FOOTNOTES:
[1] Notwithstanding the many praises lavished on this celebrated nobleman as a poet, by Dryden, by Addison, by Bolingbroke, by our Author, and others, yet candid criticism must oblige us to confess, that he was but a feeble imitator of the feeblest parts of Waller. After having been secretary at war, 1710, controller and treasurer to the household, and of her majesty's privy council, and created a peer, 1711, he was seized as a suspected person, at the accession of George I., and confined in the Tower. Whatever may be thought of Lord Lansdowne as a poet, his character as a man was highly valuable. His conversation was most pleasing and polite; his affability, and universal benevolence, and gentleness, captivating; he was a firm friend and a sincere lover of his country. This is the character I received of him from his near relation, the late excellent Mrs. Delany.—Warton.
[2] Thus Hopkins, in his History of Love:
Ye woods and wilds, serene and blest retreats,
At once the lovers' and the Muses' seats
To you I fly.—Wakefield.
[3] Originally thus:
Chaste goddess of the woods,
Nymphs of the vales, and Naïads of the flood,
Lead me through arching bow'rs, and glimin'ring glades,
Unlock your springs.—Pope.
Dryden's Virgil, Geor. ii. 245:
Once more unlock for thee the sacred spring.
Æn. x. 241:
Now, sacred sisters, open all your spring.—Wakefield.
[4] Neget quis carmina Gallo? Virg.—Warburton.
[5] Evidently suggested by Waller:
Of the first Paradise there's nothing found,
Yet the description lasts.—Holt White.
Addison's Letter from Italy:
Sometimes misguided by the tuneful throng,
I look for streams immortalised in song,
That lost in silence and oblivion lie;
Dumb are their fountains, and their channels dry;
Yet run for ever by the muse's skill,
And in the smooth description murmur still.—Wakefield.
[6] There is an inaccuracy in making the flame equal to a grove. It might have been Milton's flame.—Warton.
Addison's Letter from Italy:
O, could the muse my ravished breast inspire
With warmth like yours, and raise an equal fire.—Wakefield.
[7] This is borrowed from the lines, quoted by Bowles, in which Denham alludes to the founder of Windsor Castle being as doubtful as was the birth-place of Homer:
Like him in birth, thou should'st be like in fame,
As thine his fate, if mine had been his flame.
[8] From Waller:
As in old chaos heav'n with earth confused,
And stars with rocks together crushed and bruised.—Wakefield.
[9] Evidently from Cooper's Hill:
Here Nature, whether more intent to please
Us, or herself, with strange varieties,
Wisely she knew the harmony of things,
As well as that of sounds, from discord springs.
Such was the discord which did first disperse
Form, order, beauty through the universe.—Warton.
[10] There is a levity in this comparison which appears to me unseasonable, and but ill according with the serene dignity of the subject.—Wakefield.
[11] Originally thus:
Why should I sing our better suns or air,
Whose vital draughts prevent the leech's care,
While through fresh fields th' enlivening odours breathe,
Or spread with vernal blooms the purple heath?—Pope.
The first couplet of the lines in Pope's note, was from Dryden's epistle to his kinsman:
He scapes the best, who, nature to repair,
Draws physic from the fields, in draughts of vital air.
[12] Milton's Allegro, ver. 78:
Bosomed high in tufted trees.—Wakefield.
[13] Milton, Par. Lost, iv. 248:
Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balms.
This fancy was borrowed from the ancients. According to Ovid (Met. x. 500), Myrrha, changed into a tree, weeps myrrh, and the sisters of Phæton (Met. ii. 364), transformed into poplars, shed tears which harden in the sun, and turn into amber.
[14] This fabulous mixture of stale images, Olympus and the Gods, is, in my opinion, extremely puerile, especially in a description of real scenery. Pan, Pomona, and the rest, mere representative substitutions, give no offence.—Wakefield.
[15] The making the hills nobler than Olympus with all its gods, because the gods appeared "in their blessings" on the humbler mountains of Windsor, is a thought only to be excused in a very young writer.—Bowles.
[16] The word "crowned" is exceptionable; it makes Pan crowned with flocks.—Warton.
Pope, in his manuscript, has underscored "Pan with flocks," and "crowned," and set a mark against the line, as if he had detected, and intended to remove, the defect.
[17] Dryden's Translations from Ovid:
A dismal desert, and a silent waste.
Pope weakened the line in varying it. "Dreary desert" and "gloomy waste" are synonymous, but "silent" adds a distinct idea to "dismal."
[18] The Forest Laws.—Pope.
The killing a deer, boar, or hare, was punished with the loss of the delinquent's eyes.—Warton.
Thierry believes that the forest laws had a more serious object than to secure for the king a monopoly of sport. The chief intention was to keep the newly conquered Saxons from going armed under the pretext that they were in pursuit of game. Hence the penalty was of a nature to incapacitate the offender for military service.
[19] This is in imitation of Waller:
Prove all a desert! and none there make stay
But savage beasts, or men as wild as they.—Wakefield.
Sir William Temple says of the forests on the continent that they
give a shade
To savage beasts who on the weaker prey,
Or human savages more wild than they.
Wakefield remarks that there is an inaccuracy in Pope's couplet, since the "savage laws" to which the pronoun "they" in part refers, were the mode in which the severity of the king displayed itself.
[20] The representation is erroneous. The "air, floods, and wilds" were not "dispeopled." The forest laws occasioned an increase in the quantity of game, which was preserved more carefully when it became the property of the privileged few, and was no longer liable to be exterminated by the many. Pope is not consistent with himself, for he afterwards complains that "while the subject starved the beast was fed."
[21] Originally thus in the MS.:
From towns laid waste, to dens and caves they ran
(For who first stooped to be a slave was man).—Warburton.
The conceit is childish, because dens and caves are the residence of these brutes at all times, and therefore their retreat to these places constitutes no argument of their aversion to slavery. And the following couplet is by no means worthy of the poet.—Wakefield.
