Then follows in this volume the playful treatment of a quarrel between friends, in Pope’s “Rape of the Lock.” Lord Petre, aged twenty, audaciously cut from the head of Miss Arabella Fermor, daughter of Mr. Fermor of Tusmore, a lock of her hair while she was playing cards in the Queen’s rooms at Hampton Court. Pope’s friend, Mr. Caryll, suggested to him that a mock heroic treatment of the resulting quarrel might restore peace, and Pope wrote a poem in two cantos, which was published in a Miscellany in 1712, Pope’s age then being twenty-four. But as epic poems required supernatural machinery, Pope added afterwards to his mock epic the machinery of sylphs and gnomes, suggested to him by the reading of a French story, “Le Comte de Gabalis,” by the Abbé Villars. Here there were sylphs of the air and gnomes of the earth, little spirits who would be in right proportion to the substance of his poem, which was refashioned into five cantos, and republished as we have it now in February 1714.
“John Gilpin” was written by William Cowper in the year 1782, when Lady Austin was lodging in the Vicarage at Olney, and spent every evening with Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, cheering Cowper greatly by her liveliness. One evening she told the story of John Gilpin’s ride in a way that tickled the poet’s fancy, set him laughing when he woke up in the night, and obliged him to turn it next day into ballad rhyme. Mrs. Unwin’s son sent it to the Public Advertiser, for the poet’s corner. It was printed in that newspaper, and thought no more of until about three years later. Then it was suggested to a popular actor named Henderson, who gave entertainments of his own, that this piece would tell well among his recitations. He introduced it into his entertainments, and soon all the town was running after John Gilpin as madly as the six gentlemen and the post-boy.
John Gilpin’s flight is followed in this volume by the flight of Tam o’ Shanter. Burns wrote “Tam o’ Shanter” at Elliesland, and himself considered it the best of all his poems. He told the story to Captain Grose, as it was current among the people in his part of the country, its scene laid almost on the spot where he was born. Captain Grose, the antiquary, who was collecting materials for his “Antiquities of Scotland,” published in 1789–91, got Burns to versify it and give it to him. The poem made its first appearance, therefore, in Captain Grose’s book. Mrs. Burns told of it that it was the work of a day. Burns was most of the day on his favourite walk by the river, where his wife and some of the children joined him in the afternoon. Mrs. Burns saw that her husband was busily engaged “crooning to himsell,” and she loitered behind with the little ones among the broom. Presently she was attracted by the poet’s strange and wild gesticulations; he seemed agonised with an ungovernable joy. He was reciting very loud. Every circumstance suggested to heighten the impression of fear in the lines following,
“By this time he was ’cross the ford
Where in the snaw the chapman smoored,” etc.,
was taken from local tradition. Shanter was the real name of a farm near Kirkoswald, then occupied by a Douglas Grahame, who was much of Tam’s character, and was well content to be called by his country neighbours Tam o’ Shanter for the rest of his life, after Burns had made the name of the farm immortal.
Our selection ends with two pieces by Thomas Hood, whose “Tale of a Trumpet” is luxuriant with play of wit that has its earnest side. Hood died in 1845.
A Note upon the Game of Ombre is added, which is founded upon the description of the game in a little book—“The Court Gamester”—which instructed card-players in the reigns of the first Georges. In the “Rape of the Lock” there is a game of ombre played through to the last trick. That note will enable any reader to follow Belinda’s play. It will also enable any one who may care to do so to restore to a place among our home amusements a game which carried all before it in Queen Anne’s day, and which is really, when cleared of its gambling details, as good a domestic game for three players as cribbage or piquet is for two. My “Court Gamester,” which was in its fifth edition in 1728, after devoting its best energies to ombre, contented its readers in fewer pages with the addition only of piquet and chess.
Obsolete words and words of Scottish dialect, with a few more as to the meaning of which some readers might be uncertain, will be found explained in the Glossary that ends this volume.
CHAUCER’S
Manciple’s Tale of Phœbus and the Crow
MODERNISED BY LEIGH HUNT.