Alexander pope the major works

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICSfollowed, including An Essay on Criticism 1711, Windsor Forest 1713, and the five-canto version of The Rape of the Lock.. However, the appearance of the first Dunc

OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS

followed, including An Essay on Criticism (1711), Windsor Forest (1713), and the five-canto version of The Rape of the Lock Pope then embarked on a translation of the Iliad (1715-20), which together with the Odyssey (1725-6) left him financially secure His

position as the major living English poet was confirmed by the appearance of his Works in 1717 There followed a break in creative activity, during which Pope edited Shakespeare (1725) However,

the appearance of the first Dunciad (1728) marked the beginning of

a brilliant new phase, including the imitations of Horace, the Essay

on Man, and the epistles to various friends In 1742 Pope added a new fourth book to The Dunciad, and the complete work was

published in 1743 Pope spent the last twenty-five years of his life

at his villa in Twickenham, devoting much of his time to his celebrated garden and grotto He died in 1744.

PAT ROGERS, DeBartolo Professor in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida, has written many books on Augustan satire including Grub Street (1972), Literature and Popular Culture

in Eighteenth-Century England (1985), The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (2004), and Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts (2005).

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OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS

ALEXANDER POPE

The Major Works

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

PAT ROGERS

OXFORD

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1 3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 2

Introduction ixAcknowledgements xxiiiChronology xxivNote on the Text xxviiPastorals

An Essay on Criticism 17Sappho to Phaon 40Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture 46Windsor Forest 49

The Guardian, no 173 62

The Wife of Bath from Chaucer 66The Rape of the Lock 77

To Belinda on the Rape of the Lock 100

Letter to Martha Blount, November 1714 101The Temple of Fame 103

A Farewell to London in the Year 1715 118Epistle to Mr Jervas 120Epistle to Miss Blount, on her Leaving the Town after the

Coronation 122

A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge 124

A Further Account of the Condition of Edmund Curll 128Letter to Lord Burlington, November 1716 134Eloisa to Abelard 137Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady 147Letter to Teresa and Martha Blount, September 1717 150Letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1718 151The Iliad, Book XVIII 155

To Mr Gay 173

To Mr Addison 174Epistle to Robert Earl of Oxford 176

I

Letter to Swift, August 1723 177Letter to Martha Blount, 22 June 1724 179Preface to the Works of Shakespeare 183

Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry 195

Letter to Swift, 28 November 1729 239Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton 242

An Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington 242

An Epistle to Allen Lord Bathurst 250The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated 265

An Essay on Man 270Letter to Swift, 20 April 1733 309The Fourth Satire of Dr John Donne Versified 311

An Epistle to Sir Richard Temple, Lord Cobham 319The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated 327The Second Satire of the First Book of Horace Imitated

in the Manner of Mr Pope 332Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot 336

An Epistle to a Lady 350The Second Satire of Dr John Donne Versified 358Letter to Swift, 25 March 1736 361The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated 363The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated 372The Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated 385The First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated 389Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue I 394Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue II 400Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog 408Epitaph for One who would not be Buried in

Westminster Abbey 409Letter to Hugh Bethel, 19 March 1744 409The Dunciad 411Epitaph on Bounce 572Conversations with Joseph Spence 573Notes 575

Further Reading 710Biographical Index 714Index of Titles 734Index of First Line

Index of Correspondents 738

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

THE aim of this volume is to give a representative selection of Pope'smost important work His chief lifelong vocation was that of the poet,and this is reflected by the inclusion of all his major poems, omittingonly the translations of Homer In addition, a characteristic sample ofhis prose is provided, including satires, pamphlets, and periodical writ-ing His criticism is represented by the influential preface to his edition

of Shakespeare Finally, the personal side of his work is illustrated byshort passages from his conversations with Joseph Spence, and byexamples of his wide-ranging correspondence In all categories thereare inevitably omissions, caused by the demands of space Pope is ahighly allusive poet, and even with a number of self-denying ordinances

I have been obliged to annotate the text quite fully in order to enable

a reader to follow its sense

Among the poems there are several casualties which are particularly

to be regretted It has not been possible to find room for some of the

early translations (although Sappho to Phaon is included); for Messiah

and the Ode on St Cecilia's Day; for the original version of The Rape of

the Lock and The Dunciad; and for many shorter items which

demon-strate Pope's skill in occasional verse, especially in ballads, epigrams,and epitaphs The largest gap, as already indicated, surrounds thetranslations of Homer, but a single book of the Iliad is included to givesome sense of Pope's attempt to bring 'primitive' epic within Augustannorms The drama, which is nearly all collaborative, has had to beexcluded However, Peri Bathous is present in full to illustrate theScriblerian carping against solemn folly, as well as the prose squibswhich emerged from Pope's prolonged struggle with the rascally book-seller Curll As for the correspondence, ten typical letters are given infull, and whilst they cannot speak adequately for the entire body ofover two thousand letters they do show some of his best effects in thefamiliar epistle The items are printed in chronological order, regard-less of their literary category (except for the extracts from Spence), toenable a reader to follow the shape of Pope's career Brief rationalebehind these editorial decisions will be found in the Note on the Text,

p xxvii below

Pope has often been termed the first truly professional poet in lish This is a fair judgement, even though (as Pope realized soonerthan anyone) his poetic father John Dryden had led the way In the

Eng-X I N T R O D U C T I O N

review of Pope's life and writings which follows, I shall try to give amore detailed justification for this description; at this point it is enough

to observe that Pope had a peculiarly acute awareness of the traditions

he inherited, as well as a clear-sighted vision of where he stood inliterary history His dealings with the book trade mark a significantmoment in the development of the literary profession This can be seen

in the care with which Pope prepared his texts and supervised theirappearance in print; his choice of outlets and occasions for publication;and his battles with the redoubtable Curll in print and in the lawcourts.Curll was a key figure in the evolution of print culture, a never-failingirritant to Pope but also an essential combatant in the battle of the bookswhich helped to produce the literary market-place of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries Apart from the ruse by which Pope tricked Curllinto producing the first collection of a writer's private letters in 1735,

we might consider the ideas at stake in the pamphlets against Curllprinted below, pp 124-34

The great Popian scholar Maynard Mack has used an epigraph fromThomas Mann: 'Who is the poet? He whose life is symbolic.' Theapplication can be made in several ways: Mack probably had in mindthe way in which Pope inhabited both the garden and the city, activelyengaged in the political fisticuffs of his turbulent times and yet holdingpart of himself in reserve The emblem of this divided life is the grotto

he created at Twickenham This was a shrine to family life and toretirement, garnished with a dense array of historical and mythologicalreferences, but it was also a repository of geological discoveries It wasset in a secluded garden, but this Eden was itself planted in an almostsuburban location, only a matter of miles upstream from London.Pope's villa offers itself as a miniature of the grand country houseowned by his aristocratic friends like Burlington and Bathurst But his'estate' ran not to thousands of acres of protected parkland, but to 'fiverented acres' on a busy road, directly abutting on to the Thames Inthe same way, Pope's situation as a Catholic meant that he was notquite a full citizen of the realm, someone almost in the situation of anaturalized alien His invalid condition ensured that he could partici-pate in the business of life only through writing It is no accident thatthis successful careerist, with his grand acquaintance and his pamperedvisits to the stateliest homes of England, should have been personallydispossessed, disinherited, and deprived; hence, among other things,the ability of his poetry to enter into the feelings of women, whosesocial and physical position his own mimicked Hence, too, the symbolicmarginality of his role as a poet: famous, widely respected, and even

feared, Pope still had at his command only the illusory weapons of theimagination.