[22] According to this doctrine no nation can lie free in which lawless beasts are subjugated by man.
[23] Pope puts "the elements" for the creatures which inhabited them.
[24] In the first edition it was,
The swain with tears to beasts his labour yields,
which defined the poet's idea more clearly. He changed the expression to avoid the recurrence of the same word when he introduced "beast" into the next couplet.
[25] Addison's Letter from Italy:
The poor inhabitant beholds in vain
The reddening orange, and the swelling grain:
Joyless he sees the growing oils and wines,
And in the myrtle's fragrant shade repines:
Starves, in the midst of nature's bounty curst,
And in the loaden vineyard dies for thirst.—Holt White.
This passage, which describes the misery entailed upon the Italian peasants by an oppressive government, plainly suggested the lines of Pope. The death from thirst, which Addison adds to the death from starvation, is too great an exaggeration. Water could always be had.
No wonder savages or subjects slain—
But subjects starved, while savages were fed.
It was originally thus, but the word "savages" is not properly applied to beasts, but to men; which occasioned the alteration.—Pope.
[27] Translated from
Templa adimit divis, fora civibus, arva colonis,
an old monkish writer, I forget who.—Pope.
[28] Alluding to the destruction made in the New Forest, and the tyrannies exercised there by William I.—Pope.
I have the authority of three or four of our best antiquarians to say, that the common tradition of villages and parishes, within the compass of thirty miles, being destroyed, in the New Forest, is absolutely groundless, no traces or vestiges of such being to be discovered, nor any other parish named in Doomsday Book, but what now remains.—Warton.
The argument from Doomsday Book is of no weight if, as Lingard asserts, the New Forest was formed before the registration took place. William was an eager sportsman. "He loved the beasts of chase," says the Saxon chronicle, "as if he had been their father," and the source of his love was the pleasure he took in killing them. His hunting grounds, however, were ample without the New Forest, and Thierry thinks that his motive in forming it may have been political. The wooded district, denuded of a hostile population, and stretching to the sea, would have afforded shelter to the Normans in the event of a reverse, and enabled them to disembark in safety.
[29] Addison's Campaign:
O'er prostrate towns and palaces they pass,
Now covered o'er with weeds, and hid in grass.
[30] Donne, in his second Satire,
When winds in our ruined abbeys roar.—Wakefield.
[31] It is a blemish in this fine passage that a couplet in the past tense should be interposed for the sake of the rhyme, in the midst of a description in the present tense.
[32] Originally:
And wolves with howling fill, &c.
The author thought this an error, wolves not being common in England at the time of the Conqueror.—Pope.
[33] "The temples," "broken columns," and "choirs," of the poet, suppose a much statelier architecture than belonged to the rude village churches of the Saxons. With the same exaggeration the hamlets which stood on the site of the New Forest are converted by Pope into "cities," and "towns."
[34] William did not confine his oppression to the weak and succumb to the strong. The statement that he was "awed by his nobles" is opposed to the contemporary testimony of the Saxon chronicle. "No man," says the writer, "durst do anything against his will; he had earls in his bonds who had done against his will, and at last he did not spare his own brother, Odo; him he set in prison." "His rich men moaned," says the chronicler again, "and the poor men murmured, but he was so hard that he recked not the hatred of them all."
[35] The language is too strong. "When his power or interest was concerned," says Lingard, "William listened to no suggestions but those of ambition or avarice, but on other occasions he displayed a strong sense of religion, and a profound respect for its institutions." While resisting ecclesiastical usurpation, and depriving individuals who were disaffected or incompetent, of their preferment, he upheld the church and its dignitaries, and left both in a more exalted position than he found them.
[36] It is incorrect to say that William was denied a grave. As his body was about to be lowered into the vault in the church of St. Stephen, which he had founded at Caen, a person named Fitz-Arthur forbade the burial, on the plea that the land had been taken by violence from his father, but the prelates having paid him sixty shillings on the spot, and promised him further compensation, the ceremony was allowed to proceed.
[37] "An open space between woods," is Johnson's definition of "lawn," which is the meaning here, and at ver. 21 and 149. The term has since been appropriated to the dressed green-sward in gardens.
[38] Richard, second son of William the Conqueror.—Pope.
Richard is said by some to have been killed by a stag in the New Forest, by others to have been crushed against a tree by his horse.
[39] This verse is taken from one of Denham's in his translation of the Second Æneis:
At once the taker, and at once the prey.—Wakefield.
[40] The oak under which Rufus was shot, was standing till within these few years.—Bowles.
A stone pillar now marks the spot.—Croker.
[41] In the New Forest, where the cottages had been swept away by William. "Succeeding monarchs" did not, as Pope implies, suffer encroachments on the forest out of pity for their subjects. The concession was extorted. Some of the provisions of Magna Charta were directed against the increase of the royal forests and against the "evil customs" maintained with respect to them.
[42] Mountains hitherto unknown to the flocks, who were now for the first time permitted to feed there.
Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma. Virg.—Warburton.
Virgil is treating of grafts, and says that the parent stock, when the slips grow, wonders at leaves and fruit not its own. Here the imagination keeps pace with the description, but stops short before the notion that the trees in the forest wondered to behold the crops of corn.
[44] He doubtless had in his eye, Vir. Æn. i. 506:
Latonæ tacitum pertentant gaudia pectus.—Wakefield.
Dryden's translation:
And feeds with secret joy her silent breast.
In Virgil the silent exultation is felt by a mother, who, in an assembly of nymphs, marks the superior beauty of her goddess daughter. There was not the same reason why the swain should keep secret the transport he felt at the sight of wheat fields.
[45] Originally:
O may no more a foreign master's rage,
With wrongs yet legal, curse a future age!
Still spread, fair liberty! thy heav'nly wings,
Breathe plenty on the fields, and fragrance on the springs.—Pope.
The last couplet was suggested by Addison's Letter to Lord Halifax:
O Liberty, thou goddess heav'nly bright,
Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight!
Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign,
And smiling plenty leads thy wanton train.
[46] Addison's Campaign:
Their courage dwells not in a troubled flood
Of mounting spirits, and fermenting blood.
[47] "Thickest woods" till Warburton's edition. The epithet "gameful," to express that the woods were full of game, seems to be peculiar to Pope.
[48] Originally:
When yellow autumn summer's heat succeeds,
And into wine the purple harvest bleeds,
The partridge feeding in the new-shorn fields,
Both morning sports and evening pleasures yields.—Pope.
Richardson transcribes from the margin of Pope's MS. "Qu. if allowable to describe the season by a circumstance not proper to our climate, the vintage?" And the line which speaks of the making of wine was no doubt altered to obviate this objection.
[49] Dryden's Sigismonda and Guiscardo:
Watchful to betray
With inward rage he meditates his prey.—Holt White.
[50] From Virgil, Geo. iv. 176:
si parra licet componere magnis.
If little things with great we may compare. Dryden.—Wakefield.
[51] It stood thus in the first editions:
Pleased in the general's sight, the host lie down
Sudden before some unsuspecting town;
The young, the old, one instant make our prize,
And o'er their captive heads Britannia's standard flies.—Warburton.
Pope, as Wakefield observes, has joined together in the simile in the text the inconsistent notions of a town surprised, and a town taken by the regular approaches of a siege. "The passage," adds Wakefield, "as it originally stood was free from this heterogeneous intermixture, and by a little polish might have been made superior to the present reading."
[52] Richardson gives a more descriptive line from the manuscript:
Exults in air and plies his whistling wings.
The poet doubtless substituted the later version, because the expression "whirring pheasant" conveyed the same idea as "whistling wings."
[53] This fine apostrophe was probably suggested by that of Virgil on the ox dying of the plague:
Now what avails his well-deserving toil. Dryden.—Wakefield.
[54] Steevens quotes Pictæque volucres. Virg. Painted birds. Dryden.—Bowles.
Pope probably took the phrase from Paradise Lost, where the birds are described as spreading "their painted wings." In transferring the expression he overlooked the fact that the wings are not the part of the pheasant to which the epithet "painted" is especially applicable.
[55] Originally thus:
When hoary-winter clothes the years in white,
The woods and fields to pleasing toils invite.—Pope.
[56] The reflection is misplaced; for dogs by nature chase hares, and man avails himself of their instinctive propensities.
[57] Originally:
O'er rustling leaves around the naked groves.—Warburton.
This is a better line.—Warton.
[58] Wakefield understood Pope to mean that the trees shaded the doves, and he objected that leafless trees could not properly be said to overshadow. Steevens pointed out that it was the doves, on the contrary, which overshadowed the trees, by alighting on them in flocks. The ambiguity was caused by Pope's bad and inveterate habit of putting the accusative case before the verb.
The fowler lifts his levelled tube on high.—Pope.
He owed the line in the text to Dryden's Virgil, Geor. ii. 774.
And bends his bow, and levels with his eyes.
"Tube" is an affected term for a gun, but the word is adopted by Cowper and Campbell. Thomson, in his lines on partridge-shooting, was not afraid to call the gun by its own name, and yet is more poetical than Cowper, Campbell, or Pope:
the gun
Glanced just and sudden from the fowler's eye,
O'ertakes their sounding pinions.
The last expression is nobly descriptive.
Præcipites altá vitam sub nube relinquunt. Virg.—Warburton.
So before Pope, Philips in his Cider:
——they leave their little lives above the clouds.—Steevens.
[61] It is singular, that in a poem on a forest, the majestic oak, the deer, and many other interesting and characteristic circumstances, should be all thrown in the distant ground, whilst objects much less appropriate, the fisher, the fowler, &c. are brought forward.—Bowles.
[62] The active use of the word hope, though authorised by Dryden, appears to my taste intolerably harsh and affected.—Wakefield.
[63] "Volume," except in its application to books, now carries with it an idea of magnitude. In Pope's day it was still used in its strictly etymological sense. When Milton, in his personification of Sin (Par. Lost, ii. 651), says that she
ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast,
"voluminous" is the synonym for "many a scaly fold," and not for the conjoint epithet "vast."
[64] Wakefield points out that Pope borrowed the language from Lauderdale's translation of the fourth Georgic, where he says of the bees that they are "bedropped with gold," or from Milton's description of the fish, which
sporting with quick glance
Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold.
[65] "The wat'ry plain" from the campi liquentes of Virgil, is an expression of Dryden's in his translation of Ovid, Met. i., and elsewhere. Drayton in his Polyolbion has the tyrant pike.—Wakefield.
"The luce, or pike," says Walton, "is the tyrant of the fresh waters."
[66] Originally thus:
But when bright Phœbus from the twins invites
Our active genius to more free delights,
With springing day we range the lawns around.—Pope.
[67] "Sylvan war," is an expression borrowed from writers who described the chase of ferocious beasts,—the lion, tiger, and boar. The language is inapplicable to the pursuit of such timid creatures as the hare, deer, and fox.
[68] Translated from Statius.
Stare adeo miserum est, pereunt vestigia mille
Ante fugam, absentemque ferit gravis ungula campum.
These lines Mr. Dryden, in his preface to his translation of Fresnoy's Art of Painting, calls wonderfully fine, and says "they would cost him an hour, if he had the leisure, to translate them, there is so much of beauty in the original," which was the reason, I suppose, why Mr. Pope tried his strength with them.—Warburton.
[69] "Threatening" is an inappropriate epithet for the sloping hills up which the hunters rode in the neighbourhood of Windsor.
[70] Instead of this couplet, Pope had written in his early manuscript,
They stretch, they sweat, they glow, they shout around;
Heav'n trembles, roar the mountains, thunders all the ground.
He was betrayed into this bombast, which his better taste rejected, by the attempt to carry on the hyperbolical strain of Statius.
[71] Queen Anne.—Warburton.
Congreve's Prologue to the Queen:
For never was in Rome nor Athens seen
So fair a circle, and so bright a queen.
[72] This use of the word "reign" for the territory ruled over, instead of for the sway of the ruler, was always uncommon, and is now obsolete. Queen Anne is mentioned in connection with the chase and the "immortal huntress," because her favourite diversion before she grew unwieldy and inactive, was to follow the hounds in her chaise.
[73] Better in the manuscript:
And rules the boundless empire of the main.
By the alteration Pope increased the compliment to Anne by making her the light of the earth as well as mistress of the forest and the sea. Wakefield thinks that this application to the queen of the offices of Diana as goddess of the woods, the luminary of the night, and the chief agent in the production of the tides, is happily conceived, but the moon and the monarch were "the light of the earth "and "empress of the main" in such different senses, that the line is a trivial play upon words.
[74] In the last edition published in Pope's lifetime, the four previous lines, with the variation of "sunny heaths" for "airy wastes," were printed in a note, and their place in the text was supplied by a single couplet:
Here, as old bards have sung, Diana strayed,
Bathed in the springs, or sought the cooling shade.
Wakefield suggests that Pope rejected this latter line, as not being suited to the prevailing character of the English climate, but at ver. 209 he represents the goddess as often "laving" in the Lodona, and to bathe and luxuriate in shade are surely common enough in England.
[75] Dr. Warton says, "that Johnson seems to have passed too severe a censure on this episode of Lodona; and that a tale in a descriptive poem has a good effect." Johnson does not object to a tale in a descriptive poem. He objects only to the triteness of such a tale as this.—Bowles.
[76] Dryden's Translations from Ovid:
The nicest eye did no distinction know,
But that the goddess bore a golden bow.
Nec positu variare comas; uni fibula vestem,
Vitta coercuerat neglectos alba capillos. Ovid.—Warburton.
[78] This thought of the quiver sounding is found both in Homer and Virgil.—Wakefield.
Pope remembered Dryden's translation of Virgil, Æneis, xi. 968:
Diana's arms upon her shoulder sounds.
And xi. 1140:
A gilded quiver from his shoulder sounds.
[79] Dryden's Æneis, xii. 108:
The lover gazed, and burning with desire,
The more he looked the more he fed the fire.
Ut fugere accipitrem penna trepidante columbæ,
Ut solet accipiter trepidas agitare columbas. Ovid, Met. lib. v.—Warburton.
Sandys' translation:
As trembling doves the eager hawks eschew;
As eager hawks the trembling dovers pursue.
[81] In the first edition:
As from the god with fearful speed she flew,
As did the god with equal speed pursue.
[82] Wakefield remarks that Pope, yielding to the exigencies of rhyme, has put "run" for "ran."
Sol erat a tergo: vidi præcedere longam
Ante pedes umbram; nisi timor illa videbat.
Sed certe sonituque pedum terrebar; et ingens
Crinales vittas afflabat anhelitus oris. Ovid, Met. lib. v.—
Warburton.
Sandys, whom our bard manifestly consulted, renders thus:
The sun was at our backs; before my feet
I saw his shadow, or my fear did see't.
Howere his sounding steps, and thick-drawn breath
That fanned my hair, affrighted me to death.—Wakefield.
Not only is the story of Lodona copied from the transformation of Arethusa into a stream, but nearly all the particulars are taken from different passages in Ovid, of which Warburton has furnished a sufficient specimen.
[84] The river Loddon.—Pope.
[85] The idea of "augmenting the waves with tears" was very common among the earliest English poets, but perhaps the most ridiculous use ever made of this combination, was by Shakespeare:
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears.—Bowles.
Dryden's translation of the first book of Ovid's Art of Love:
Her briny tears augment the briny flood.
[86] These six lines were added after the first writing of this poem.—Pope.
And in truth they are but puerile and redundant.—Warton.
[87] Eve, looking into the fountain, in Dryden's State of Innocence, Act ii.:
What's here? another firmament below
Spread wide, and other trees that downward grow.—Steevens.
[88] The epithet "absent," employed to denote that the trees were only a reflection in the water, is more perplexing than descriptive, particularly as the "absent trees" are distinguished from the "pendant woods," which must equally have been absent.
[89] In every edition before Warburton's it was "spreading honours." Pope probably considered that "rear," which denoted an upward direction, could not be consistently conjoined with "spreading." For "shores," improperly applied in the next line to a river, all the editions before 1736 had "banks."
[90] "Her" appears for the first time in the edition of Warburton in the place of "his," and is now the accepted reading, but it is manifestly a misprint, since "her" has no antecedent. The couplet is obscure. Pope could hardly intend to assert that the flow of the tide poured as much water into the Thames as all the other rivers of the world discharged into the ocean, and he probably meant that all the navigable rivers of the globe did not send more commerce to the sea than came from the sea up the Thames. Even in this case it was a wild, without being a poetical, exaggeration.
[91] In the first edition:
No seas so rich, so full no streams appear.
The epithets "clear," "gentle," "full," which Pope applies to the Thames, show that he had in his mind the celebrated passage in Cooper's Hill:
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'er-flowing full.
[92] The ancients gave the name of the terrestrial Eridanus or Po, to a constellation which has somewhat the form of a winding river. Pope copied Denham:
Heav'n her Eridanus no more shall boast,
Whose fame in thine, like lesser currents lost,
By nobler streams shall visit Jove's abodes,
To shine amongst the stars and bathe the gods.
[93] Very ill expressed, especially the rivers swelling the lays.—Warton.
[94] The original readings were beyond all competition preferable both in strength and beauty:
Not fabled Po more swells the poet's lays
While through the skies his shining current strays.—Wakefield.
[95] In saying that the Po did not swell the lays of the poet in the same degree as the Thames, Pope more especially alluded to the celebrated description of the latter in Cooper's Hill.
