FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Recommendatory poems addressed to Pope are without exception dull, insipid productions, which never rise above mediocrity, and sometimes fall below it. Only those are reprinted here which he himself prefixed to his works. The first seven appeared in the quarto of 1717, and the remaining two in the octavo of 1736.
[2] Legally speaking, of Buckinghamshire; for he would not take the title of Buckingham, under a fear that there was lurking somewhere or other a claim to that title amongst the connections of the Villiers family. He was a pompous grandee, who lived in uneasy splendour, and, as a writer, most extravagantly overrated: accordingly, he is now forgotten. Such was his vanity, and his ridiculous mania for allying himself with royalty, that he first of all had the presumption to court the Princess (afterwards Queen) Anne. Being rejected, he then offered himself to the illegitimate daughter of James II. by the daughter of Sir Charles Sedley. She was as ostentatious as himself, and accepted him.—De Quincey.
Pope commenced the interchange of praise with the Duke of Buckingham by celebrating him in the Essay on Criticism. The return verses of the Duke are little better than drivelling. His Essay on Satire and Essay on Poetry are his principal works, but though one was retouched by Dryden and the other by Pope, they are very second-rate performances. The Duke died in February, 1721, aged 72.
[3] Anne, wife of Heneage, fifth Earl of Winchelsea, and daughter of Sir William Kingsmill. She died on Aug. 5, 1720.—Croker.
She wrote a tragedy called Aristomenes, or the Royal Shepherd, to which Pope may be supposed to allude in his letter to Caryll of Dec. 15, 1713, where he says, "I was invited to dinner to my Lady Winchelsea, and after dinner to hear a play read, at both which I sat in great disorder with sickness at my head and stomach." Pope omitted her rugged, bald, prosaic verses in 1736, probably because they were intrinsically worthless, and because the name of the author had ceased to carry any weight. In 1727 and 1732 they were printed with Pope's poems in Lintot's Miscellany, and doubtless with the sanction of Pope himself.
[4] These verses, with the heading, "To my friend Mr. Pope, on his Pastorals," originally appeared in 1709, in the same volume of Tonson's Miscellany which contained the Pastorals themselves. In the fifth edition of Lintot's Miscellany, 1727, and in the sixth edition, 1732, the poem of Wycherley, who was then dead, is prefixed to Pope's pieces, and bears the title, "To Mr. Pope at sixteen years old, on occasion of his Pastorals." This was untrue, and seems designed to convey a false idea of Pope's precocity. The lines were not addressed to him till he was twenty, as appears from Wycherley's letter of May 18, 1708, in which he says, "I have made a compliment in verse upon the printing your Pastorals which you shall see when you see me." Dennis, and others, accused Pope of being the author of the flattering tribute. The poet appealed in refutation of the charge to Wycherley's letters, and added that the first draught, and corrected copy of the panegyric, which were still extant in the Harley library in Wycherley's handwriting, would show "that if they received any alteration from Mr. Pope it was in the omission of some of his own praises." Documents to which nobody had access proved nothing. Mr. Croker considered that there was strong internal evidence from the smoothness of the rhythm, the antithetical style, and the nature of the commendation, that Pope must have assisted in reducing the lines to their present shape. The mannerism of both authors can be clearly traced in them. They have the stamp of Wycherley, improved by Pope.
[5] If Wycherley had been capable of anything of the kind, this, and the previous couplet, might have been written after the Essay on Criticism, but surely could not have been inspired by a perusal of the manuscript of the Pastorals.—Croker.
[6] This line was omitted by Pope in 1736.
[7] From Boileau's Art of Poetry, Chant ii. v. 1.—Warton.
[8] This triplet was omitted by Pope in the edition of 1736.
[9] Francis Knapp, of Chilton, in Berkshire, Gent. He was of St. John's College, Oxford, and afterwards demy of Magdalen College.—Cunningham.
