[81] In the first edition:
[82] Wakefield remarks that Pope, yielding to the exigencies of rhyme, has put "run" for "ran."
Sandys, whom our bard manifestly consulted, renders thus:
Not only is the story of Lodona copied from the transformation of Arethusa into a stream, but nearly all the particulars are taken from different passages in Ovid, of which Warburton has furnished a sufficient specimen.
[84] The river Loddon.—Pope.
[85] The idea of "augmenting the waves with tears" was very common among the earliest English poets, but perhaps the most ridiculous use ever made of this combination, was by Shakespeare:
Dryden's translation of the first book of Ovid's Art of Love:
[86] These six lines were added after the first writing of this poem.—Pope.
And in truth they are but puerile and redundant.—Warton.
[87] Eve, looking into the fountain, in Dryden's State of Innocence, Act ii.:
[88] The epithet "absent," employed to denote that the trees were only a reflection in the water, is more perplexing than descriptive, particularly as the "absent trees" are distinguished from the "pendant woods," which must equally have been absent.
[89] In every edition before Warburton's it was "spreading honours." Pope probably considered that "rear," which denoted an upward direction, could not be consistently conjoined with "spreading." For "shores," improperly applied in the next line to a river, all the editions before 1736 had "banks."
[90] "Her" appears for the first time in the edition of Warburton in the place of "his," and is now the accepted reading, but it is manifestly a misprint, since "her" has no antecedent. The couplet is obscure. Pope could hardly intend to assert that the flow of the tide poured as much water into the Thames as all the other rivers of the world discharged into the ocean, and he probably meant that all the navigable rivers of the globe did not send more commerce to the sea than came from the sea up the Thames. Even in this case it was a wild, without being a poetical, exaggeration.
[91] In the first edition:
The epithets "clear," "gentle," "full," which Pope applies to the Thames, show that he had in his mind the celebrated passage in Cooper's Hill:
[92] The ancients gave the name of the terrestrial Eridanus or Po, to a constellation which has somewhat the form of a winding river. Pope copied Denham:
[93] Very ill expressed, especially the rivers swelling the lays.—Warton.
[94] The original readings were beyond all competition preferable both in strength and beauty:
[95] In saying that the Po did not swell the lays of the poet in the same degree as the Thames, Pope more especially alluded to the celebrated description of the latter in Cooper's Hill.
[96] In the earlier editions,
The MS. goes on thus:
[97] Originally:
The turn of this passage manifestly proves that our poet had in view that incomparable encomium of Virgil's second Georgic on philosophy and a country life.—Wakefield.
In addition to the imitation of the second Georgic, and the translation of lines in Horace and Lucan, Pope adopted hints, as Warton has remarked, from Philips's Cider:
[98] Lord Lansdowne.—Croker.
[99] This is taken from Horace's epistle to Tibullus:
Pope remembered Creech's translation of the passage:
[101] Dryden's Virgil, Geor. ii. 673:
Addison in his Letter from Italy has the expression "fired with a thousand raptures."
[103] Cooper's Hill is the elevation, not deserving the name of mountain, just over Egham and Runnymede.—Croker.
[104] It stood thus in the MS.
[105] From Philips's Cider, ii. 6:
[106] By "first lays," Pope means Cooper's Hill, but Denham had previously written the Sophy, a tragedy, and translated the second book of the Æneid.
[107] Dryden says of the Cooper's Hill, "it is a poem which for majesty of style is, and ever will be, the standard of good writing." From hence, no doubt, Pope took the word "majestic."—Bowles.
[108] Mr. Cowley died at Chertsey, on the borders of the Forest, and was from thence conveyed to Westminster.—Pope.
Pope told Spence that Cowley was killed by a fever brought on by lying out all night in the fields. He had got drunk, in company with his friend Dean Sprat, at the house of a neighbour, and they lost their way in the attempt to walk home. Sprat had long before related that Cowley caught his last illness in the "meadows," but says it was caused "by staying too long amongst his labourers in the heat of the summer." The drunkenness, and the lying out all night, appear to have been the embellishments of scandal.
[109] Cowley died July 28, 1667, in the 49th year of his age. Pope's "O early lost!" is copied from the "O early ripe!" of Dryden in his lines to the Memory of Oldham.
[110] Oldham's Imitation of Moschus:
[111] On the margin of his manuscript Pope wrote the passage of Virgil which he imitated:
The "pomp" was not a poetical exaggeration. Evelyn, who attended the funeral, says that Cowley's body was "conveyed to Westminster Abbey in a hearse with six horses, near a hundred coaches of noblemen, and persons of quality following."
[112] Originally:
[113] We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. Psalm cxxxvii. 2.—Wakefield.
Pope says that "each muse" hung up her lyre because Cowley was thought to excel in many departments of verse. "He was beloved," said Dr. Felton, "by every muse he courted, and has rivalled the ancients in every kind of poetry but tragedy." Dr. Sprat entitled his poem on him an "Ode to the English Ovid, Anacreon, Pindar, and Virgil."
[114] Warton mentions, that "living lyre" is used by Cowley.
[115] This couplet was a triplet in the manuscript with the following middle line:
It is surprising that Pope did not feel the bathos of the expression, "'Tis yours, my lord," introduced into the midst of the high-flown adulation.
[116] Philips:
[117] Meaning, I apprehend, the star of the knights of the Garter installed at Windsor.—Wakefield.
The order was founded by Edward III., the builder of Windsor Castle, which further connected it with Pope's subject. Denham had celebrated the institution of the garter in Cooper's Hill, and Lord Lansdowne, in his Progress of Beauty, "sung the honours" in a few despicable verses, which certainly added no "lustre to the silver star."
[118] All the lines that follow were not added to the poem till the year 1710 [1712]. What immediately followed this, and made the conclusion, were these;
[119] Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, one of the first refiners of the English poetry; famous in the time of Henry VIII. for his sonnets, the scene of many of which is laid at Windsor.—Pope.
[120] The Fair Geraldine, the general object of Lord Surrey's passionate sonnets, was one of the daughters of Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare. In Warton's History of English Poetry, is a poem of the elegiac kind, in which Surrey laments his imprisonment in Windsor Castle.—Warton.
[121] The Mira of Granville was the Countess of Newburgh. Towards the end of her life Dr. King, of Oxford, wrote a very severe satire against her, in three hooks, called The Toast.—Warton.
She proved in her conduct to be the reverse of "heavenly." "Granville," says Johnson, "wrote verses to her before he was three-and-twenty, and may be forgiven if he regarded the face more than the mind. Poets are sometimes in too much haste to praise."
[123] Edward III. born here.—Pope.
[124] David Bruce, king of Scotland, taken prisoner at the battle of Nevil's Cross, 1346, and John, king of France, captured at the battle of Poitiers, 1356. "Monarchs chained" conveys the idea of a rigorous imprisonment, and belies the chivalry, which was the pride of Edward and the Black Prince. David, who was the brother-in-law of Edward III., was subjected to so little constraint, that he was allowed to visit Scotland, and confer with his people on the terms of his ransom. John was received with royal honours in England, and during the whole of his residence here was surrounded with regal luxury and state.
[125] Denham's Cooper's Hill:
Edward III. claimed the crown of France by descent, and quartered the French fleur-de-lis on his shield before the victories of the Black Prince had made the assumption something more than an empty boast.
[126] Originally thus in the MS.
[127] He was a Neapolitan. Without much invention, and with less taste, his exuberant pencil was ready at pouring out gods, goddesses, kings, emperors, and triumphs, over those public surfaces on which the eye never rests long enough to criticise,—I mean ceilings and staircases. Charles II. consigned over Windsor to his pencil. He executed most of the ceilings there, one whole side of St. George's Hall, and the chapel. On the accession of James II., Verrio was again employed at Windsor in Wolsey's Tomb-house.—Horace Walpole.
[128] Pope had in his head this couplet of Halifax:
[129] Henry VI.—Pope.
[130] Edward IV.—Pope.
[131] The Land's End in Cornwall is called by Diodorus Siculus, Belerium promentorium, perhaps from Bellerus, one of the Cornish giants with which that country and the poems of old British bards were once filled.—T. Warton.
[132] Dryden's translation of the tenth Satire of Juvenal, ver. 236:
[133] Dr. Chetwood's verses to Roscommon:
[134] Charles I. was buried in St. George's Chapel, Windsor. The precise spot was a matter of doubt till an accidental aperture was made in 1813 into the vault of Henry VIII., when a lead coffin was discovered bearing the inscription "King Charles, 1648." It was opened in the presence of the Regent; and the corpse was in a sufficient state of preservation to enable the spectators to recognise the likeness of the countenance to Vandyke's portraits of the king, and to ascertain that the head had been severed from the body.
[135] Originally thus in the MS.
[136] To say that the plague in London, and its consumption by fire, were judgments inflicted by heaven for the murder of Charles I., is a very extraordinary stretch of tory principles indeed.—Warton.
[137] This couplet is directed at the Revolution, considered by Pope, in common with all jacobites, to be a like public calamity with the plague and the fire of London.—Croker.
Pope had in his mind, when he wrote the couplet, Creech's Hor., Ode xxxv. lib. 1.
[138] Thus in the MS.
It may be presumed that Pope varied the couplet from perceiving the impropriety of a parody on the fiat of the Creator.
[139] Dryden's Annus Mirabilis:
And again, at the conclusion of his Threnodia Augustalis:
The gods of rivers are invariably represented as old men.
[140] Spenser of Father Thames:
[141] Between verse 330 and 331, originally stood these lines;
[142] Horns were a classical attribute of rivers,—not I think, according to the common view, as a mark of dignity, but as a symbolical expression of the fact that the principal streams, like the ocean itself, are formed from a confluence of tributaries.—Croker.
Pope's personification of the Thames is the echo of Addison's translation of a passage in Claudian, describing the deity of the Eridanus:
[143] Augusta was the name which the Romans at one period gave to London. The representation of the god attended by
and the accompanying enumeration of the subsidiary streams, is closely imitated from the Faery Queen. Pope professes to describe the river-gods who stood round the throne of Father Thames, but he has confounded the river-gods with the rivers, and some of his epithets,—"winding Isis," "blue transparent Vandalis," "gulphy Lee,"—are not applicable to persons.
[144] The river-gods were said to be the children of Oceanus and Tethys, but in the earlier mythology, Oceanus was himself a river (not a sea), surrounding the earth, and the lesser rivers were his progeny.
[145] The Tamesis. It was a common but erroneous notion, that the appellation was formed from appending the name Isis to Thame.
[146] Warton observes that Pope has here copied and equalled the description of rivers in Spenser, Drayton, and Milton. The description is beautiful, but in some points it is deficient. "Winding Isis" and "fruitful Thame" are ill designated. No peculiar and visible image is added to the character of the streams, either interesting from beauty, or incidental circumstances. Most rivers wind and may be called fruitful, as well as the Isis and Thame. The latter part of the description is much more masterly, as every river has its distinctive mark, and that mark is picturesque. It may be said, however, that all the epithets, in a description of this sort, cannot be equally significant, but surely something more striking should have been given as circumstantially characteristic of such rivers as the Isis and Thames, than that they were "winding" and "fruitful," or of the Kennet that it was renowned for "silver eels."—Bowles.
[147] Drayton:
The Kennet is not linked by Pope to any poetical association when he simply says that it is "renowned for silver eels," but Spenser brings a delightful picture before the eye when he speaks of the
[148] Addison:
[149] Several of Pope's epithets are borrowed, although he has not always coupled them with the same streams to which they are applied in his originals. For "Kennet swift" Milton has "Severn swift," and for "chalky Wey" Spenser has "chalky Kennet."
[150] The Wandle.—Croker.
[151] Milton has "gulphy Dun" and "sedgy Lee," and Pope combined the characteristics. The remainder of the couplet is from Addison's translation of a passage in Claudian:
[152] Milton's Vacation Exercise:
The Mole at particular spots, called the swallows, sinks through crevices in the chalk, and during dry seasons, when there is not sufficient water to till both the subterranean and the upper channel, the bed of the river is laid bare in parts of its course. The stream sometimes entirely disappears from Burford-bridge to the neighbourhood of Thorncroft-bridge, a distance of nearly three miles.
[153] Drayton:
Pope's epithet "silent" was suggested by "the still Darent" of Spenser, and the same poet had said of the Eden that it was
[154] Addison's translation of an extract from Ovid:
[155] The river god bowing respectfully to his human audience, before he commenced his speech, is a ludicrous idea, into which Pope was seduced by his courtly desire to represent even the deities as doing homage to Queen Anne.
[156] So Dryden, Æneis, x. 156:
Pope's lines are compiled from the passage quoted by Wakefield and a couplet in the Court Prospect of Hopkins:
[157] The Hermus is characterised by Virgil as "turbid with gold." The property was more usually ascribed to its tributary, the Pactolus, but there was no gold in either.
[158] An undoubted imitation, I think, of Dr. Bathurst's verses on Selden:
Homer denominates the Nile, whose sources were unknown, a river that falls from Jupiter or heaven. And our countryman calls it sevenfold, as Ovid before him septemfluus, and Catullus still earlier septemgeminus, from the seven mouths by which its waters are discharged into the Mediterranean.—Wakefield.
[159] Originally thus in the MS.
This he altered with his usual discernment, on account of the mean conceit in the equivocal use of the word "foundation."—Wakefield.
[160] This alludes to General Stanhope's campaigns on the Ebro, and the Duke of Marlborough's on the Danube.—Croker.
In saying that British blood should no more dye foreign lands, Pope meant to furnish an argument for the Peace by intimating that the war was kept up, at the sacrifice of English life, for the benefit of other nations.
[161] In the manuscript:
[162] And certainly sufficient ferocity is displayed even in these amusements. Cowley says,
His commentator, Dr. Hurd, remarks in a spirit that endears him to the reader, "Innocent, he means, in comparison with wars on his own kind."—Wakefield.