[96] In the earlier editions,
Nor all his stars a brighter lustre show,
Than the fair nymphs that gild thy shore below.
The MS. goes on thus:
Whose pow'rful charms enamoured gods may move
To quit for this the radiant court above;
And force great Jove, if Jove's a lover still,
To change Olympus, &c.
[97] Originally:
Happy the man, who to these shades retires,
But doubly happy, if the muse inspires!
Blest whom the sweets of home-felt quiet please;
But far more blest, who study joins with ease.—Pope.
The turn of this passage manifestly proves that our poet had in view that incomparable encomium of Virgil's second Georgic on philosophy and a country life.—Wakefield.
In addition to the imitation of the second Georgic, and the translation of lines in Horace and Lucan, Pope adopted hints, as Warton has remarked, from Philips's Cider:
He to his labour hies
Gladsome, intent on somewhat that may ease
Unhealthy mortals, and with curious search
Examines all the properties of herbs,
Fossils and minerals, &c.
or else his thoughts
Are exercised with speculations deep,
Of good, and just, and meet, and th' wholesome rules
Of temperance, and ought that may improve
The moral life; &c.
[98] Lord Lansdowne.—Croker.
[99] This is taken from Horace's epistle to Tibullus:
An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?—Wakefield.
Pope remembered Creech's translation of the passage:
Or dost thou gravely walk the healthy wood,
Considering what befits the wise and good.
——servare modum, finemque tenere,
Naturamque sequi. Lucan.—Warburton.
[101] Dryden's Virgil, Geor. ii. 673:
Ye sacred muses! with whose beauty fired,
My soul is ravished, and my brain inspired.—Wakefield.
Addison in his Letter from Italy has the expression "fired with a thousand raptures."
O, qui me gelidis in vallibus Hæmi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra! Virg.—Warburton.
[103] Cooper's Hill is the elevation, not deserving the name of mountain, just over Egham and Runnymede.—Croker.
[104] It stood thus in the MS.
Methinks around your hold scenes I rove,
And hear your music echoing through the grove:
With transport visit each inspiring shade,
By god-like poets venerable made.—Warburton.
[105] From Philips's Cider, ii. 6:
or what
Unrivalled authors by their presence made
For ever venerable.—Steevens.
[106] By "first lays," Pope means Cooper's Hill, but Denham had previously written the Sophy, a tragedy, and translated the second book of the Æneid.
[107] Dryden says of the Cooper's Hill, "it is a poem which for majesty of style is, and ever will be, the standard of good writing." From hence, no doubt, Pope took the word "majestic."—Bowles.
[108] Mr. Cowley died at Chertsey, on the borders of the Forest, and was from thence conveyed to Westminster.—Pope.
Pope told Spence that Cowley was killed by a fever brought on by lying out all night in the fields. He had got drunk, in company with his friend Dean Sprat, at the house of a neighbour, and they lost their way in the attempt to walk home. Sprat had long before related that Cowley caught his last illness in the "meadows," but says it was caused "by staying too long amongst his labourers in the heat of the summer." The drunkenness, and the lying out all night, appear to have been the embellishments of scandal.
[109] Cowley died July 28, 1667, in the 49th year of his age. Pope's "O early lost!" is copied from the "O early ripe!" of Dryden in his lines to the Memory of Oldham.
[110] Oldham's Imitation of Moschus:
This, Thames, ah! this, is now thy second loss
For which in tears thy weeping current flows.
[111] On the margin of his manuscript Pope wrote the passage of Virgil which he imitated:
quæ, Tiberine, videbis
Funera, cum tumulum præterlabere recentem.
The "pomp" was not a poetical exaggeration. Evelyn, who attended the funeral, says that Cowley's body was "conveyed to Westminster Abbey in a hearse with six horses, near a hundred coaches of noblemen, and persons of quality following."
[112] Originally:
What sighs, what murmurs, filled the vocal shore!
His tuneful swans were heard to sing no more.—Pope.
[113] We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. Psalm cxxxvii. 2.—Wakefield.
Pope says that "each muse" hung up her lyre because Cowley was thought to excel in many departments of verse. "He was beloved," said Dr. Felton, "by every muse he courted, and has rivalled the ancients in every kind of poetry but tragedy." Dr. Sprat entitled his poem on him an "Ode to the English Ovid, Anacreon, Pindar, and Virgil."
[114] Warton mentions, that "living lyre" is used by Cowley.
[115] This couplet was a triplet in the manuscript with the following middle line:
What bard, what angel, tunes the warbling strings?
It is surprising that Pope did not feel the bathos of the expression, "'Tis yours, my lord," introduced into the midst of the high-flown adulation.
[116] Philips:
And paint those honours thou art sure to wear.—Steevens.
[117] Meaning, I apprehend, the star of the knights of the Garter installed at Windsor.—Wakefield.
The order was founded by Edward III., the builder of Windsor Castle, which further connected it with Pope's subject. Denham had celebrated the institution of the garter in Cooper's Hill, and Lord Lansdowne, in his Progress of Beauty, "sung the honours" in a few despicable verses, which certainly added no "lustre to the silver star."
[118] All the lines that follow were not added to the poem till the year 1710 [1712]. What immediately followed this, and made the conclusion, were these;
My humble muse in unambitious strains
Paints the green forests and the flow'ry plains;
Where I obscurely pass my careless days,
Pleased in the silent shade with empty praise,
Enough for me that to the list'ning swains
First in these fields I sung the sylvan strains.—Pope.
[119] Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, one of the first refiners of the English poetry; famous in the time of Henry VIII. for his sonnets, the scene of many of which is laid at Windsor.—Pope.
[120] The Fair Geraldine, the general object of Lord Surrey's passionate sonnets, was one of the daughters of Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare. In Warton's History of English Poetry, is a poem of the elegiac kind, in which Surrey laments his imprisonment in Windsor Castle.—Warton.
[121] The Mira of Granville was the Countess of Newburgh. Towards the end of her life Dr. King, of Oxford, wrote a very severe satire against her, in three hooks, called The Toast.—Warton.
She proved in her conduct to be the reverse of "heavenly." "Granville," says Johnson, "wrote verses to her before he was three-and-twenty, and may be forgiven if he regarded the face more than the mind. Poets are sometimes in too much haste to praise."
Not to recount those several kings, to whom
It gave a cradle, and to whom a tomb. Denham.—Bowles.
[123] Edward III. born here.—Pope.
[124] David Bruce, king of Scotland, taken prisoner at the battle of Nevil's Cross, 1346, and John, king of France, captured at the battle of Poitiers, 1356. "Monarchs chained" conveys the idea of a rigorous imprisonment, and belies the chivalry, which was the pride of Edward and the Black Prince. David, who was the brother-in-law of Edward III., was subjected to so little constraint, that he was allowed to visit Scotland, and confer with his people on the terms of his ransom. John was received with royal honours in England, and during the whole of his residence here was surrounded with regal luxury and state.
[125] Denham's Cooper's Hill:
——Great Edward, and thy greater son,
The lilies which his father wore, he won.
Edward III. claimed the crown of France by descent, and quartered the French fleur-de-lis on his shield before the victories of the Black Prince had made the assumption something more than an empty boast.
[126] Originally thus in the MS.
When brass decays, when trophies lie o'er-thrown,
And mould'ring into dust drops the proud stone,
From Windsor's roofs, &c.—Warburton.
[127] He was a Neapolitan. Without much invention, and with less taste, his exuberant pencil was ready at pouring out gods, goddesses, kings, emperors, and triumphs, over those public surfaces on which the eye never rests long enough to criticise,—I mean ceilings and staircases. Charles II. consigned over Windsor to his pencil. He executed most of the ceilings there, one whole side of St. George's Hall, and the chapel. On the accession of James II., Verrio was again employed at Windsor in Wolsey's Tomb-house.—Horace Walpole.
[128] Pope had in his head this couplet of Halifax:
The wounded arm would furnish all their rooms,
And bleed for ever scarlet in the looms.—Holt White.
[129] Henry VI.—Pope.
[130] Edward IV.—Pope.
[131] The Land's End in Cornwall is called by Diodorus Siculus, Belerium promentorium, perhaps from Bellerus, one of the Cornish giants with which that country and the poems of old British bards were once filled.—T. Warton.
[132] Dryden's translation of the tenth Satire of Juvenal, ver. 236:
Whom Afric was not able to contain
Whose length runs level with th' Atlantic main.—Wakefield.
[133] Dr. Chetwood's verses to Roscommon:
Make warlike James's peaceful virtues known.—Wakefield.
[134] Charles I. was buried in St. George's Chapel, Windsor. The precise spot was a matter of doubt till an accidental aperture was made in 1813 into the vault of Henry VIII., when a lead coffin was discovered bearing the inscription "King Charles, 1648." It was opened in the presence of the Regent; and the corpse was in a sufficient state of preservation to enable the spectators to recognise the likeness of the countenance to Vandyke's portraits of the king, and to ascertain that the head had been severed from the body.
[135] Originally thus in the MS.
Oh fact accurst! oh sacrilegious brood,
Sworn to rebellion, principled in blood!
Since that dire morn what tears has Albion shed,
Gods! what new wounds, &c.—Warburton.
[136] To say that the plague in London, and its consumption by fire, were judgments inflicted by heaven for the murder of Charles I., is a very extraordinary stretch of tory principles indeed.—Warton.
[137] This couplet is directed at the Revolution, considered by Pope, in common with all jacobites, to be a like public calamity with the plague and the fire of London.—Croker.
Pope had in his mind, when he wrote the couplet, Creech's Hor., Ode xxxv. lib. 1.
I blush at the dishonest show,
I die to see the wounds and scars,
Those glories of our civil wars.
[138] Thus in the MS.
Till Anna rose, and bade the Furies cease;
Let there be peace—she said, and all was peace.—Warburton.
It may be presumed that Pope varied the couplet from perceiving the impropriety of a parody on the fiat of the Creator.
[139] Dryden's Annus Mirabilis:
Old Father Thames raised up his rev'rend head.
And again, at the conclusion of his Threnodia Augustalis:
While, starting from his oozy bed,
Th' asserted ocean rears his rev'rend head.—Wakefield.
The gods of rivers are invariably represented as old men.
[140] Spenser of Father Thames:
his beard all gray
Dewed with silver drops that trickled down alway.—Wakefield.
[141] Between verse 330 and 331, originally stood these lines;
From shore to shore exulting shouts he heard,
O'er all his banks a lambent light appeared,
With sparkling flames heav'n's glowing concave shone,
Fictitious stars, and glories not her own.
He saw, and gently rose above the stream
His shining horns diffused a golden gleam:
With pearl and gold his tow'ry front was drest,
The tributes of the distant East and West.—Pope.
[142] Horns were a classical attribute of rivers,—not I think, according to the common view, as a mark of dignity, but as a symbolical expression of the fact that the principal streams, like the ocean itself, are formed from a confluence of tributaries.—Croker.
Pope's personification of the Thames is the echo of Addison's translation of a passage in Claudian, describing the deity of the Eridanus:
His head above the floods he gently reared,
And as he rose his golden horns appeared,
That on the forehead shone divinely bright
And o'er the banks diffused a yellow light:
Beneath his arm an urn supported lies
With stars embellished, and fictitious skies.
[143] Augusta was the name which the Romans at one period gave to London. The representation of the god attended by
All little rivers, which owe vassalage
To him, as to their lord, and tribute pay,
and the accompanying enumeration of the subsidiary streams, is closely imitated from the Faery Queen. Pope professes to describe the river-gods who stood round the throne of Father Thames, but he has confounded the river-gods with the rivers, and some of his epithets,—"winding Isis," "blue transparent Vandalis," "gulphy Lee,"—are not applicable to persons.
[144] The river-gods were said to be the children of Oceanus and Tethys, but in the earlier mythology, Oceanus was himself a river (not a sea), surrounding the earth, and the lesser rivers were his progeny.
[145] The Tamesis. It was a common but erroneous notion, that the appellation was formed from appending the name Isis to Thame.
[146] Warton observes that Pope has here copied and equalled the description of rivers in Spenser, Drayton, and Milton. The description is beautiful, but in some points it is deficient. "Winding Isis" and "fruitful Thame" are ill designated. No peculiar and visible image is added to the character of the streams, either interesting from beauty, or incidental circumstances. Most rivers wind and may be called fruitful, as well as the Isis and Thame. The latter part of the description is much more masterly, as every river has its distinctive mark, and that mark is picturesque. It may be said, however, that all the epithets, in a description of this sort, cannot be equally significant, but surely something more striking should have been given as circumstantially characteristic of such rivers as the Isis and Thames, than that they were "winding" and "fruitful," or of the Kennet that it was renowned for "silver eels."—Bowles.
[147] Drayton:
The crystal Trent for fords and fish renowned.—Bowles.
The Kennet is not linked by Pope to any poetical association when he simply says that it is "renowned for silver eels," but Spenser brings a delightful picture before the eye when he speaks of the
still Darent in whose waters clean
Ten thousand fishes play, and deck his pleasant stream.
[148] Addison:
Where silver lakes with verdant shadows crowned.
[149] Several of Pope's epithets are borrowed, although he has not always coupled them with the same streams to which they are applied in his originals. For "Kennet swift" Milton has "Severn swift," and for "chalky Wey" Spenser has "chalky Kennet."
[150] The Wandle.—Croker.
[151] Milton has "gulphy Dun" and "sedgy Lee," and Pope combined the characteristics. The remainder of the couplet is from Addison's translation of a passage in Claudian:
Her dropping locks the silver Tessin rears,
The blue transparent Adda next appears.
[152] Milton's Vacation Exercise:
Or sullen Mole, that runneth underneath.—Wakefield.
The Mole at particular spots, called the swallows, sinks through crevices in the chalk, and during dry seasons, when there is not sufficient water to till both the subterranean and the upper channel, the bed of the river is laid bare in parts of its course. The stream sometimes entirely disappears from Burford-bridge to the neighbourhood of Thorncroft-bridge, a distance of nearly three miles.
[153] Drayton:
And the old Lee brags of the Danish blood.—Bowles.
Pope's epithet "silent" was suggested by "the still Darent" of Spenser, and the same poet had said of the Eden that it was
——stained with blood of many a band
Of Scots and English.
[154] Addison's translation of an extract from Ovid:
While thus she rested on her arm reclined,
The hoary willows waving with the wind.
[155] The river god bowing respectfully to his human audience, before he commenced his speech, is a ludicrous idea, into which Pope was seduced by his courtly desire to represent even the deities as doing homage to Queen Anne.
[156] So Dryden, Æneis, x. 156:
The winds their breath restrain,
And the hushed waves lie flatted on the main.—Wakefield.
Pope's lines are compiled from the passage quoted by Wakefield and a couplet in the Court Prospect of Hopkins:
Unrolling waves steal softly to the shore,
They know their sovereign and they fear to roar.
[157] The Hermus is characterised by Virgil as "turbid with gold." The property was more usually ascribed to its tributary, the Pactolus, but there was no gold in either.
[158] An undoubted imitation, I think, of Dr. Bathurst's verses on Selden:
As when old Nilus, who with bounteous flows
Waters a hundred nations as he goes,
Scattering rich harvests, keeps his sacred head
Amidst the clouds still undiscovered.
Homer denominates the Nile, whose sources were unknown, a river that falls from Jupiter or heaven. And our countryman calls it sevenfold, as Ovid before him septemfluus, and Catullus still earlier septemgeminus, from the seven mouths by which its waters are discharged into the Mediterranean.—Wakefield.
[159] Originally thus in the MS.
Let Venice boast her tow'rs amidst the main,
Where the rough Adrian swells and roars in vain;
Here not a town, but spacious realms shall have
A sure foundation on the rolling wave.—Warburton.
This he altered with his usual discernment, on account of the mean conceit in the equivocal use of the word "foundation."—Wakefield.
[160] This alludes to General Stanhope's campaigns on the Ebro, and the Duke of Marlborough's on the Danube.—Croker.
In saying that British blood should no more dye foreign lands, Pope meant to furnish an argument for the Peace by intimating that the war was kept up, at the sacrifice of English life, for the benefit of other nations.
[161] In the manuscript:
O'er all the Forests shall appear no trace.
[162] And certainly sufficient ferocity is displayed even in these amusements. Cowley says,
And all his malice, all his craft is shown
In innocent wars, on beasts and birds alone.
His commentator, Dr. Hurd, remarks in a spirit that endears him to the reader, "Innocent, he means, in comparison with wars on his own kind."—Wakefield.
[163] The fifty new churches.—Pope.
[164] This seems imitated from Hopkins' Court Prospect:
As far as fair Augusta's buildings reach,
Bent, like a bow, along a peaceful beach.—Wakefield.
Cowley's Somerset House:
And here, behold, in a long bending row,
How two joint cities make one glorious bow.
Whitehall is just above that circular sweep of the Thames in the midst of which the cities of London and Westminster unite. Pope wrote in the belief that the magnificent design of Inigo Jones for the palace at Whitehall would one day be executed.
[165] Addison's translation of a passage in Claudian on the imperial palace at Rome:
Thither the kingdoms and the nations come,
In supplicating crowds to learn their doom.
To Delphi less th' inquiring worlds repair.
[166] "Once more," as in the renowned reign of Elizabeth.—Holt White.
After holding out a prospect of perpetual peace, Pope conjures up a future vision of "sueing kings," and "suppliant states," which are the consequences of war and victory.
[167] This return to the trees of Windsor Forest, his original subject, is masterly and judicious; and the whole speech of Thames is highly animated and poetical,—forcible and rich in diction, as it is copious and noble in imagery.—Bowles.
[168] Originally thus:
Now shall our fleets the bloody cross display
To the rich regions of the rising day,
Or those green isles, where headlong Titan steeps
His hissing axle in th' Atlantic deeps:
Tempt icy seas, &c.—Pope.
The original lines were rejected, probably as too nearly resembling a passage in Comus:
And the gilded car of day
His glowing axle doth allay
In the steep Atlantic stream.—Bowles.
[169] Pope has written "if obscure?" against this line in the manuscript. It is plain he meant that the trees were converted into ships, but the language is extravagant.
[170] The red cross upon the Union Jack.
[171] Waller's verses on Tea:
To the fair region where the sun does rise.
[172] "To tempt the sea" is a classical expression, significant of hazard and resolution. Dryden's Iliad:
What now remains
But that once more we tempt the wat'ry plains.—Wakefield.
[173] "Exalt" is an inefficient and prosaic word.—Wakefield.
The word is certainly not "prosaic," for no one in prose would talk of exalting a sail, but it is "inefficient," just because it is one of those deviations from common speech, which sound affected.
[174] The whole passage seems a grand improvement from Philips' Cider, book ii.:
uncontroll'd
The British navy, through the ocean vast,
Shall wave her double cross t' extremest climes
Terrific, and return with od'rous spoils
Of Araby well fraught, or Indus' wealth,
Pearl and barbaric gold.—Wakefield.
Pope also drew upon Addison's lines to William III.:
Where'er the waves in restless errors roll,
The sea lies open now to either pole:
Now may we safely use the northern gales,
And in the polar circle spread our sails:
Or deep in southern climes, secure from wars,
New lands explore, and sail by other stars;
Fetch uncontrolled each labour of the sun,
And make the product of the world our own.
Towards the close of 1712 Tickell published his poem on the Prospect of Peace. "The description," Pope wrote to Caryll, "of the several parts of the world in regard to our trade has interfered with some lines of my own in Windsor Forest, though written before I saw his. I transcribe both, and desire your sincere judgment whether I ought not to strike out mine, either as they seem too like his, or as they are inferior." The close resemblance arose from their having copied a common original. The couplet of Pope on the West India islands, which he subsequently omitted, has no counterpart in Tickell, because it was not derived from the passage in Addison.
[175] In poetical philosophy the crude material from which jewels and the precious metals were formed, was supposed to be ripened into maturity by the sun. Tickell has the same idea:
Here nearer suns prepare the ripening gem,
And here the ore, &c.
[176] This was suggested by a couplet of Denham's on the same subject in his Cooper's Hill:
Nor are his blessings to his banks confined,
But free and common as the sea or wind.—Wakefield.
[177] A wish that London may be made a free Port.—Pope.
[178] This resembles Waller in his panegyric on Cromwell:
While by your valour and your bounteous mind,
Nations, divided by the sea, are joined.—Wakefield.
[179] Better in the first edition, "Whose naked youth," and in the Miscellanies better still, "While naked youth."—Wakefield.
[180] "Admire" was formerly applied to anything which excited surprise, whether the surprise was coupled with commendation or censure, or was simply a sentiment of wonder. Thus Milton, using the word in this last sense, says, Par. Lost, i. 690:
Let none admire
That riches grow in hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.
"Admire" has the same signification in Windsor Forest. Pope means that the savages would be astonished at "our speech, our colour, and our strange attire," and not that they would admire them in our present laudatory sense of the term, which would be contrary to the fact. "A fair complexion," says Adam Smith, "is a shocking deformity upon the coast of Guinea. Thick lips and a flat nose are a beauty."
[181] As Peru was particularly famous for its long succession of Incas, and Mexico for many magnificent works of massy gold, there is great propriety in fixing the restoration of the grandeur of each to that object for which each was once so remarkable.—Warton.
[182] Rage in Virgil is bound in "brazen bonds," and Envy is tormented by "the snakes of Ixion." These coincidences are specified by Wakefield.
[183] Sir J. Beaumont's Bosworth Field:
Beneath her feet pale envy bites her chain,
And snaky discord whets her sting in vain.
[184] Hor., Ode iii. lib. 3:
Quo, Musa, tendis? desine pervicax
Referre sermones Deorum et
Magna modis tenuare parvis.—Warburton.
Addison's translation of Horace's Ode:
But hold, my muse, forbear thy tow'ring flight
Nor bring the secrets of the gods to light.
Pope says that he will not presume "to touch on Albion's golden days," and "bring the scenes of opening fate to light," oblivious that the speech which Father Thames has just delivered is entirely made up of these two topics. As might be inferred from their feebleness, the lines from ver. 426 formed part of the original Windsor Forest, with the exception of the couplet beginning "Where Peace descending," which is of another order of poetry. The second line is exquisite.
[185] He adopted one or two hints, and especially the turn of the compliment to Lord Lansdowne, from the conclusion of Addison's Letter to Lord Halifax:
But I've already troubled you too long,
Nor dare attempt a more adventurous song.
My humble verse demands a softer theme,
A painted meadow, or a purling stream:
Unfit for heroes; whom immortal lays
And lines like Virgil's, or like yours, should praise.
[186] It is observable that our author finishes this poem with the first line of his Pastorals, as Virgil closed his Georgics with the first line of his Eclogues. The preceding couplet scarcely rises to mediocrity, and seems modelled from Dryden's version of the passage imitated:
Whilst I at Naples pass my peaceful days,
Affecting studies of less noisy praise.—Wakefield.
The conclusion is feeble and flat. The whole should have ended with the speech of Thames.—Warton.