'The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth', he wrote in the preface

to his first collection in 1717 He duly took part in the contest ofancients and moderns, originality and imitation, Tory and Whig, cityand court, which eddied around him as Stuart gave way to Hanoverian

No great work in English literature, with the possible exception of

Shakespearian comedy, is so explicitly a battle of the sexes as The Rape

of the Lock No work enacts more directly the political takeover of a

nation than does the Dunciad, with its coup d'etat by the all-conqueringforces of dulness But these are mythical battles Pope imagined themthe more keenly because he had so little power to affect the real course

of events, whether the great issues of state or the domestic dramas ofsexual politics—where he was forced to remain on the sidelines as amaimed non-combatant Pope thus prefigures the willed self-positioning of the Romantic and modern poet, asserting the spiritualprimacy of the fictive in the face of the primacy of raw life in theeveryday world For Pope this was not a pose, but a genuine existentialdestiny

Moreover, Pope is a professional poet in a more obvious and directsense than the discussion so far reveals It is noteworthy that the earlymasters of English fiction—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne,Smollett—had all been otherwise employed before they found thenovel, or the novel found them Pope is the great exception to this rule.Where the age often cultivated a pose of genteel amateurism, he stoodout as a serious player in the literary market-place From an early age

he was dedicated, purposeful, single-minded; he brought the intensity

of a specialist to his vocation He dabbled in drama, dipped his toe atentative inch into scholarship, and threw off the occasional essay incriticism or satiric squib in prose (He also wrote some remarkableletters but they were—or affected to be—at the informal end of thewriter's craft.) All his deepest energies were monopolized by poetry.The two translations of Homer are considerable works, but in so far

as they are Pope, rather than as true renderings of the original Weneed not root about to find and assemble from disjecta membra 'theessential Pope' In his works we find his very self and voice

His life is in many ways an interesting one; and his literary career issplendid and historic But from childhood on, his biography is only abackground to the art Alexander Pope was born on 21 May 1688 inthe heart of the City of London, at his parents' home on the southside of Lombard Street It was a prosperous area, still associated with

xii I N T R O D U C T I O N

money-lenders, but with bustling markets around to give it a less bleakand institutional air than it has today Across the street were twochurches destroyed in the Great Fire, just a generation back, and SirChristopher Wren was then restoring them Pope's father and motherwere both well into their forties: indeed, his father was on the point ofretiring from business He had done well enough out of the linen trade

to amass a respectable stock of capital, perhaps £10,000, comparable

to thirty times as much today

This sounds like a stable enough family; but there were cracks inthe placid bourgeois front Alexander Pope senior, born an Anglican,had become a Roman Catholic; his second wife Editha (the poet'smother) belonged to the same faith Apart, possibly, from 1558, whenQueen Elizabeth succeeded Mary, the year 1688 was the least pro-pitious moment in English history for a Catholic to enter the world.James II was forced from the throne within months of Pope's birth,and his religion was to be from now on an officially proscribed un-English activity As Pope grew up under William and Mary, he foundhimself a member of a beleaguered and unpopular minority Onereason for his father's early retirement, in fact, was the need to complywith anti-Catholic legislation which sought to drive papists from thecapital The Pope family moved first to Hammersmith, at this time anouter suburb, and then to the country in Berkshire, where the secondMrs Pope had connections When young Alexander was about 10 hecame with his parents to Binfield, deep in the forest between Windsorand Reading It was the first settled home he had known, and hisrural surroundings were to furnish a classic ground from which hisimagination would develop He immersed himself in the pastoral, asperhaps only a sensitive boy would do when plucked from the noise ofthe town and the effigies of prejudice Robert Hooke's primly doricMonument stood

pointing at the skies, Like a tall bully

I N T R O D U C T I O N

second great handicap which fell to Pope's lot At the age of about 12,

he contracted a form of tuberculosis of the bone, probably as a result

of drinking infected milk This produced severe curvature of the spine,and progressively affected his mobility The first onset of the illness(which was soon to be identified by Dr Percival Pott, hence its latername 'Pott's disease') lasted until Pope was around 16 After that heseems to have found a way of living with his disorder, and it was only

in middle age that he submitted to the state of an outright invalid But

he remained dwarfish in build (perhaps four feet six inches tall), andunderwent a variety of humiliations throughout life He needed help

to perform ordinary functions like dressing and undressing; he sufferedexcruciating torments every time he travelled along the bumpy roads

of eighteenth-century England; and a normal sex life was debarredhim In his later years he had asthma, recurrent migraine, heart trouble,and an eye condition, as well as a urethral stricture which involved apainful operation in 1740 Most people know that Pope was a hunch-back and some awareness of the fact hovers behind our reading of hispoems But we generally make too little allowance for it We are con-

scious of his physique as it makes for oddity (and hence, perhaps, his

prickly nature and satiric leanings); we too rarely comprehend the sheerpain, inconvenience, and embarrassment to which his 'crazy carcass'put him A medical case-history cannot explain away Pope's flaws, as

a man or a writer; nor, for that matter, can his 'long Disease' beidentified with his creativity But it is critically prudent, as well ashumane, to remind ourselves of the obstacles he had to face There is

a hint of compensatory over-achievement in Pope's career, but weought to be clear just what was involved—not a freakish father or abad prep school, but the condition (doubly so) of a total outsider.Excluded by his physical condition from normal education, Pope had

to rely on his own resources His bookish tastes led him to the greatliterature of Greece and Rome, and in his youth it seems to have beenthe epic and pastoral writers who meant more than moral or satiricpoets In English his masters were, as they remained, Spenser, Shake-speare, Milton, and Dryden (who died just as Pope approached histwelfth birthday) But his interests were eclectic enough to promptimitations of such different models as Chaucer and the influentialseventeenth-century lyricists Cowley and Waller Nobody at this datefully understood Chaucer's metric, and 'imitating' his poetry involvedgreater liberties than we readily countenance today The lines 'Women

ben full of Ragerie', written c.1702, have a callow mocking air, which

combines pseudo-medieval inflexions like stoppen and callen with pure

xiii

Augustan attitudes ('Miss star'd') But even a century later Wordsworththought it worth retaining in his versions of Chaucer 'sprinklings ofantiquity' to supply a historical local colour At all events, Pope's longtutelage did him no harm in the end He acquired a patron in Berkshire

—Sir William Trumbull, a lawyer, ambassador, and government ter who had retired to a life of dignified idleness a few miles fromBinfield At the age of about 17, Pope was strong enough to face thehurly-burly of the capital, and there he gained the notice of litterateurs

minis-in the coffee-houses, notably the playwright Wycherley and the

physician-poet Garth, author of The Dispensary The youthful Pope

had a talent for charming old people, which suggests that a certain sciously winsome quality may have formed part of his make-up.These men, along with other established literary figures, helped tousher him into print in 1709 The leading publisher Jacob Tonson

con-included various items, including the four Pastorals, in a volume of

miscellanies which took its place in a highly regarded series The

virtu-osity of the Pastorals would have been apparent in any mode of

publi-cation, but here they were set off to the maximum advantage Within

a year or two Pope had reached the fringe of the Spectator circle, then

at the pinnacle of all literary affairs He soon afterwards made theacquaintance of Jonathan Swift and John Gay: one consequence wasthe formation of the Scriblerus Club, to which Thomas Parnell and

Dr John Arbuthnot were also admitted The club perfected a kind ofhigh-spirited spoofing, involving parody, intellectual practical jokes,

and an onslaught upon all things pedantic The roots of The Dunciad,

as indeed of Gulliver's Travels, may well lie in this convivial association

At the same time Pope was coming to know some of the greatest figures

in the land, including the two Tory statesmen, Oxford and Bolingbroke,who dominated political life Every year brought a fresh triumph for

Pope: in 1711,An Essay on Criticism, both elegant and incisive; in 1712,

the original Rape of the Locke in its two-canto form; in 1713, Windsor

Forest, celebrating the end of the long-drawn Marlborough wars and

also evoking the scenes of Pope's boyhood; then in 1714 the revised

Rape of the Lock, wonderfully enriched by its expansion to five cantos.

All these poems, together with Eloisa to Abelard, appeared in a

hand-some folio collection in 1717, which provided a conspectus of his career

to date

This pattern of unbroken success might well have been disturbed bythe events of 1714, when Queen Anne died and the Tory ministry fell.Certainly the Hanoverian regime promised a different set of values,and it was one seen by many creative people as hostile to their purposes

Swift was exiled to Dublin, landlocked in a safely remote deanery when

he had envisaged himself as Bishop of Bath and Wells (later, no doubt,

of London or Winchester) Gay, too, went through many years ofneglect and self-pity Even the robust Dr Arbuthnot had to endure theloss of his court post and his lodgings in St James's Palace But Popehad no official encumbrances He was already plotting his own road to

independence: a verse translation of the Iliad, begun during the Tory

ascendancy The first instalment appeared in June 1715, and thereafterthe poem came out in segments until its completion in 1720 The Iliadconfirmed Pope's now unchallengeable standing as the leading poet ofhis day It also laid the foundations of a secure and even comfortableway of life

Up to this time Pope had not made very much money For most ofhis work he had been paid between £15 and £30, and the original

copyright of The Rape of the Locke earned him no more than £7 But the Iliad was published by private subscription, and Pope organized a

massive campaign to attract names for his list He also obtained larly good terms from his bookseller, Lintot, which meant that he took

particu-a higher proportion of the profits thparticu-an wparticu-as customparticu-ary (Lintot hoped toget his own returns from a separate trade edition, and in the end he

did so) The Iliad carries a list of 575 subscribers, who ordered just over 650 sets at 6 guineas per head Dr Johnson in the Lives of the Poets

estimated Pope's receipts at £5,3 20; this may be a little on the high side,

as Pope had to pay Lintot for distribution expenses of later volumes.However, he certainly cleared a very considerable sum and had gonefar to set himself up for life He started painting in a genteel way andthen became an expert on landscape gardening The family had movedfrom Berkshire to Chiswick in 1716; after the death of Pope's father

he took up residence with his mother in Twickenham From 1718 thiswould be his home for the rest of his life

The South Sea Bubble in 1720 was to mark a turning-point innational affairs, preparing the way for the long dominance of RobertWalpole Pope and the Prime Minister have been described as 'mightyopposites', and it is true that the rise of Walpole coincided with a dip

in Pope's fortunes After completing the Iliad in 1720, he embarked

on a similar project for translating the Odyssey Although the

subscrip-tion list was even larger (over 600 names, taking 850 copies) and hemade something like £4,500, his energies seem to have flagged Hewas responsible for only half of the text, twelve books of Homer havingbeen allotted to discreet assistants in William Broome and ElijahFenton The facts eventually trickled out, as they always will, and Pope

lost something in reputation as a consequence At the same period hewas engaged in an edition of Shakespeare, mounted for the benefit ofthe publisher Tonson It was not particularly successful commercially,

and it suffered critically at the hands of Lewis Theobald, whose

Shake-speare Restored (1726) exposed the poet's limitations as a historical

scholar There are good things in the edition, notably an impressivedefence of Shakespeare in the preface; but Pope's handling of textualmatters was perfunctory even by the far from rigorous standards of theage Theobald's own edition (1733) was to mark an improvement in thisrespect, and later in the century Malone was to continue the process.Another of Pope's undertakings was an edition of the works of anaristocratic poetaster, the Duke of Buckingham (1723), which the min-istry seized in the belief that it might contain some coded Jacobitemessage A few months later he was summoned to appear before theHouse of Lords as a character witness for his friend Francis Atterbury,Bishop of Rochester, who was accused of plotting on behalf of thePretender As a matter of fact Pope had survived the first Jacobite rising

in 1715, and subsequent minor attempts in favour of this cause, without

a great deal of trouble; whether he would have found it possible tocome to terms with a restored Stuart monarchy, had one of these coupssucceeded, is a matter of guesswork But it was again uncomfortable

to be a Catholic in 1723, and when Pope's own brother-in-law andnephew were pursued by the authorities that year (ostensibly for deer-stealing in Windsor Forest, though there were political overtones) hewas understandably disturbed—indeed, he came closer to the writer'snotorious 'block' than he ever did again

As he approached the age of 40, he made an astounding recoveryfrom his creative lethargy He was, for one thing, rid of Homer andShakespeare for the first time for over a decade He also experiencedthe invigorating company of Swift once more, during two visits theDean paid to England in 1726 and 1727 Curiously there may evenhave been some stimulus in the death of George I, in the first of those

years, and the accession of George II The Dunciad made it pretty clear

what Pope felt about that event:

Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first!

But somehow this confirmation of Hanoverian rule, with Walpoleagainst all the odds entrenched even more firmly in power, provided

Pope with a fresh burst of imaginative energy The first version of The

Dunciad appeared in May 1728, twenty months after Gulliver and four

I N T R O D U C T I O N

months after The Beggar's Opera There were as yet no notes, and most

of the names were not spelt out in full But there was already enoughdamaging particularity to arouse the whole of Grub Street against Pope.The poem deals with the transference of sovereignty from one KingDunce (in the fiction Elkanah Settle, a deceased compiler of funeraltributes and stage-manager of official pageantry) to another (LewisTheobald, here styled 'Tibbald', a hack dramatist and critic who had

irked Pope with Shakespeare Restored) The pretended occasion for this

handover of power is the Lord Mayor's Day procession, held each year

in November when the new civic dignitaries took up office In realityPope is making covert allusion to the royal succession; Queen Dulnesshas a marked tincture of Queen Caroline about her, whilst the cer-emonial of enthronement and anointing (e.g i 231-46) directly recallsthe coronation of George and Caroline in October 1727 Pope was, ofcourse, very well advanced in composing his poem by that date; but hewas too skilful a reviser and adaptor not to make use of this gift fromfortune

Three volumes of miscellanies by the Scriblerian wits appeared in

1727 and 1728 The most important single item was Peri Bathous, or

The Art of Sinking in Poetry, an ironic course of instruction in achieving

literary depths Pope was mainly responsible, and his assiduous tion of inflated or anti-climactic writing served his purposes well In

collec-1729 he published The Dunciad Variorum, still in three books, but with

many gaps filled in and extensive preliminaries attached The generaleffect was to emphasize the burlesque of pedantry; but the broaderpolitical and cultural message ran no risk of occlusion in the process.Much of the action concerns the scribblers of Grub Street, and Popetakes the opportunity to pay off some personal scores (He had a spyamong the garrets in the shape of Richard Savage, best known to history

as the hero of Samuel Johnson's remarkable biography.) However,patrons and sponsors are equally in the line of fire: the malign organism

of Dulness has corrupted the fashionable West End in addition to theseamier quarters of town The metaphoric life of the poetry asserts aconnection between the miasmic squalor of Grub Street and the sordidlucre of the court And the mock-heroic framework—a parody of the

removal of Troy to Latium in the Aeneid—supplies a constant reminder

of alien dignity and vanished significance

The 1730s represent the decade of Pope's most diverse achievement

He embarked on a massive new project, first mentioned in November

1729, which was to treat a vast range of social and ethical concerns

This philosophical opus magnum was never to attain a finished state,

xvii

I N T R O D U C T I O N

and indeed recent research has shown that its scope and content veeredabout in Pope's mind for the remaining fifteen years of his life How-ever, most of his important poetry in the 1730s bears a definite relation

to the scheme; and many individual poems were composed at this timewith a particular slot in the scheme marked out for them

Among the eight finished epistles intended as component parts

of the scheme, the first to appear was the verse letter to the Earl of lington, published in 1731 Later this became the fourth and last of

Bur-the Epistles to Several Persons, which Pope's literary executor Warburton

rechristened 'Moral Essays' when editing the works in 1751 It wasfollowed by the Epistle to Bathurst (1733), the Epistle to Cobham (1734),and the Epistle to a Lady (1735) Each of these poems is addressed to

an individual well known to Pope, though the degree of intimacy varies.The lady in question, Martha Blount, was Pope's closest woman friendfor more than thirty years Each epistle has a theme, broadly social innature, and the method of the poem allows for direct apostrophetogether with discursive argument, character sketches, parables, andsatiric asides Meanwhile Pope was busy about another portion of theplanned 'ethic epistles', namely the four instalments of a poem now

known as the Essay on Man, published at intervals in 1733 and 1734.

Their concerns interlock closely with those of the Epistles to Several

Persons, but the tone is generally more elevated and the scale of

imagina-tive operation more cosmic Pope himself wrote to Swift of a choicewhich lay before him, of proceeding 'in the same grave march likeLucretius' or of descending 'to the gaieties of Horace' Modern critics

on the whole have found it more congenial to detect the affinities withHorace, but Pope would probably have laid the emphasis rather on itsLucretian (and anti-Lucretian) vein of metaphysical enquiry, enacted

in the exclamatory, interrogatory, and hortatory gestures of its language.But it is impossible ever to banish Horace from the Augustan poeticscene At the very same juncture Pope was engaged in a series of

Imitations of Horace, the first of which dates from 1733 It has been

suggested by Miriam Leranbaum that Pope began the imitations 'as a

kind of jeu d'esprit to provide relaxation from the greater moral ness demanded by the opus magnum project', but that in time they came

serious-to possess their own 'moral earnestness and intensity' This may well

be true, and it is a relevant consideration that the Horatian poemscluster in time around the period of maximum absorption in the opus

magnum For an eighteenth-century audience, an 'imitation' meant an

adaptation of some earlier text, modernizing references and insertingtopical material, but not departing too widely from the original An

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

imitator twined his parasitic poem closely around the host; if the newgrowth totally obliterated the old, then he had failed in his task Pope'smost substantial attempt in this direction is his version of the firstepistle of the second book Horace had inscribed his poem to theEmperor Augustus: Pope retains this formula, though it is understood

by everyone that he means the King, George Augustus The imitation,published in 1737, brilliantly reverses Horace's drift to convert aRoman celebration into an English lament When these Horatian

poems were collected by Warburton in 1751 the famous Epistle to Dr

Arbuthnot was set at their head, and a subtitle 'Prologue to the Satires'

appended We cannot be sure that this would have had Pope's blessing,but all in all it makes reasonable sense On the other hand, the two

Epilogues published in 1738 were certainly intended as a tailpiece to

the series of imitations—and a splendidly trenchant conclusion theyform, too

The last period of a writer's life is often the best documented: ents are more likely to keep letters, and anecdotalists to report conver-sations So it is with Pope We know a good deal about both his doingsand his opinions towards the end A young protege called Joseph

recipi-Spence began to collect his obiter dicta, whilst a large body of

correspon-dence survives to record his activity as a writer (and by this time,effectively, publisher of his own works) We also learn much of hisbeloved 'rambles' around the country, which enabled him to keep intouch with a wide circle of friends and to put into practice some of histheories on landscape design At home in Twickenham he was obsess-ively occupied with his garden and especially its centre-piece, thefamous grotto As Maynard Mack has shown, the grotto became anemblem of retirement and the poetic imagination As for his far-flungfriends, they included the Bath entrepreneur Ralph Allen, the ageingpolitician Bolingbroke (once disgraced for his Jacobite activity, butpermitted a limited reinstatement during the 1730s), the mercurialex-soldier Peterborough, and the rather withdrawn architect-earl, Bur-lington Although his health was declining, Pope seems to have attained

a wide measure of fulfilment as he reached his fiftieth birthday.But politics were never far off He had been enlisted as a fringemember of the so-called 'Patriot' Opposition to Walpole, a high-minded and ideologically intense campaign to oust the Prime Ministerwhich was led by men of distinction including William Pulteney, theEarl of Chesterfield, and William Pitt, later to be celebrated as theGreat Commoner and then as the Earl of Chatham It is a matter ofcontention how much active support Pope gave to this movement, which

xix

epic called Brutus (never completed) which would have celebrated

lib-erty in terms close to those of Opposition polemic And at the very end

of his life, a new fourth book for The Dunciad (1742) implicated in itssatire not just Walpole, men finally poised for the fall, but also theKing—who would outlast Pope and half the Opposition A revised

version of the full Dunciad in four books (1743) recast the main role,

with Theobald's place as King Dunce now taken by the Poet LaureateColley Cibber, an eccentric and seemingly easy-going man who hadacquired a large measure of influence in the world of the arts Cibber'sfitness for the part derived both from his court appointment and fromhis history as an actor-manager At the same time Pope widened thescope of his poem to include a whole range of current issues, fromdeism to education, and from opera to antiquarianism The resonantlast paragraph of Book III was transferred to the new last book, where

it still forms a conclusion of startling pungency

Pope died on 30 May 1744, just after his fifty-sixth birthday Hishealth had been deteriorating steadily, with his asthma little alleviated

by a quack who treated him for dropsy Most of his old literary allieswere dead: Swift alone survived, bereft of almost all his faculties, foranother year There began a process of reassessment such as eminentauthors are bound to undergo Biographies, pamphlets, and criticalessays followed one another Warburton's edition of the works in 1751provoked fresh controversy; new poems and new biographical factscontinued to emerge In this extensive debate the two most importantfigures were the poet and literary historian Joseph Warton and the

redoubtable Samuel Johnson Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings

of Pope (1756-82) contains a searching review of the poetry: with a few

exceptions, he finds Pope deficient in originality and in imaginativepower Johnson's study in The Lives of the Poets (1781) constituted insome respects an answer to the first volume of Warton's Essay It ismore sympathetic to what might be termed the central Augustan virtues

in Pope (harmony, chastity of language, architectural skill), but itacknowledges faults in both the man and the poet Johnson's Liferemains the single most distinguished item in the long critical debatethat has raged around Pope

xx

I N T R O D U C T I O N

In the nineteenth century, Pope was especially fortunate in hisadmirers Byron was a resolute defender of Pope's reputation, adducinghis example in opposition to what he saw as the provincialism andself-indulgence of much Romantic poetry On a famous occasionCharles Lamb singled out Pope's compliments, by which he must havemeant the tributes to eminent contemporaries which are so skilfullyworked into the fabric of the satire Hazlitt reports Lamb as saying,'Each of them is worth an estate for life—nay, is an immortality.' Ageneration later, Ruskin was to see Pope as a case-study in the effects

of the 'classical spirit'; though this 'spoiled half his work, he brokethrough it continually into true enthusiasm and tender thought' Else-where Ruskin linked Pope with Virgil as 'two great masters of theabsolute art of language' Better known is Matthew Arnold's critique

in 'The Study of Poetry' (1880), where he concludes that 'Dryden andPope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose' Thisattitude remained dominant in the English-speaking world until the1930s, when poets like W H Auden and Edith Sitwell offered a higherestimate of Pope's imaginative powers, and academic studies made a

significant advance The edition of the Works (1871-89) by Elwin and

Courthope has gradually been supplanted The poems, including theHomer translations, were splendidly edited by a team of distinguishedscholars headed by John Butt and Maynard Mack A second volume

of the prose works has been prepared by Rosemary Cowler to supplantthe earlier edition by Norman Ault The correspondence has beenedited by George Sherburn Stimulating monographs have illuminatedvarious areas of Pope's work, for example R A Brower's consideration

of his habits of allusion, Ian Jack's exploration of the mock-heroicdevice, Geoffrey Tillotson's analysis of stylistic features, and HowardWeinbrot's review of the relation to formal verse satire from earlierperiods Maynard Mack has produced the deepest study of Pope's lifeand a host of important essays on the poet's imagery, his physical being,and his relations with Walpole A further generation of critics includingEmrys Jones and Howard Erskine-Hill have drawn attention to a vein

of fantasy, surrealism, and the comic 'absurd' in Pope Most recently,feminist scholarship has opened up new vistas on all of Pope's writing,

as exemplified by the contributions of Carole Fabricant, Ellen Pollak,and Valerie Rumbold

Pope is primarily a comic writer By this I mean not simply that he

is often very funny, as in the pose of self-pity at the start of his Epistle

to Dr Arbuthnot I refer equally to the domain of his best work: its visible dramatis personae are those of a living, breathing society, its settings are

xxi

I N T R O D U C T I O N

beguilingly familiar, and its emotional range reflects our own dailymoods It is important to add 'visible', for Pope's imagination may atany time take off to stranger and more grotesque countries of the mind

The Rape of the Lock is in the first place a poem concerning beaux and

belles, prompted by a scandalous story of a peer who snipped off somecurls from the head of a giddy young socialite Its milieu seems to bedomestic (dressing-tables, coffee-tables, card-tables) Yet the plot getsmixed up with Rosicrucian mysteries, and we visit a nightmare world of

psycho-sexual disorders in the Cave of Spleen Similarly, The Dunciad is

formally constructed around the doings of a squalid array of able hack writers But the imagery, the allusions, and the dense poetic

recogniz-texture all encourage us to see these louche and farcical doings within

the wider sweep of history

Pope was lucky in that the seventeenth-century 'reform of ournumbers' no longer needed to be argued about as in Dryden's day:

Late, very late, correctness grew our care,

When the tired nation breathed from civil war.

(Epistle to Augustus)

The ingredients that made for correctness (pure diction, clean syntax,smooth versification) could be largely taken for granted, and Pope couldharness these to express thought, feeling, and observation In civicterms, in bodily constitution, he was a pariah, an outsider But heunderstood his age—both the larger workings of society and the psy-chology of individuals—as fully as anyone then alive His dedication tothe art of poetry enables us to share that insight, dispensed to us in therichest possible way through pleasures of the imagination

xxii

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

THE major debt accrued by an editor is to former generations ofscholars who have built up our knowledge of the life and works ofPope My deepest gratitude goes to those who have produced the twogreat editions of the poet: the unduly maligned Elwin and Courthope

in the nineteenth century, and the group headed by John Butt whowere responsible for the Twickenham edition in the twentieth century

As a modern spelling edition, my own has different textual priorities,and the series policy calls for a different style of explanatory gloss.Nevertheless, the work of these predecessors has left a solid ground-work on which we continue to rely Among one-volume editions, I havefound some useful material in the selection of poetry and prose edited

by Aubrey Williams (Riverside Editions, 1969)

The text of Pope's letters is based on The Correspondence of Alexander

Pope, ed George Sherburn (Oxford University Press, 1956) The

excerpts from Pope's conversations with Spence are taken from

Obser-vations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men by Joseph Spence,

ed James M Osborn (Oxford University Press, 1966) Permission touse this material is gratefully acknowledged

A wider indebtedness is to the biographical, critical, and graphical work of Maynard Mack, which it would be impossible toconceal even if I desired to hide the fact Such acknowledgement mayperhaps stand in the place of a formal dedication

1688 21 May, P born in London

1688-9 Protestant Revolution: James II forced to abdicate in favour

of William and Mary

c 1700 P's family moves from London to Binfield, in Windsor

Forest

1702 Queen Anne succeeds to throne

1704 Swift, A Tale of a Tub.

1709 P's first published works, including his Pastorals, appear in

a London miscellany

1710 Formation of Tory Government led by Harley and St John

(Bolingbroke), later close friend of P

1711 P's Essay on Criticism brings him fame; Addison and Steele

launch the Spectator (P and Swift occasional contributions).

1712 20 May, first appearance of Rape of the Lock (two-canto

version)

1713 7 March, Windsor Forest published; P writes essays for

Steele's journal the Guardian Scriblerus Club becomes

active, with P, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Parnell, and Harley(now Lord Oxford) members

1714 4 March, five-canto version of Rape of the Lock published,

I August, death of Queen Anne and accession of firstHanoverian king, George I Tories out of office for theremainder of P's life Swift settled in Dublin as Dean

of St Patrick's

1715 February, The Temple of Fame; 6 June, first instalment of

P's Iliad translation Jacobite rising in Scotland in support

of the Old Pretender, put down with relative ease Catholic legislation limits P's personal liberties

Anti-1716 P's family moves to Chiswick on outskirts of London P

attacks the bookseller Curll in prose pamphlets

1716-20 Remaining volumes of Iliad translation published

1717 P, Gay, and Arbuthnot collaborate in farce Three Hours afte

Marriage P's father dies 3 June, P's first major collection

of Works published, including new poems such as Eloisa to Abelard.

