[443] Vide Ovid's Metamorphoses, viii.—Pope.
Nisus had a purple hair on which depended the safety of himself and his kingdom. When the Cretans made war upon him, his daughter Scylla fell in love with their leader Minos, whom she saw from a high tower. Hurried away by her passion, she plucked out her father's hair as he slept, and carried it to Minos, who was victorious in consequence, and Scylla was turned for her crime into a bird. The line of Pope is made up from a passage in Dryden's translation of the first Georgic, where, having applied the epithet "injured" to Nisus, he adds,
And thus the purple hair is dearly paid.
[444] Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel:
[445] In the first edition it was thus,
As o'er the fragrant steams she bends her head.—Ver. 134.
All that is between was added afterwards.—Pope.
[446] This repetition is formed on similar passages in Virgil.—Wakefield.
As, for instance, Dryden's Æn. vi. 950:
[447] See Milton, lib. vi. 330, of Satan cut asunder by the Angel Michael.—Pope.
[449] A famous book written about that time by a woman: full of court and party scandal; and in a loose effeminacy of style and sentiment, which well-suited the debauched taste of the better vulgar.—Warburton.
Mrs. Manley, the author of it, was the daughter of Sir Roger Manley, Governor of Guernsey, and the author of the first volume of the famous Turkish Spy, published from his papers, by Dr. Midgley. She was known and admired by all the wits of the times. She died in the house of Alderman Barber, Swift's friend; and was said to have been the mistress of the alderman.—Warton.
Her actions were even more infamous than her writings. One Mary Thompson had been kept by a person named Pheasant, and at his death, in 1705, she endeavoured to pass herself off for his wife, that she might have a right of dower out of his estate. According to Mr. Nichols, in a note to Steele's Letters, Mrs. Manley was bribed by the promise of 100l. a-year for life, to aid Mrs. Thompson in getting a forged entry of the marriage inserted in a register. The case was heard in Doctors' Commons, and Mrs. Manley's guilt was proved. But neither her profligacy nor her frauds could deprive her of the countenance of political partisans like Swift and Prior, or of good-natured men of pleasure like Steele.
[450] Ladies in those days sometimes received visits in their bed-chambers, when the bed was covered with a richer counterpane, and "graced" by a small pillow with a worked case and lace edging. Of the female fashions which Pope pleasantly assumes will be as lasting as the swimming of fishes or the flight of birds, the greater part have passed away.—Croker.
[451] Ogilby, Virg. Ecl. v.:
So long thy honoured name and praise shall last.
Dryden, Æn. i. 857:
Your honour, name, and praise shall never die!— Wakefield.
[452] So Juvenal exactly, x. 146:
Quandoquidem data sunt ipsis quoque fata sepulchris.—WAKEFIELD.
[453] Addison of Troy in his poem to the king:
And laid the labour of the gods in dust.—Wakefield.
[454] Addison's translation of Horace, Ode iii. 3:
At regina gravi, &c.—Virg. Æn. iv. 1.—Pope.
[457] The thought and turn of these lines is imitated from the Dispensary, Canto iii.:
[458] All the lines from hence to the 94th verse, that describe the house of Spleen, are not in the first edition; instead of them followed only these:
And continued at the 94th verse of this Canto.—Pope.
[459] Garth in the Dispensary, canto iv.:
The bat with sooty wings flits through the grove.
[460] Spleen was thought to be engendered by the east wind. Cowper, in the Task, Bk. iv. ver. 363, speaks of
[461] In this description our poet seems to have had before him the Cave of Envy in Ovid, Met. ii. 760:
[462] For "Megrim," the first edition has "Languor."
[463] "Wait" for "wait on" or "by" is a very harsh ellipse, though it has the sanction of Dryden.
[464] Hypochondriacal disorders, under the name of vapours or spleen, were then the fashionable complaint, and as they often presented no definite bodily symptoms they could be readily feigned. The "gown" and "night-dress" of Pope are the "dressing-gown" of our day.
