraph has a mixture of Irony, and must not altogether be taken for Horace's own judgment, only the common chat of the pretenders to criticism; in some things right, in others wrong. . . .- Pope. Beaumont's judgment. Of the fifty-two plays attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, less than one-third are known to show traces of Beaumont's hand. See note on Fletcher in the Epistle to Congreve, line 20. Shadwell hasty. Warburton tells us that this line (from Wilmot, Earl of Rochester) refers not to the differing abilities of Shadwell and of Wycherley, but to the rate at which they produced plays. For Shadwell, see note on Epistle to Congreve, line 48. Southern; Rowe; dramatists, contemporary with Pope. Heywood; John Heywood died the year after Shakespeare was born. His 'Interludes' show the transition from the Moralities to the regular play. Cibber; Colley Cibber, actor, play-wright, Poet Laureate; immortalized in 1743, when formally proclaimed by Pope as the hero of the Dunciad. 89-106. Gammer Gurton's Needle (1575) was supposed, in the time of Pope, to be the oldest English comedy. It is now known that Ralph Roister Doister goes back as far as 1566. the Careless Husband (1704). Though Cibber's masterpiece, this is certainly a dull play, lacking action and distinctness of characterization. Spenser, Sydney, Milton. As your acquaintance with these writers grows more extended you will recognize the justness of Pope's strictures. Bentley (d. 1742), the great Greek scholar, made the mistake of trying to edit Milton on the same critical principles that he had so successfully applied to the Epistles of Phalaris. He included within brackets [hooks] all lines that seemed to him spurious. The result was an edition of Milton scarcely less deplorable than Sir Isaac Newton's edition of the Prophecies of Daniel, or than Professor Tyndall's discourses on Irish Politics. Ne sutor supra crepidam. th' affected fool; Lord Hervey, the friend of Queen Caroline. This sarcasm is based upon his lines: 107-118. All that I learned from Dr. Friend at school By Gradus, Lexicon, or Grammar-rule Sprat; 'A worse Cowley.' - Pope (apud Spence). Carew; Sedley; each a man of one song. To the former belongs |