1718 Death of Parnell P moves to Twickenham

1719 Death of Addison Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, admired by P.

1720 South Sea Bubble

1721 Walpole comes to power

1722 P edits Parnell's poems P's friend Atterbury implicated in

Jacobite plot (exiled 1723)

1723 P edits works of Duke of Buckingham P's brother-in-law

arrested for deer-stealing in the 'Windsor Blacks' affair,involving a series of anti-Jacobite measures

1724 Swift, Drapier's Letters, attacking English Government's

treatment of Ireland

1725 March, P's subscription edition of Shakespeare published

April, first instalment of P's translation of Odyssey

pub-lished

1726 Remaining volumes of Odyssey published Swift visits

Eng-land for publication of Gulliver's Travels.

1727 First two volumes of Pope-Swift Miscellanies published

Swift visits England for last time

1728 7 March, third volume of Miscellanies including Peri Bathous.

May, first version of The Dunciad in three books Gay, Beggar's Opera, premiered with great success.

1729 April, Dunciad Variorum adds extensive apparatus and notes.

Swift, A Modest Proposal.

1730 Fielding, The Author's Farce.

1731 14 December, Epistle to Burlington Death of Defoe.

1732 Further volume of Miscellanies Death of Gay

1733 January, Epistle to Bathurst; 20 February, Essay on Man,

i-iii First in the series of Imitations of Horace appear Death

of P's mother

1734 2 January, Epistle to Cobham; 24 January, Essay on Man, iv.

Further Horatian imitations published

1735 January, Epistle to Arbuthnol; 8 February, Epistle to a Lady

Second volume of P's Works Death of Arbuthnot P

engineers publication of his letters

1737 Authorized edition of P's letters Death of Queen Caroline

Theatrical Licensing Act imposed restraints on new plays

1738 Series of imitations of Horace culminate in Epilogue to

Sat-ires Samuel Johnson's London, admired by P.

1740 Richardson, Pamela, i.

1741 Memoirs of Scriblerus published, largely written in years of

Scriblerus Club activity and edited by P

1742 March, new fourth book of The Dunciad Fielding, Joseph

Andrews Swift officially declared of unsound mind Handel, The Messiah.

1743 October, revised Dunciad in Four Books.

1744 Important quarto editions of several poems by P 30 May,

P dies Johnson, Life of Savage

1745 19 October, Swift dies in Dublin

xxvi

NOTE ON THE TEXT

THIS volume is designed in part as a successor to the edition of Pope's

Poetical Works, which was prepared for the Oxford Standard Authors

by Herbert Davis in 1966 As well as adding many extracts from theprose and the correspondence, I have made a different selection fromPope's poetry However, the modernized text is based for the most part

on the same original printings as those Davis used to establish his text

That is, the text of the Essay on Criticism, the Essay on Man, and what have usually been known as the Moral Essays is based on the quarto

editions of 1744 printed by William Bowyer under the close supervision

of Pope The Dunciad is based on the first printing of the full work in

1743 These are already clean and rather 'modern' printings, with lesselaborate typographical signalling than had generally been the custom

up to this time Otherwise the text is based on the posthumous editionput out by Pope's executor William Warburton in 1751, largely follow-

ing the same principles An important study by David Foxon, Pope and

the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford, 1991), has shown that

Pope consciously adopted the simpler and less cluttered style, even inhis own manuscripts, as his career progressed

In a few respects I have departed from Davis's editorial methods.Most crucially, I have abandoned a practice which has been adopted

by every editor since Pope's death In this volume the imitations ofHorace and the so-called Moral Essays are printed not as a group butseparately, as they first appeared at intervals over a period of years It

is undeniably the case that Pope did not envisage the full series when

he wrote the first items in each category, and indeed it was only over

a very slow process that the familiar headings came into being The

Moral Essays were at one stage intended to form part of Pope's opus magnum, built around the Essay on Man, but this scheme too was aban-

doned In my view we get a much clearer sense of Pope's actual workingprocedures if we read the poems in the order that they appeared, with

a recognition that the series developed out of what were at firstoccasional and disparate poems (This view is strengthened by Foxon'sbook, which shows how opportunistic Pope was in shaping his poeticcareer post facto by rearranging items in his collected Works.) The same

reasoning does not apply to the Essay on Man, which was all along

devised as a work in four parts; moreover, printing its four epistles insequence leads to only one minor break in strict chronology, since the

N O T E O N T H E T E X T

fourth epistle appeared eight months after the third in January 1734,

that is, eight days after the Epistle to Cobham The arrangement here

involves the tiniest displacement of chronological order, whereas thenormal layout of Pope's collected poetry conceals the fact that the

imitations of Horace began not long after the first version of The

Dun-dad and ended not long before the final version It should be added

that The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, since they are presenthere in their expanded form, are printed in the chronological positionappropriate to this state There are some drawbacks in this procedure,since ideally one should have the felt presence of The Dunciad whenreading all the poems of the 1730s, but the alternative—that ofinserting the 1743 version, complete with the new fourth book, at thepoint appropriate to the 1728 version—is obviously unacceptable: itwould make nonsense of the new material and the enthronement ofCibber, who only became Poet Laureate in 1730

The extracts from conversations with Joseph Spence, which are allbrief, have been collected together at the end, rather than scatteredpiecemeal through the volume Letters are placed according to date

of writing; printed works are normally placed according to date ofpublication, except in one or two cases where there was an abnormaldelay before the item reached the press In this latter instance, the date

of composition is used The Spence materials are quoted from theedition by J M Osborn (1966) and the correspondence is based onthe text edited by George Sherburn (1956)

Modernization has been carried through in a systematic manner,affecting spelling, capitalization, typography, and punctuation (althoughthe last is altered more sparingly, in cases where obscurity might arise).Spelling is left unaltered where there is a real difference in sound or

meaning But Terras is just terrace, and so it becomes: as with blest,

which becomes blessed On the other hand, learned indicates the modernpronunciation with one syllable, and an accent is marked to indicate

the pronunciation learned I have eliminated the mark of elision in words such as confess'd,pow'r, sev'ral, nat'ral, ev'ry,av'rice, degen'rate, and many

others, since the full spelling indicates normal modern pronunciation,and this is what Pope's metre requires The apostrophe is retained only

in cases such as th' oppressor, where a reader may add an unwanted

syllable if the article is spelt out in full Proper names are subject tothe same treatment, since Aegypt is no more or less than Egypt, precisely

on a par with aethereal/ ethereal This leads to some delicate decisions,

as where Heideggre is and is not quite Heidegger, and I have perhapsinconsistently left Twitnam for Twickenham, on the basis that the middlexxviii

consonant does seem to make a substantial difference to the feel of theword Where Pope vacillates (as in Curl/Curll) I have always adopted

the familiar modern form Curll Deliberate distortions such as Tibbald

for Theobald are naturally retained Names originally printed as blanksare, where possible, filled in (thus P-p-le becomes Popple): there may

be some loss of suggestiveness here, but the main reason for Pope'sreticence was fear of reprisal (a fate his modern editor need not dread),and he was in any case much bolder in setting out the full name thanwere most writers of the age

One change regularly made in the punctuation is to observe modernrules with regard to cues for direct speech Thus, a line from the Iliadruns in the original:

Return? (said Hector, fir'd with stern Disdain)

This is modernized as follows:

'Return?', said Hector, fired with stern disdain,

The reason is that as soon as we adopt modern conventions with regard

to quotation marks, the need for brackets disappears; their inclusionsuggests a parenthetic note which is not truly a part of the original Ihave also suppressed question marks of a rhetorical order where they

do not indicate a true query, and have eliminated a few exclamationmarks which would not be used in a similar context today

Notes at the end are signalled by a degree sign (°) in the text It

should be noted that individuals mentioned in TheDunciad are routinely

entered in the Biographical Index and no textual sign is given Allfootnotes are those of Pope himself or, in a very few cases, thosesupplied by Warburton in the name of the poet

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Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes,

Flumina amem, sylvasque, inglorius!

To Sir WILLIAM TRUMBULL

First in these fields I try the sylvan strains, iNor blush to sport on Windsor's blissful plains:

These Pastorals were written at the age of sixteen, and then passed through the hands of Mr Walsh, Mr Wycherley, G Granville afterwards Lord Lansdowne, Sir William Trumbull, Dr Garth, Lord Halifax, Lord Somers, Mr Mainwaring, and others All these gave our author the greatest encouragement, and particularly Mr Walsh (whom Mr Dryden, in his Postscript to Virgil, calls the best critic of his age.) 'The author (says he) seems to have a particular genius for this kind of Poetry, and

a judgment that much exceeds his years He has taken very freely from the Ancients But what he has mixed of his own with theirs is no way inferior to what he has taken from them It is not flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age His Preface is very judicious and learned' Letter to Mr Wycherley, Ap 1705 The Lord Lansdowne about the same time, mentioning the youth of our poet, says (in a printed Letter of the Character of Mr Wycherley) 'that if he goes on as he has begun in the pastoral way, as Virgil first tried his strength, we may hope to see English poetry vie with the Roman,' etc Notwithstanding the early time of their production, the author esteemed these as the most correct in the versification, and musical in the numbers, of all his works The reason for his labouring them into so much softness, was, doubtless, that this sort of poetry derives almost its whole beauty from a natural ease of thought and smoothness of verse; whereas that of most other kinds consists in the strength and fullness of both In a letter of his to Mr Walsh about this time we find an enumeration of several niceties in versification, which perhaps have never been strictly observed in any English poem, except in these Pastorals They were not printed till 1709.

Sir William Trumbull.] Our author's friendship with this gentleman commenced

at very unequal years; he was under sixteen, but Sir William above sixty, and had lately resigned his employment of Secretary of State to King William."

I Prima Syracosio dignata est ludere versu,

P A S T O R A L S

Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring,

While on thy banks Sicilian0 Muses sing;

Let vernal airs through trembling osiers0 play,

And Albion's cliffs resound the rural lay

You, that too wise for pride, too good for power,

Enjoy the glory to be great no more,

And carrying with you all the world can boast,

To all the world illustriously0 are lost!

O let my Muse her slender reed inspire,0

Till in your native shades you tune the lyre:

So when the nightingale to rest removes,

The thrush may chant to the forsaken groves,

But, charmed to silence, listens while she sings,

And all th' aerial audience clap their wings

Soon as the flocks shook off the nightly dews,

Two swains, whom love kept wakeful, and the Muse,Poured o'er the whitening vale their fleecy care,

Fresh as the morn, and as the season fair:

This is the general exordium and opening of the Pastorals, in imitation of the sixth of Virgil, which some have therefore not improbably thought to have been the first originally In the beginnings of the other three Pastorals, he imitates expressly those which now stand first of the three chief poets in this kind, Spenser, Virgil, Theocritus.

A shepherd's boy (he seeks no better name),—

Beneath the shade a spreading beech displays,—

Thyrsis, the music of that murm'ring spring.—

arc manifestly imitations of

A Shepherd's Buy (no beller da him call)—

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi.—

12 Sir W Trumbull was born in Windsor Forest, to which he retreated after he

had resigned the post of Secretary of State to King William III.

17 The scene of this Pastoral a valley, the time the morning It stood originally thus,

Daphnis and Strephon to the shades retired

Both warmed by love, and by the Muse inspired,

Fresh as the mom, and as the season fair,

In flowery vales they fed their fleecy care;

And while Aurora gilds the mountain's side,

Thus Daphnis spoke and Strephon thus replied.

2

10

20

The dawn now blushing on the mountain's side,

Thus Daphnis spoke, and Strephon thus replied

Daphnis

Hear how the birds, on every bloomy spray,

With joyous music wake the dawning day!

Why sit we mute when early linnets sing,

When warbling Philomel0 salutes the spring?

Why sit we sad when Phosphor0 shines so clear,

And lavish Nature paints the purple0 year?

Strephon

Sing then, and Damon shall attend the strain,

While yon slow oxen turn the furrowed plain 30Here the bright crocus and blue violet glow;

Here western winds on breathing0 roses blow

I'll stake yon lamb, that near the fountain plays,

And from the brink his dancing shade surveys

Daphnis

And I this bowl, where wanton ivy twines,

And swelling clusters bend the curling vines:

Four figures rising0 from the work appear,

The various seasons of the rolling year;

And what is that, which binds the radiant sky,

Where twelve fair signs0 in beauteous order lie? 4o

34 The first reading was,

And his own image from the bank surveys.

35 36 Lenta quibus tomo facili mperaddita vitis,

Diffuses edera vestit pallente coiymbos.

Virgil.

36 And dusters lurk beneath the curling vines.

38 The subject of these Pastorals engraven on the bowl is not without its priety The shepherd's hesitation at the name of the zodiac, imitates that in Virgil,

pro-Et quis fuit alter,

Then sing by turns, by turns the Muses sing

Now hawthorns blossom, now the daisies spring,

Now leaves the trees, and flowers adorn the

ground;

Begin, the vales shall every note rebound

Strephon

Inspire me, Phoebus, in my Delia's praise,

With Waller's strains, or Granville's0 moving lays!

A milk-white bull shall at your altars stand,

That threats a fight, and spurns0 the rising sand

Daphnis

0 Love! for Sylvia let me gain the prize,

And make my tongue victorious as her eyes; 50

No lambs or sheep for victims I'll impart,

Thy victim, Love, shall be the shepherd's heart

Strephon

Me gentle Delia beckons from the plain,

Then hid in shades, eludes her eager swain;

But feigns a laugh, to see me search around,

And by that laugh the willing fair is found

Daphnis

The sprightly Sylvia trips along the green,

She runs, but hopes she does not run unseen;

While a kind glance at her pursuer flies,

How much at variance are her feet and eyes! 60

41 Literally from Virgil,

Altemis dicetis, amant alterna Camoenae;

Et nunc omnis ager, nunc omnis parturit arbos,

Nuncfrondent sylvae, nunc formosissimus annus.

46 George Granville, afterwards Lord Lansdowne, known for his poems, most

of which he composed very young, and proposed Waller as his model.

47 Virgil—Pastite taurum, Qui comu petal, a pedibus jam spargat arenam.

58 Imitation of Virgil,

Mala me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,

P A S T O R A L S 5

Strephon

O'er golden sands let rich Pactolus0 flow

And trees weep amber on the banks of Po;°

Blessed Thames's shores the brightest beauties yield,Feed here my lambs, 111 seek no distant field

Daphnis

Celestial Venus haunts Idalia's0 groves;

Diana Cynthus,0 Ceres Hybla0 loves:

If Windsor-shades delight the matchless maid,

Cynthus and Hybla yield to Windsor-shade

Strephon

All nature mourns, the skies relent in showers,

Hushed are the birds, and closed the drooping flowers; 70

If Delia smile, the flowers begin to spring,

The skies to brighten, and the birds to sing

Daphnis

All nature laughs, the groves are fresh and fair,

The sun's mild lustre warms the vital air;

If Sylvia smiles, new glories gild the shore,

And vanquished nature seems to charm no more

Strephon

In spring the fields, in autumn hills I love,

At morn the plains, at noon the shady grove,

61 It stood thus at first,

Let rich Iberia golden fleeces boast,

Her purple wool the proud Assyrian coast,

Blessed Thames's shores, etc.

69 All nature mourns,]

Virgil Aret ager, vitio martens sitit ae'ris herba, etc.

Phyllidis adventu nostrae nemus omne virebit.

69 These verses were thus at first:

All nature mourns, the birds their songs deny,

Nor wasted brooks the thirsty flowers supply;

If Delia smile, the flowers begin to spring,

PASTORALSBut Delia always; absent from her sight,

Nor plains at morn, nor groves at noon delight 80

Daphnis

Sylvia's like autumn ripe, yet mild as May,

More bright than noon, yet fresh as early day;

Ev'n spring displeases, when she shines not here;

But blessed with her, 'tis spring throughout the year

Strephon

Say, Daphnis, say, in what glad soil appears,

A wondrous tree that sacred monarchs bears?

Tell me but this, and I'll disclaim the prize,

And give the conquest to thy Sylvia's eyes

Daphnis

Nay tell me first, in what more happy fields

The thistle springs, to which the lily yields? 90And then a nobler prize I will resign;

For Sylvia, charming Sylvia shall be thine

Damon

Cease to contend, for, Daphnis, I decree,

The bowl to Strephon, and the lamb to thee:

Blessed swains, whose nymphs in every grace excel;

Blessed nymphs, whose swains those graces sing so well!Now rise, and haste to yonder woodbine bowers,

A soft retreat from sudden vernal showers;

The turf with rural dainties shall be crowned,

While opening blooms diffuse their sweets around 100

86 An allusion to the Royal Oak, in which Charles II had been hid from the pursuit after the battle of Worcester."

90 Alludes to the device of the Scots monarchs, the thistle, worn by Queen Anne; and to the arms of France, the fleur de lys The two riddles are in imitation

of those in Virgil Ed iii.

Die quibus in terris inscripti nomina Regum

Nascantur Flores, & Phyllida solus habebis 0

99 was originally,

The turf with country dainties shall be spread,

6

P A S T O R A L S

For see! the gathering flocks to shelter tend,

And from the Pleiades0 fruitful showers descend

A shepherd's boy (he seeks no better name)

Led forth his flocks along the silver Thame,

Where dancing sun-beams on the waters played,

And verdant alders formed a quivering shade

Soft as he mourned, the streams forgot to flow,

The flocks around a dumb compassion show,

The Naiads wept in every watery bower,

And Jove consented in a silent shower

Accept, O GARTH, the Muse's early lays,

That adds this wreath of ivy to thy bays;

Hear what from Love unpractised hearts endure,From Love, the sole disease thou canst not cure.'Ye shady beeches, and ye cooling streams,

Defence from Phoebus', not from Cupid's beams,

To you I mourn, nor to the deaf I sing,

i, 2, 3, 4 were thus printed in the first edition:

A faithful swain, whom Lave had taught to sing,

Bewailed his fate beside a silver spring;

Where gentle Thames his winding waters leads

Through verdant forests, and through flowery meads.

3 The scene of this Pastoral by the river's side; suitable to the heat of the season; the time noon.

8 Jupiter et laeto descendet plurimus imbri Virgil.

9 Dr Samuel Garth, author of the Dispensary, was one of the first friends of the

author, whose acquaintance with him began at fourteen or fifteen Their friendship continued from the year 1703 to 1718, which was that of his death 0

7

I

10

P A S T O R A L S

The woods shall answer, and their echo ring

The hills and rocks attend my doleful lay,

Why art thou prouder and more hard than they?

The bleating sheep with my complaints agree,

They parched with heat, and I inflamed by thee 20The sultry Sirius0 burns the thirsty plains,

While in thy heart eternal winter reigns

Where stray ye Muses, in what lawn or grove,

While your Alexis pines in hopeless love?

In those fair fields where sacred Isis° glides,

Or else where Cam his winding vales divides?

As in the crystal spring I view my face,

Fresh rising blushes paint the watery glass;

But since those graces please thy eyes no more,

I shun the fountains which I sought before 30Once I was skilled in every herb that grew,

And every plant that drinks the morning dew;

Ah wretched shepherd, what avails thy art,

To cure thy lambs, but not to heal thy heart!

Let other swains attend the rural care,

Feed fairer flocks, or richer fleeces share:0

But nigh yon mountain let me tune my lays,

Embrace my love, and bind my brows with bays

That flute is mine which Colin's tuneful breath

16 The woods shall answer and their echo ring, is a line out of Spenser's lamion.

Epitha-23 Quae nemora, aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellae

Naiades, indigno cum Gallus amore periret?

Nam neque Parnassi vobis juga, nam neque Pindi

Ulla moram fecere, neque Aonia Aganippe.

Virgil out of Theocritus.

27 Oft in the crystal spring I cast a view,

And equalled Hylas, if the glass be true;

But since those graces meet my eyes no more,

I shun, etc.

Virgil again from the Cyclops of Theocritus,

nuper me in littore vidi Cum placidum ventis staret mare, non ego Daphnim,

Judice te, meluam, si nunquam fallil imago.

39 Colin] The name taken by Spenser in his Eclogues, where his mistress is

celebrated under that of Rosalinda.

8

Inspired when living, and bequeathed in death; 40

He said, "Alexis,0 take this pipe, the same

That taught the groves my Rosalinda's name":

But now the reeds shall hang on yonder tree,

For ever silent, since despised by thee

Oh! were I made by some transforming power

The captive bird that sings within thy bower!

Then might my voice thy listening ears employ,

And I those kisses he receives, enjoy

And yet my numbers please the rural throng,

Rough satyrs dance, and Pan applauds the song: 50The nymphs, forsaking every cave and spring,

Their early fruit, and milk-white turtles0 bring;

Each amorous nymph prefers her gifts in vain,

On you their gifts are all bestowed again

For you the swains the fairest flowers design,

And in one garland all their beauties join;0

Accept the wreath which you deserve alone,

In whom all beauties are comprised in one

See what delights in sylvan scenes appear!

Descending Gods have found Elysium here 60

In woods bright Venus with Adonis strayed,

And chaste Diana haunts the forest-shade

Come, lovely nymph, and bless the silent hours,

When swains from shearing seek their nightly

bowers;

When weary reapers quit the sultry field,

And crowned with corn, their thanks to Ceres yield,This harmless grove no lurking viper hides,

But in my breast the serpent Love abides

Here bees from blossoms sip the rosy dew,

But your Alexis knows no sweets but you 70

Oh deign to visit our forsaken seats,

The mossy fountains, and the green retreats!

40 Virgil Ed ii.

Est mihi disparibus septem compacta ciculis

Fistula, Damaetas dono mihi quam dedit olim,

Et dixit moriens, Te nunc habet ista secundum.

60 Habitarunt Di quoque sylvas—Virgil.