Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.
Howell writes, p. 290, "'Tis a powerful sex:—they were too strong for the first, the strongest and wisest man that was; they must needs be strong, when one hair of a woman can draw more than an hundred pair of oxen."
Pope's description of the death of the lamb, in his "Essay on Man," is finished with the nicest touches, and is one of the finest pictures our poetry exhibits. Even familiar as it is to our ear, we never examine it but with undiminished admiration.
The lamb, thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
After pausing on the last two fine verses, will not the reader smile that I should conjecture the image might originally have been discovered in the following humble verses in a poem once considered not as contemptible:
A gentle lamb has rhetoric to plead,
And when she sees the butcher's knife decreed,
Her voice entreats him not to make her bleed.
DR. KING'S Mully of Mountown.
This natural and affecting image might certainly have been observed by Pope, without his having perceived it through the less polished lens of the telescope of Dr. King. It is, however, a similarity, though it may not be an imitation; and is given as an example of that art in composition which can ornament the humblest conception, like the graceful vest thrown over naked and sordid beggary.
I consider the following lines as strictly copied by Thomas Warton:
The daring artist
Explored the pangs that rend the royal breast,
Those wounds that lurk beneath the tissued vest.
T. WARTON on Shakspeare.
Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Defence of Poesie," has the same image. He writes, "Tragedy openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue."