[1514] Celebrated men are aware that their reputation spreads wide, and whether fame is valuable or worthless, "all that is felt of it" does not "begin and end in the small circle of friends and foes."
[1515] The men of renown,—the Shakespeares, Bacons, and Newtons,—can never be "empty shades" while we have the works which were the fruit of their prodigious intellects. When the wealth of a great mind is preserved to posterity we possess a principal part of the man, and if in the next world he takes no cognisance of his fame in this, it is we that are the empty shades to him; he is a substance and a power to us.
[1516] Wakefield says that "but for his political bias Pope would have written, 'A Marlb'rough living.'" But Marlborough died in 1722, and the point of Pope's line consisted in opposing the example of a living man to a dead.
[1517] The "wit" is not to be taken here in its narrow modern sense of a jester. Pope is deriding fame in general, and divides famous men into two classes,—"heroes and the wise." The wise, such as Shakespeare, Bacon, and Newton, are compared to feathers, which are flimsy and showy; and the heroes, who are the scourges of mankind, are compared to rods.
[1518] "Honest" was formerly used in a less confined sense than at present, but the word has never been adequate to designate "the noblest work of God."
[1519] Pope has hitherto spoken of all fame. He now speaks of bad fame, and this was never supposed to be an element of happiness.
[1520] He alludes to the disinterment of the bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton on Jan. 30, 1661, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I. The putrid corpses were hung for the day upon a gibbet at Tyburn, were decapitated at night, and the heads fixed on the front of Westminster Hall. The trunks were buried in a hole dug near the gibbet.
[1521] Marcellus was an opponent of Cæsar, and a partisan of Pompey. After the battle of Pharsalia he retired to Mitylene, was pardoned by Cæsar at the request of the senate, and assassinated by an attendant on his way back to Rome. His moral superiority over Cæsar is conjecture. Warton mentions that "by Marcellus Pope was said to mean the Duke of Ormond," a man of small abilities, and a tool of Bolingbroke and Oxford. He fled from England at the death of Queen Anne, joined the court of the Pretender, and being attainted had to pass the rest of his life abroad. He died at Madrid, Nov. 16, 1745, aged 94. One version of the couplet in the MS. has the names of Walpole, and the jacobite member of parliament, Shippen:
And more contentment honest Sh[ippen] feels
Than W[alpole] with a senate at his heels.
[1522] So Lord Lansdowne of Cato: