[1] Notwithstanding the many praises lavished on this celebrated nobleman as a poet, by Dryden, by Addison, by Bolingbroke, by our Author, and others, yet candid criticism must oblige us to confess, that he was but a feeble imitator of the feeblest parts of Waller. After having been secretary at war, 1710, controller and treasurer to the household, and of her majesty's privy council, and created a peer, 1711, he was seized as a suspected person, at the accession of George I., and confined in the Tower. Whatever may be thought of Lord Lansdowne as a poet, his character as a man was highly valuable. His conversation was most pleasing and polite; his affability, and universal benevolence, and gentleness, captivating; he was a firm friend and a sincere lover of his country. This is the character I received of him from his near relation, the late excellent Mrs. Delany.—Warton.
[2] Thus Hopkins, in his History of Love:
[3] Originally thus:
Dryden's Virgil, Geor. ii. 245:
Æn. x. 241:
[4] Neget quis carmina Gallo? Virg.—Warburton.
[5] Evidently suggested by Waller:
Addison's Letter from Italy:
[6] There is an inaccuracy in making the flame equal to a grove. It might have been Milton's flame.—Warton.
Addison's Letter from Italy:
[7] This is borrowed from the lines, quoted by Bowles, in which Denham alludes to the founder of Windsor Castle being as doubtful as was the birth-place of Homer:
[8] From Waller:
[9] Evidently from Cooper's Hill:
[10] There is a levity in this comparison which appears to me unseasonable, and but ill according with the serene dignity of the subject.—Wakefield.
[11] Originally thus:
The first couplet of the lines in Pope's note, was from Dryden's epistle to his kinsman:
[12] Milton's Allegro, ver. 78:
[13] Milton, Par. Lost, iv. 248:
This fancy was borrowed from the ancients. According to Ovid (Met. x. 500), Myrrha, changed into a tree, weeps myrrh, and the sisters of Phæton (Met. ii. 364), transformed into poplars, shed tears which harden in the sun, and turn into amber.
[14] This fabulous mixture of stale images, Olympus and the Gods, is, in my opinion, extremely puerile, especially in a description of real scenery. Pan, Pomona, and the rest, mere representative substitutions, give no offence.—Wakefield.
[15] The making the hills nobler than Olympus with all its gods, because the gods appeared "in their blessings" on the humbler mountains of Windsor, is a thought only to be excused in a very young writer.—Bowles.
[16] The word "crowned" is exceptionable; it makes Pan crowned with flocks.—Warton.
Pope, in his manuscript, has underscored "Pan with flocks," and "crowned," and set a mark against the line, as if he had detected, and intended to remove, the defect.
[17] Dryden's Translations from Ovid:
Pope weakened the line in varying it. "Dreary desert" and "gloomy waste" are synonymous, but "silent" adds a distinct idea to "dismal."
[18] The Forest Laws.—Pope.
The killing a deer, boar, or hare, was punished with the loss of the delinquent's eyes.—Warton.
Thierry believes that the forest laws had a more serious object than to secure for the king a monopoly of sport. The chief intention was to keep the newly conquered Saxons from going armed under the pretext that they were in pursuit of game. Hence the penalty was of a nature to incapacitate the offender for military service.
[19] This is in imitation of Waller:
Sir William Temple says of the forests on the continent that they
Wakefield remarks that there is an inaccuracy in Pope's couplet, since the "savage laws" to which the pronoun "they" in part refers, were the mode in which the severity of the king displayed itself.
[20] The representation is erroneous. The "air, floods, and wilds" were not "dispeopled." The forest laws occasioned an increase in the quantity of game, which was preserved more carefully when it became the property of the privileged few, and was no longer liable to be exterminated by the many. Pope is not consistent with himself, for he afterwards complains that "while the subject starved the beast was fed."
[21] Originally thus in the MS.:
The conceit is childish, because dens and caves are the residence of these brutes at all times, and therefore their retreat to these places constitutes no argument of their aversion to slavery. And the following couplet is by no means worthy of the poet.—Wakefield.
[22] According to this doctrine no nation can lie free in which lawless beasts are subjugated by man.
[23] Pope puts "the elements" for the creatures which inhabited them.
[24] In the first edition it was,
which defined the poet's idea more clearly. He changed the expression to avoid the recurrence of the same word when he introduced "beast" into the next couplet.
[25] Addison's Letter from Italy:
This passage, which describes the misery entailed upon the Italian peasants by an oppressive government, plainly suggested the lines of Pope. The death from thirst, which Addison adds to the death from starvation, is too great an exaggeration. Water could always be had.
It was originally thus, but the word "savages" is not properly applied to beasts, but to men; which occasioned the alteration.—Pope.
[27] Translated from
an old monkish writer, I forget who.—Pope.
[28] Alluding to the destruction made in the New Forest, and the tyrannies exercised there by William I.—Pope.
I have the authority of three or four of our best antiquarians to say, that the common tradition of villages and parishes, within the compass of thirty miles, being destroyed, in the New Forest, is absolutely groundless, no traces or vestiges of such being to be discovered, nor any other parish named in Doomsday Book, but what now remains.—Warton.
The argument from Doomsday Book is of no weight if, as Lingard asserts, the New Forest was formed before the registration took place. William was an eager sportsman. "He loved the beasts of chase," says the Saxon chronicle, "as if he had been their father," and the source of his love was the pleasure he took in killing them. His hunting grounds, however, were ample without the New Forest, and Thierry thinks that his motive in forming it may have been political. The wooded district, denuded of a hostile population, and stretching to the sea, would have afforded shelter to the Normans in the event of a reverse, and enabled them to disembark in safety.
[29] Addison's Campaign:
[30] Donne, in his second Satire,
[31] It is a blemish in this fine passage that a couplet in the past tense should be interposed for the sake of the rhyme, in the midst of a description in the present tense.
[32] Originally:
The author thought this an error, wolves not being common in England at the time of the Conqueror.—Pope.
[33] "The temples," "broken columns," and "choirs," of the poet, suppose a much statelier architecture than belonged to the rude village churches of the Saxons. With the same exaggeration the hamlets which stood on the site of the New Forest are converted by Pope into "cities," and "towns."
[34] William did not confine his oppression to the weak and succumb to the strong. The statement that he was "awed by his nobles" is opposed to the contemporary testimony of the Saxon chronicle. "No man," says the writer, "durst do anything against his will; he had earls in his bonds who had done against his will, and at last he did not spare his own brother, Odo; him he set in prison." "His rich men moaned," says the chronicler again, "and the poor men murmured, but he was so hard that he recked not the hatred of them all."
[35] The language is too strong. "When his power or interest was concerned," says Lingard, "William listened to no suggestions but those of ambition or avarice, but on other occasions he displayed a strong sense of religion, and a profound respect for its institutions." While resisting ecclesiastical usurpation, and depriving individuals who were disaffected or incompetent, of their preferment, he upheld the church and its dignitaries, and left both in a more exalted position than he found them.
[36] It is incorrect to say that William was denied a grave. As his body was about to be lowered into the vault in the church of St. Stephen, which he had founded at Caen, a person named Fitz-Arthur forbade the burial, on the plea that the land had been taken by violence from his father, but the prelates having paid him sixty shillings on the spot, and promised him further compensation, the ceremony was allowed to proceed.
[37] "An open space between woods," is Johnson's definition of "lawn," which is the meaning here, and at ver. 21 and 149. The term has since been appropriated to the dressed green-sward in gardens.
[38] Richard, second son of William the Conqueror.—Pope.
Richard is said by some to have been killed by a stag in the New Forest, by others to have been crushed against a tree by his horse.
[39] This verse is taken from one of Denham's in his translation of the Second Æneis:
[40] The oak under which Rufus was shot, was standing till within these few years.—Bowles.
A stone pillar now marks the spot.—Croker.
[41] In the New Forest, where the cottages had been swept away by William. "Succeeding monarchs" did not, as Pope implies, suffer encroachments on the forest out of pity for their subjects. The concession was extorted. Some of the provisions of Magna Charta were directed against the increase of the royal forests and against the "evil customs" maintained with respect to them.
[42] Mountains hitherto unknown to the flocks, who were now for the first time permitted to feed there.
Virgil is treating of grafts, and says that the parent stock, when the slips grow, wonders at leaves and fruit not its own. Here the imagination keeps pace with the description, but stops short before the notion that the trees in the forest wondered to behold the crops of corn.
[44] He doubtless had in his eye, Vir. Æn. i. 506:
Dryden's translation:
In Virgil the silent exultation is felt by a mother, who, in an assembly of nymphs, marks the superior beauty of her goddess daughter. There was not the same reason why the swain should keep secret the transport he felt at the sight of wheat fields.
[45] Originally:
The last couplet was suggested by Addison's Letter to Lord Halifax:
[46] Addison's Campaign:
[47] "Thickest woods" till Warburton's edition. The epithet "gameful," to express that the woods were full of game, seems to be peculiar to Pope.
[48] Originally:
Richardson transcribes from the margin of Pope's MS. "Qu. if allowable to describe the season by a circumstance not proper to our climate, the vintage?" And the line which speaks of the making of wine was no doubt altered to obviate this objection.
[49] Dryden's Sigismonda and Guiscardo:
[50] From Virgil, Geo. iv. 176:
[51] It stood thus in the first editions:
Pope, as Wakefield observes, has joined together in the simile in the text the inconsistent notions of a town surprised, and a town taken by the regular approaches of a siege. "The passage," adds Wakefield, "as it originally stood was free from this heterogeneous intermixture, and by a little polish might have been made superior to the present reading."
[52] Richardson gives a more descriptive line from the manuscript:
The poet doubtless substituted the later version, because the expression "whirring pheasant" conveyed the same idea as "whistling wings."
[53] This fine apostrophe was probably suggested by that of Virgil on the ox dying of the plague:
[54] Steevens quotes Pictæque volucres. Virg. Painted birds. Dryden.—Bowles.
Pope probably took the phrase from Paradise Lost, where the birds are described as spreading "their painted wings." In transferring the expression he overlooked the fact that the wings are not the part of the pheasant to which the epithet "painted" is especially applicable.
[55] Originally thus:
[56] The reflection is misplaced; for dogs by nature chase hares, and man avails himself of their instinctive propensities.
[57] Originally:
This is a better line.—Warton.
[58] Wakefield understood Pope to mean that the trees shaded the doves, and he objected that leafless trees could not properly be said to overshadow. Steevens pointed out that it was the doves, on the contrary, which overshadowed the trees, by alighting on them in flocks. The ambiguity was caused by Pope's bad and inveterate habit of putting the accusative case before the verb.
He owed the line in the text to Dryden's Virgil, Geor. ii. 774.
"Tube" is an affected term for a gun, but the word is adopted by Cowper and Campbell. Thomson, in his lines on partridge-shooting, was not afraid to call the gun by its own name, and yet is more poetical than Cowper, Campbell, or Pope:
The last expression is nobly descriptive.
So before Pope, Philips in his Cider:
[61] It is singular, that in a poem on a forest, the majestic oak, the deer, and many other interesting and characteristic circumstances, should be all thrown in the distant ground, whilst objects much less appropriate, the fisher, the fowler, &c. are brought forward.—Bowles.
[62] The active use of the word hope, though authorised by Dryden, appears to my taste intolerably harsh and affected.—Wakefield.
[63] "Volume," except in its application to books, now carries with it an idea of magnitude. In Pope's day it was still used in its strictly etymological sense. When Milton, in his personification of Sin (Par. Lost, ii. 651), says that she
"voluminous" is the synonym for "many a scaly fold," and not for the conjoint epithet "vast."
[64] Wakefield points out that Pope borrowed the language from Lauderdale's translation of the fourth Georgic, where he says of the bees that they are "bedropped with gold," or from Milton's description of the fish, which
[65] "The wat'ry plain" from the campi liquentes of Virgil, is an expression of Dryden's in his translation of Ovid, Met. i., and elsewhere. Drayton in his Polyolbion has the tyrant pike.—Wakefield.
"The luce, or pike," says Walton, "is the tyrant of the fresh waters."
[66] Originally thus:
[67] "Sylvan war," is an expression borrowed from writers who described the chase of ferocious beasts,—the lion, tiger, and boar. The language is inapplicable to the pursuit of such timid creatures as the hare, deer, and fox.
[68] Translated from Statius.
These lines Mr. Dryden, in his preface to his translation of Fresnoy's Art of Painting, calls wonderfully fine, and says "they would cost him an hour, if he had the leisure, to translate them, there is so much of beauty in the original," which was the reason, I suppose, why Mr. Pope tried his strength with them.—Warburton.
[69] "Threatening" is an inappropriate epithet for the sloping hills up which the hunters rode in the neighbourhood of Windsor.
[70] Instead of this couplet, Pope had written in his early manuscript,
He was betrayed into this bombast, which his better taste rejected, by the attempt to carry on the hyperbolical strain of Statius.
[71] Queen Anne.—Warburton.
Congreve's Prologue to the Queen:
[72] This use of the word "reign" for the territory ruled over, instead of for the sway of the ruler, was always uncommon, and is now obsolete. Queen Anne is mentioned in connection with the chase and the "immortal huntress," because her favourite diversion before she grew unwieldy and inactive, was to follow the hounds in her chaise.
[73] Better in the manuscript:
By the alteration Pope increased the compliment to Anne by making her the light of the earth as well as mistress of the forest and the sea. Wakefield thinks that this application to the queen of the offices of Diana as goddess of the woods, the luminary of the night, and the chief agent in the production of the tides, is happily conceived, but the moon and the monarch were "the light of the earth "and "empress of the main" in such different senses, that the line is a trivial play upon words.
[74] In the last edition published in Pope's lifetime, the four previous lines, with the variation of "sunny heaths" for "airy wastes," were printed in a note, and their place in the text was supplied by a single couplet:
Wakefield suggests that Pope rejected this latter line, as not being suited to the prevailing character of the English climate, but at ver. 209 he represents the goddess as often "laving" in the Lodona, and to bathe and luxuriate in shade are surely common enough in England.
[75] Dr. Warton says, "that Johnson seems to have passed too severe a censure on this episode of Lodona; and that a tale in a descriptive poem has a good effect." Johnson does not object to a tale in a descriptive poem. He objects only to the triteness of such a tale as this.—Bowles.
[76] Dryden's Translations from Ovid:
[78] This thought of the quiver sounding is found both in Homer and Virgil.—Wakefield.
Pope remembered Dryden's translation of Virgil, Æneis, xi. 968:
And xi. 1140:
[79] Dryden's Æneis, xii. 108:
Sandys' translation: