The "story part" of Windsor Forest is a mosaic of translated scraps from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The fictions of heathen mythology, which had been repeated to satiety, which exhibited no invention, and had no charm for modern imaginations, are worse than an excrescence in the midst of English prospects, sports, and history. The bad effect does not stop with the puerilities themselves, but they communicate an air of weakness and unreality to the general texture of the work.
The well-merited praise which Bowles bestowed upon "the historical part" of the poem is inapplicable to the ill drawn character of William the Conqueror. Pope saw in him only a devastator and a tyrant. He had not caught a glimpse of the robust will, and masculine genius, which conquered and consolidated a great country. The vigour, daring, and sagacity which tempered the grosser traits in the mind of William are suppressed, and the masterly warrior and statesman is reduced to an inglorious spoiler of peasants, and hunter of deer. The advantages which accrued to England from the conquest itself were unknown to Pope, who fancied that its principal result was to destroy agriculture, and impoverish the people. He was not aware that it introduced a more advanced civilisation, imparted new energy to a backward stagnant population, opened up to them a vista of grander views, and repaid transitory suffering by vast and permanent benefits.
A fourth element in Windsor Forest is not noticed by Bowles. Pope considered that the "reflections upon life and political institutions" were the distinguishing excellence of Cooper's Hill. He emulated in this respect his master's merits, surpassed him in polish of style, and fell below him in strength of thought. Hunting the hare suggests to Pope this poor and false conclusion:
Beasts urged by us their fellow beasts pursue,
And learn of man each other to undo.
How much more weighty is the sentiment expressed by Denham, when the stag endeavours to take refuge in the herd:
The herd, unkindly wise,
Or chases him from thence, or from him flies;
Like a declining statesman, left forlorn
To his friends' pity, and pursuers' scorn,
With shame remembers, while himself was one
Of the same herd, himself the same had done.
The terse satire upon Henry VIII. is a still better specimen of Denham's moralisings. As he surveys the prospect round Cooper's Hill he is reminded of the dissolution of the monasteries, by the sight of the place where once stood a chapel which had shared the fate of its parent abbey. This rouses his indignation, and he thus proceeds:
Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous dire offence,
What crime could any Christian king incense
To such a rage? Was't luxury or lust?
Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just?
Were these their crimes?—they were his own much more;
But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor,
Who having spent the treasures of his crown,
Condemns their luxury to feed his own.
Thus he the church at once protects and spoils:
But princes' swords are sharper than their styles.
The last couplet is a contrast between the destroying energy of Henry VIII., and the impotence of his book against Luther.
Windsor Forest has rather more variety in its versification than is usual with Pope. The poem opens with one of those breaks in the metre which were incessant in the older rhymsters, and which were gradually abjured by their successors.