[465] Oldham had expressed the same idea in The Dream:
The ancients believed the spleen to be the seat of mirth, and hence a disordered spleen was supposed to produce melancholy and moroseness. The second sense, in modern usage, has driven out the first, and spleen has become synonymous with surliness and gloom, but Pope in prose as well as verse gave it a wider range, and appears to ascribe to it those creations of the imagination which are mistaken for realities. "Methinks," he writes to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "I am imitating in my ravings the dreams of splenetic enthusiasts and solitaires, who fall in love with saints and fancy themselves in favour of angels and spirits."
[466] Snakes erect on the "rolling spires," or coils of their bodies, as Milton says that the neck of the serpent was "erect amidst his circling spires."
[467] In the last century the word "machine" was currently employed to designate the supernatural agents in a fiction, and their proceedings when acting in human affairs. Thus, by the expression "angels in machines" is meant angels interposing on behalf of mankind.
[468] Ovid, Met. i. 1:
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas Corpora.
Of bodies changed to various forms I sing.—Dryden's Trans.—Wakefield.
[469] See Hom. Iliad, xviii., of Vulcan's walking tripods.—Pope.
Van Swieten, in his Commentaries on Boerhaave, relates that he knew a man who had studied till he fancied his legs to be of glass. His maid bringing wood to his fire threw it carelessly down. Our sage was terrified for his legs of glass. The girl, out of patience with his megrims, gave him a blow with a log on the parts affected. He started up in a rage, and from that moment recovered the use of his glass legs.—Warton.
[470] Alludes to a real fact; a lady of distinction imagined herself in this condition.—Pope.
[471] The fanciful person, here alluded to, was Dr. Edward Pelling, chaplain to several successive monarchs. Having studied himself into hypochondriasis between the age of forty and fifty, he imagined himself to be pregnant, and forbore all manner of exercise lest motion should prove injurious to his ideal burden.—Steevens.
[472] This is adopted from the Loyal Subject of Beaumont and Fletcher.—Steevens.
[473] In imitation of the golden branch which Æneas carried as a passport when he visited the infernal regions. Spleenwort is a species of fern. "Its virtues," says Cowley, "are told in its name." He makes it compare itself with "painted flowers," and exclaim,
The plant has lost the little credit it once possessed as a remedy for hypochondriacal affections.
[474] Bishop Lowth notices Pope's frequent violation of grammar in joining a pronoun in the singular to a verb in the plural. Thus when he says in the Messiah,
either "thou" should be "you," or else "touched" should be "touchedst, didst touch." Pope has committed the same error in this speech to the Queen of Spleen; for that "thou," and not "you," is, or ought to be, the pronoun understood follows from the expression "thy power" at ver. 65. Hence "who rule" should be "who rulest," or "who dost rule," and so with the other verbs in the second person.
[475] The disease was probably named from the atmospheric vapours which were reputed to be a principal cause of English melancholy. Cowper says of England in his Task, Bk. v. ver. 462,
[476] Citron-water was a cordial distilled from a mixture of spirit of wine with the rind of citrons and lemons. There are numerous allusions in the literature of Pope's day to the fondness of women of fashion for this drink, as in Swift's Journal of a Modern Lady, where he says that "to cool her heated brains" when she wakes at noon she
Takes a large dram of citron-water.
[477] The curl papers of ladies' hair used to be fastened with strips of pliant lead.—Croker.
[478] That is, at whose shrine all our sex resign ease, pleasure, and virtue. "Honour" means female reputation.
[479] A parody of Virgil, Ecl. i. 60.—Wakefield.
Garth, Dispensary, Canto iii.:
[480] Sir George Brown. He was angry that the poet should make him talk nothing but nonsense: and in truth one could not well blame him.—Warburton.
This is one instance out of many in which Pope took unwarrantable liberties with private character. Spence had been told that the description "was the very picture of the man."
[481] A cane diversified with darker spots.—Wakefield.
The "nice conduct" of canes is ridiculed by Addison in No. 103 of the Tatler. A man of fashion, with "a cane very curiously clouded, and a blue ribbon to hang it on his wrist," protests that the "knocking it upon his shoe, leaning one leg upon it, or whistling with it on his mouth are such great reliefs to him in conversation that he does not know how to be good company without it." A second beau is warned that his cane must be forfeited if "he walks with it under his arm, brandishes it in the air, or hangs it on a button."
[482] In allusion to Achilles's oath in Homer, Il. i.—Pope.
[483] Dryden's Æn. i. 770:
If yet he lives and draws this vital air.
[484] Borrowed from Dryden's Epistle to Mr. Granville:
The long contended honours of the field.—Holt White.
[485] These two lines are additional; and assign the cause of the different operation on the passions of the two ladies. The poem went on before without that distinction, as without any machinery, to the end of the Canto.—Pope.
At ver. 91, Umbriel empties the bag which contains the angry passions over the heads of Thalestris and Belinda. At ver. 142 he breaks the phial of sorrow over Belinda alone, whence Belinda's anger is turned to grief, and Thalestris remains indignant.
[486] A parody of Virg. Æn. iv. 657:
[487] Pope originally wrote:
'Twas this the morning omens did foretell.
He altered the verse, together with one or two others of the same kind, to get rid of the "did".
[488] Butler, the poet, says that the object of black patches was to make the complexion look fairer by the contrast. Dryden has a similar idea in Palamon and Arcite:
[489] Prior's Henry and Emma:
[490] Sir William Bowles on the Death of Charles II.:
And in their rulers fate bewail their own.
[491] Translated from Virgil, Æn. iv. 440:
[492] The entreaties to stay which Dido's sister, Anna, addressed to Æneas.—Croker.
Virgil says that the pathetic entreaties to stay sent a thrill of grief through the mighty breast of Æneas, but that his resolution was unshaken. Pope's couplet supposes that he inwardly wavered.
[493] A new character introduced in the subsequent editions, to open more clearly the moral of the poem, in a parody of the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus in Homer.—Pope.
The parody first appeared when the Rape of the Lock was inserted in the quarto of 1717. In the previous enlarged editions, which contained the machinery, the sixth verse was followed by what is now verse thirty-seven:
To arms, to arms! the bold Thalestris cries.
[494] Homer.
The passage quoted by Warburton is from Pope's own translation of the Episode of Sarpedon, which appeared in Dryden's Miscellany, in 1710.
[495] Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel:
The young men's vision, and the old men's dream.—Wakefield.
[496] Denham, in his version of the speech of Homer parodied by our poet:
[497] Gay, in the Toilette:
[498] The ladies at this time always sat in the front, the gentlemen in the side-boxes.—Nichols.
In Steele's Theatre, No. 3, January 9, 1720, his "representatives of a British audience" are "three of the fair sex for the front boxes, two gentlemen of wit and pleasure for the side-boxes, and three substantial citizens for the pit." "The virgin ladies," he said, in the Guardian, No. 29, April 14, 1713, "usually dispose themselves in the front of the boxes, the young married women compose the second row, while the rear is generally made up of mothers of long standing, undesigning maids, and contented widows."—Cunningham.
[499] It is a verse frequently repeated in Homer after any speech,
——So spoke—and all the heroes applauded.—Pope.
[500] From hence the first edition goes on to the conclusion, except a very few short insertions added to keep the machinery in view to the end of the poem.—Pope.
[501] Æneid. v. 140:
[502] Homer, Il. xx.—Pope.
[503] This verse is an improvement on the original, Æneid. viii. 246:
The concluding line of the paragraph is from Addison's translation of a passage in Silius Italicus:
There is more of bathos than of humour from ver. 43 to ver. 52. The exaggeration is carried so far that even the similitude of caricature is lost.
[504] These four lines added, for the reason before mentioned.—Pope.
[505] Minerva in like manner, during the battle of Ulysses with the suitors in the Odyssey, perches on a beam of the roof to behold it.—Pope.
[506] Like the heroes in Homer when they are spectators of a combat.—Warton.
[507] This idea is borrowed from a couplet in the Duke of Buckingham's Essay on Poetry where he ridicules the poetical dialogues of the dramatis personæ in the reign of Charles II.
[508] Wakefield quotes passages from Sir Philip Sidney, Drummond, and Milton, in which the phrase "living death" occurs.
[509] The words of a song in the Opera of Camilla.—Pope.
"Here," said Dennis, speaking of the death of the beau and witling, "we have a real combat, and a metaphorical dying," and he did the lines no injustice when he added that they were but a "miserable pleasantry."
[511] Vid. Homer, Il. viii. and Virg. Æn. xii.—Pope.
The passage in Homer to which the poet refers is where Jupiter, before the conflict between Hector and Achilles, weighs the issue in a pair of scales.
[512] These two lines added for the above reason.—Pope.
[513] In imitation of the progress of Agamemnon's sceptre in Homer, Il. ii.—Pope.
[514] Pins to adorn the hair were then called bodkins, and Sir George Etherege, in Tonson's Second Miscellany, traces the genealogy of some jewels through the successive stages of the ornament of a cap, the handle of a fan, and ear-rings, till they became, like the gold seal rings, in the Rape of the Lock,
[515] "Who," asked Dennis, "ever heard of a dead man that burnt in Cupid's flames?" Pope had originally written,
And still burn on, in Cupid's flames, alive.
[516] Dryden's Alexander's Feast:
[517] Vide Ariosto, Canto xxxiv.—Pope.
From the catalogue which follows it appears that, by "all things lost on earth," Pope meant only such things as, in his opinion, were hypocritical, foolish, and frivolous. These mounted to the lunar sphere when they had finished their course here below,—a career very short in instances like the "tears of heirs," and, perhaps, very long in instances like the butterflies preserved in the cabinets of collectors.
[518] Apparently Pope had the erroneous idea that distinguished soldiers were men of dull and ponderous minds.
[519] The alms would not be "lost on earth," however unprofitable they might be to the alms-givers, from whom they had been extorted by fear instead of proceeding from a benevolent disposition.
[520] Dryden's Œdipus, act 2:
[521] Denham, in Cooper's Hill, gave him a hint:
Dryden, Æneis, v. 1092:
[523] These two lines added, for the same reason, to keep in view the machinery of the poem.—Pope.
Dryden's Æneis, v. 691:
[524] The promenades in the Mall lasted till the middle of the reign of George III., and it would appear from this line that they were enlivened by music.—Croker.
[525] Rosamond's lake was a small oblong piece of water near the Pimlico Gate of St. James's Park. When it was done away with, about the middle of the last century, the public, unwilling to lose the romantic name, transferred it to the dirty pond in the Green Park, which has, in its turn, been filled up.—Croker.
[526] John Partridge was a ridiculous stargazer, who in his almanacks every year never failed to predict the downfall of the Pope, and the King of France, then at war with the English.—Pope.
He had been made the subject of ridicule by Swift, Steele, Addison and others.—Croker.
[527] Milton, Par. Lost, v. ver. 261, calls the telescope "the glass of Galileo," who first employed it to observe the heavens.
[528] Phebe in As You Like It, Act iii. Sc. 5, says to her despised and despairing lover,
Thou tell'st me there is murder in mine eye.
[529] The compliment was meant to be serious, but is marred by its extravagance. "Millions" is too hyperbolical.
[530] Spenser in his 75th Sonnet:
And Cowley, in his imitation of Horace, Ode iv. 2: