THE FIRST EPISTLE OF THE SECOND BOOK OF HORACE. TO AUGUSTUS.1 WHILE you, great patron of mankind!' sustain The king's name was George Augustus. 2 All those nauseous and outra geous compliments, which Horace, in a strain of abject adulation, degraded himself by paying to Augustus, Pope has converted into bitter and pointed sarcasms, conveyed under the form of the most artful irony.WARTON. 3 This has been thought a very obscure expression; but it should be remembered that irony is the leading feature of this Epistle. It was written in 1737, at the time when the Spanish depredations at sea were such that there was an universal cry that the British flag had been insulted, and the contemptible and degraded English braved on their own element. "At this period," says Mr. Coxe, "the House was daily inundated with petitions and papers relating to the inhumanities committed on the English prisoners taken on board of trading vessels." "Opening all the main" means, therefore, that the King was so liberal as to leave it open to the Spaniards, who committed with impunity whatever outrages they pleased, on those who were before considered the almost exclusive masters of it.-BoWLES. Rather, "Open all the main" has a double meaning. It seems, on the surface, to mean, "open all the main to English trade;" but what is actually meant is, as Bowles says, that the main was left open only to the Spaniards. By the treaty of 1667, the Spaniards had the right of searching merchant vessels in those seas for contraband goods, and the manner in which they exercised the right provoked the liveliest indignation in England. The public excitement reached its height over what Burke calls "the fable of Jenkins's ears." 4 I have not ventured to alter the punctuation, for the passage stands as here pointed in all the early editions as 66 How shall the Muse, from such a monarch, steal well as in Warburton's. But I can- sire to command the army in person (see Lord Hervey's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 371); and, secondly, in the words "abroad defend," meaning that George II. was more careful for the interests of Hanover than for those of England, which was of course one of the stock charges of the Opposition. 1 Edward III. and Henry V. 2 That is to say, "closed their long glories with a sigh at finding how unwillingly the gratitude of base mankind was given.' 3 He seems indebted to Waller's poem on the Protector, throughout this noble passage: Still as you rise, the State, exalted too, you; Changed like the world's great scene, The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys, To thee, the world its present homage pays, Above all Greek, above all Roman fame : Just in one instance, be it yet confessed But living virtue, all achievements past, Again, in his verses on St. James's Those suns of empire! where they rise, they set.-WAKEFIELD. 35: Compare Epistle to Addison, v. With sharpened sight pale antiquaries pore, The inscription value, but the rust adore. 2 After modernising January and May and The Wife of Bath, Pope was hardly the man to make this reflection. 3 Skelton, Poet Laureate to Henry VIII., a volume of whose verses has lately been reprinted, consisting almost wholly of ribaldry, obscenity, and scurrilous language.-POPE. Pope doubtless alludes to the volume called "Pithy, Pleasant, and Profitable Workes of Maister Skelton." Printed for C. Davis in Pater-noster Row. 1736. 3 Skelton was Laureate before the year 1490. He took orders in 1498, and was censured, and perhaps suspended from his priestly office, for his satirical ballads against the Mendicants. He afterwards attacked Cardinal Wolsey, and was obliged to take shelter in the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, where he was entertained and protected by Abbot Islip till his death in 1529. He was buried in St. Margaret's, Westminster. Erasmus styled him "Britannicarum literarum lumen et decus." 4 Compare ver. 97. 5 A ballad made by a king of Scotland.-POPE. Our James I. was eminent for poetry no less than for music. We have many poems ascribed by tradition to that king; one in particular, Christ's Kirk o' the Green, is a ludicrous poem, describing low manners with no less propriety than sprightliness.-LORD KAMES. And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, We build, we paint, we sing, we dance as well; Suppose he wants a year, will you compound? At ninety-nine, a modern and a dunce? "We shall not quarrel for a year or two By courtesy of England' he may do." Then, by the rule that made the horse-tail bare, I pluck out year by year, as hair by hair,' The Devil Tavern, where Ben Jonson held his Poetical Club.POPE. Ben Jonson presided over the Apollo Club at the "Devil," which was next door to Child's Bank in Fleet Street. The tavern was pulled down when the Bank premises were extended in 1788. 2 This is a stroke at the contemporary rage for spectacular and acrobatic exhibitions of all kinds upon the stage in the place of legitimate drama. Sedley notes the beginning of the new taste after Dryden's disappearance from the stage: Poets of different magnitude advance, 3 Courtesy of England is restricted in law to the single case of not disturbing the husband in the enjoyment, for his life, of his wife's estate after her death. Pope applies it loosely to the case of not disturbing the claim of a poet to rank as a classic where a prescriptive title of a full century could not be made out.PATTISON. 4 The allusion in Horace is to the And melt down ancients like a heap of snow, Shakespeare (whom you and every play-house bill fallacy called Sorites, and is said to refer to the sophism of Eubulides of Miletus, the question being how many hairs could be pulled out of a man's head before he could be said to be made bald. 1 The old chronicler. He is men. tioned again in the Versification of Donne, Sat. iv. 131. 2 Shakespeare and Ben Jonson may truly be said not to have thought of this Immortality, the one in many pieces composed in haste for the stage; the other in his latter works in general, which Dryden called his dotages. - POPE. 3 This must mean "seemed as little to heed the life to come which is part of every poet's creed." The criticism is not just. Jonson worked to the last with painful art, and his Ode to Himself, after the failure of the New Inn, is a bitter philippic against the bad taste of the public: Say that thou pour'st them wheat, 'Twere simple fury still thyself to waste Whose appetites are dead! No! give them grains their fill, If they love lees and leave the lusty wine, 4 Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), who, 5 46 'Wit, abstracted from its effects on the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit thus defined they " (the metaphysical school) "have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased."-JOHNSON, Life of Cowley. 6 Cowley's Epic is called the Davideis. 7 Which has much more merit A A X |