349 Dull and scandalous poems printed under Pope's name, or attributed to him by his enemies. 351 the pictur'd shape: Pope was especially hurt by the caricatures which exaggerated his personal deformity. 353 A friend in exile: probably Bishop Atterbury, then in exile for his Jacobite opinions. 354-355 Another reference to Hervey who was suspected of poisoning the mind of the King against Pope. 361 Japhet: Japhet Crooke, a notorious forger of the time. He died in prison in 1734, after having had his nose slit and ears cropped for his crimes; see below, 1. 365. 363 Knight of the post: a slang term for a professional witness ready to swear to anything for money. A knight of the shire, on the other hand, is the representative of a county in the House of Commons. 367 bit: tricked, taken in, a piece of Queen Anne slang. The allusion is probably to the way in which Lady Mary Wortley Montague allowed Pope to make love to her and then laughed at him. 369 friend to his distress: in 1733, when old Dennis was in great poverty, a play was performed for his benefit, for which Pope obligingly wrote a prologue. 371 Colley Cibber, actor and poet laureate. Pope speaks as if it were an act of condescension for him to have drunk with Cibber.-Moore: James Moore Smythe (see note on 1. 23), whom Pope used to meet at the house of the Blounts. He wrote a comedy, The Rival Modes, in which he introduced six lines that Pope had written. Pope apparently had given him leave to do so, and then retracted his permission. But Moore used them without the permission and an undignified quarrel arose as to the true authorship of the passage. 373 Welsted, a hack writer of the day, had falsely charged Pope with being responsible for the death of the lady who is celebrated in Pope's Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. 374-375 There is an allusion here that has never been fully explained. Possibly the passage refers to Teresa Blount whom Pope suspected of having circulated slanderous reports concerning his relations with her sister. 876-377 Suffered Budgell to attribute to his (Pope's) pen the slanderous gossip of the Grub Street Journal, a paper to which Pope did, as a matter of fact, contribute and let him (Budgell) write anything he pleased except his (Pope's) will. Budgell, a distant cousin of Addison's, fell into bad habits after his friend's death. He was strongly suspected of having forged a will by which Dr. Tindal of Oxford left him a considerable sum of money. He finally drowned himself in the Thames. 378 the two Curlls: Curll, the bookseller, and Lord Hervey whom Pope here couples with him because of Hervey's vulgar abuse of Pope's personal deformities and obscure parentage. 380 Yet why: Why should they abuse Pope's inoffensive parents? Compare the following lines. 383 Moore's own mother was suspected of loose conduct. 386-388 Of gentle blood . . . each parent: Pope asserted, perhaps incorrectly, that his father belonged to a gentleman's family, the head of which was the Earl of Downe. His mother was the daughter of a Yorkshire gentleman, who lost two sons in the service of Charles I (cf. l. 386). 389 Bestia: probably the elder Horace Walpole, who was in receipt of a handsome pension. 391 An allusion to Addison's unhappy marriage with the Countess of Warwick. 398 The good man: Pope's father, who as a devout Roman Catholic refused to take the oath of allegiance (cf. 1. 395), or risk the equivocations sanctioned by the " schoolmen," i.e. the Catholic casuists of the day (1. 398). 404 Friend: Arbuthnot, to whom the epistle is addressed. 405-411 The first draft of these appeared in a letter to Aaron Hill, September 3, 1731, where Pope speaks of having sent them "the other day to a particular friend," perhaps the poet Thomson. Mrs. Pope, who was very old and feeble, was of course alive when they were first written, but died more than a year before the passage appeared in its revised form in this Epistle. 412 An allusion to the promise contained in the fifth commandment. 415 served a Queen: Arbuthnot had been Queen Anne's doctor, but was driven out of his rooms in the palace after her death. 416 that blessing: long life for Arbuthnot. It was, in fact, denied, for he died a month or so after the appearance of the Epistle. ODE ON SOLITUDE Pope says that this delightful little poem was written at the early age of twelve. It first appeared in a letter to his friend, Henry Cromwell, dated July 17, 1709. There are several variations between this first form and that in which it was finally published, and it is probable that Pope thought enough of his boyish production to subject it to repeated revision. Its spirit is characteristic of a side of Pope's nature that is often forgotten. He was, indeed, the poet of the society of his day, urban, cultured, and pleasure-loving; but to the end of his days he retained a love for the quiet charm of country life which he had come to feel in his boyhood at Binfield, and for which he early withdrew from the whirl and dissipations of London to the groves and the grotto of his villa at Twickenham. THE DESCENT OF DULLNESS a In the fourth book of the Dunciad, Pope abandons the satire on the pretenders to literary fame which had run through the earlier books, and flies at higher game. He represents the Goddess Dullness as "coming in her majesty to destroy Order and Science, and to substitute the Kingdom of the Dull upon earth." He attacks the pedantry and formalism of university education in his day, the dissipation and false taste of the traveled gentry, the foolish pretensions to learning of collectors and virtuosi, and the daringly irreverent speculations of freethinkers and infidels. At the close of the book he represents the Goddess as dismissing her worshipers with a speech which she concludes with " yawn of extraordinary virtue." Under its influence "all nature nods," and pulpits, colleges, and Parliament succumb. The poem closes with the magnificent description of the descent of Dullness and her final conquest of art, philosophy, and religion. It is said that Pope himself admired these lines so much that he could not repeat them without his voice faltering with emotion. "And well it might, sir," said Dr. Johnson when this anecdote was repeated to him, "for they are noble lines." And Thackeray in his lecture on Pope in The English Humorists says: "In these astonishing lines Pope reaches, I think, to the very greatest height which his sublime art has attained, and shows himself the equal of all poets of all times. It is the brightest ardor, the loftiest assertion of truth, the most generous wisdom, illustrated by the noblest poetic figure, and spoken in words the aptest, grandest, and most harmonious." EPITAPH ON GAY John Gay, the idlest, best-natured, and best-loved man of letters of his day, was the special friend of Pope. His early work, The Shepherd's Week, was planned as a parody on the Pastorals of Pope's rival, Ambrose Philips, and Pope assisted him in the composition of his luckless farce, Three Hours after Marriage. When Gay's opera Polly was forbidden by the licenser, and Gay's patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, were driven from court for soliciting subscriptions for him, Pope warmly espoused his cause. Gay died in 1732 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Pope's epitaph for his tomb was first published in the quarto edition of Pope's works in 1735. Johnson, in his discussion of Pope's epitaphs (Lives of the Poets), devotes a couple of pages of somewhat captious criticism to these lines; but they have at least the virtue of simplicity and sincerity, and are at once an admirable portrait of the man and a lasting tribute to the poet Gay. |