He graduated M.A. April 30, 1695, and as he could hardly have been an M.A. before he was twenty-five, he would have been forty-five at the date of these verses. There is a rhyming "Epistle to Mr. B——, by Mr. Fr. Knapp, of Magdalen College, in Oxford," in Tonson's Fourth Miscellany.—Croker.
He died in, or before 1727; for in one of Lintot's advertisements of that year he is described as the "late Rev. Mr. Francis Knapp, Dean of Killala."
[10] There are several lines in this copy of verses, which could not be endured in a common magazine. So much is the public ear, and public taste improved.—Warton.
[11] The next six lines were left out by Pope in 1736.
[12] Hough was chosen president of Magdalen College in April, 1687, in defiance of the mandate sent by James II. to the fellows, requiring them to elect Farmer, a profligate and a papist. The illegal proceedings of the king in dispossessing the protestants, and filling the college with romanists, alarmed and enraged the country, and contributed largely to the Revolution of 1688. In May, 1690, Hough became Bishop of Oxford. He was translated to Lichfield and Coventry in 1699, and to Worcester in 1717, where he remained till his death in May, 1743, at the age of ninety-three.
[13] By far the most elegant, and best turned compliment of all addressed to our author, happily borrowed from a fine Greek epigram, and most gracefully applied.—Warton.
There is little merit in borrowing a compliment from the Anthology, and the felicity of its application in the present instance may be questioned, notwithstanding the emphatic praise of Warton. The mythological basis of the lines, which is appropriate in the Greek, becomes childish when adopted by an English poet, and the point of the piece, which turns upon the assumption that Pope's translation was vastly superior to the original, is too extravagant to be pleasing. Fenton was a scholar, and could not have thought what he said.
[14] "I would add," says Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Parnell, "that the description of barrenness in his verses to Pope was borrowed from Secundus, but lately searching for the passage, which I had formerly read, I could not find it." The borrowed description is the only tolerable part of the poem, which is in a clumsy strain, unlike the usual easy style of Parnell.
[15] He was only son to the Lord Chancellor Harcourt, and died in 1720.—Roscoe.
[16] It was paying pitiful homage to rank to call an indifferent versifier, like the Duke of Buckingham, "great Sheffield," and pretend that he was the instructor and model of Pope.
[17] The comparison of the three Graces, admiring the reflection of themselves in Pope's works, to Narcissus enamoured of his own face in the stream, is a ludicrous conceit, and the execution is on a par with the idea.
[18] This paragraph refers to Pope's Temple of Fame.
[19] Pope's genius was not epic, and the only epic poem he composed was his juvenile effort, Alcander, which he burnt because it was too worthless to be preserved.
[20] This and the concluding verse are from the Temple of Fame.
[21] These lines first appeared in 1726, in the translation of the Odyssey, where they were appended by Broome to the final note. Pope inserted them in the 8vo edition of his works in 1736.
[22] This was a compliment our author could not take much pleasure in reading; for he could not value himself on his edition of Shakespeare.—Warton.
[23] The comparison on both sides is wanting in truth. The superficial researches, and meagre notes of Pope did not renovate Shakespeare, and no second Raphael has repainted the pictures of Raphael the first. Fitness of praise was a merit which the writers of commendatory verses commonly despised. Their study was to outvie each other in the grossness, and insincerity of their flattery.
[24] Odyssey, lib. xvi.—Broome.
[25] Pope inserted this tribute among the Recommendatory poems prefixed to the 8vo edition of his works, 1736. Lyttelton was not raised to the peerage till November, 1757, twenty-seven years after the date of his verses.
[26] Warton prefers Fenton's verses, but in my opinion these lines of Lord Lyttelton's are much superior to all the other recommendatory verses. They are as elegant and correct in themselves, as the sentiments they convey appear sincere, and worthy an ingenuous, cultivated, and liberal mind. There is a small inaccuracy in one or two expressions, and perhaps it would have been better if Virgil's speech, which forms the conclusion, had been compressed.—Bowles.