The Works of Alexander Pope Part 51

Amidst thy laurels let this ivy twine, Thine was my earliest muse.

Ivy, with the Romans, was the emblem of literary success, and the laurel crown was worn by a victorious general at a triumph. As Pollio, to whom Virgil addressed his eighth eclogue, was both a conqueror and a poet, the double garland allotted to him was appropriate, but there was no fitness in the application of the pa.s.sage to Garth.]

[Footnote 13: A harsh line, and a false and affected thought.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 14: Virg. Ecl. x. 8.

Non canimus surdis: respondent omnia sylvae.--POPE.

Ogilby's translation of the verse in Virgil:

Nor to the deaf do we our numbers sing, Since woods, in answ'ring us, with echoes ring.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 15: A line out of Spenser's Epithalamion.--POPE.]

[Footnote 16: A line unworthy our author, containing a false and trivial thought; as is also the 22nd line.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 17: Pope says his merit in these Pastorals is his copying from the ancients. Can anything like this, and other conceits, be found in the natural and unaffected language of Virgil? No such thing. But what do we find in Dryden's imitation of Virgil, Ecl. ii. 13:

The creaking locusts with my voice conspire, They fried with heat, and I with fierce desire.

This is Virgil's:

Sole sub ardenti resonant arbusta cicadis.

And Pope had the imitation in his eye, not the original.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 18: So Virgil says of Sirius, or the dog-star, Geor. ii. 353:

hiulca siti findit Canis aestifer arva.

"Ga.s.sendi has well remarked," says Arnauld in his Logic, "that nothing could be less probable than the notion that the dog-star is the cause of the extraordinary heat which prevails in what are called the dog days, because as Sirius is on the other side of the equator, the effects of the star should be greatest at the places where it is most perpendicular, whereas the dog days here are the winter season there.

Whence the inhabitants of those countries have much more reason to believe that the dog-star brings cold than we have to believe that it causes heat."]

[Footnote 19: The Shepherd's Calendar of Spenser:

Such rage as winter's reigneth in my heart.]

[Footnote 20: Virg. Ecl. x. 9, out of Theocritus:

Quae nemora, aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellae Naades, indigno c.u.m Gallus amore periret?

Nam neque Parna.s.si vobis juga, nam neque Pindi, Ulla moram fecere, neque Aoniae Aganippe.--POPE.

Ogilby's translation:

Say, Naades, where were you, in what grove, Or lawn, when Gallus fell by ill-matched love.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 21: Addison's Campaign:

Or where the Seine her flow'ry fields divides, Or where the Loire through winding vineyards glides.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope wrote at random. The Cam does not divide vales, but runs, or rather creeps, through one of the flattest districts in England.]

[Footnote 22:

Oft in the crystal spring I cast a view, And equalled Hylas, if the gla.s.s be true; But since those graces meet my eyes no more, shun, etc.

Virgil again (Ecl. ii. 25), from the Cyclops of Theocritus:

nuper me in littore vidi, c.u.m placidum ventis staret mare; non ego Daphnim, Judice te, metuam, si nunquam fallit imago.--POPE.

In his first version, which is closer to Virgil than the second, Pope had in his mind Dryden's translation, Ecl. ii. 33:

and if the gla.s.s be true, With Daphnis I may vie.]

[Footnote 23: Milton, Penseroso, ver. 172:

And every herb that sips the dew.--WAKEFIELD.]

[Footnote 24: This is an obvious imitation of those trite lines in Ovid, Met. i. 522:

herbarum subjecta potentia n.o.bis.

Hei mihi, quod nullis amor est medicabilis herbis; Nec prosunt domino, quae prosunt omnibus, artes.--WAKEFIELD.

Dryden's translation:

What herbs and simples grow In fields and forests, all their pow'rs I know.

To cure the pains of love no plant avails, And his own physic the physician fails.

It is remarkable that the imitation in the text of some of the most hacknied lines in cla.s.sical literature, should be one of four pa.s.sages quoted by Ruffhead, to prove that all the images in Pope's Pastorals had not been borrowed from preceding poets.]

[Footnote 25: The only faulty rhymes, _care_ and _shear_, perhaps in these poems, where the versification is in general so exact and correct.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 26: The scene is laid upon the banks of the Thames, and "mountain" is a term inapplicable to any of the neighbouring hills. Pope was too intent upon copying Virgil to pay much regard to the characteristics of the English landscape.]

[Footnote 27: It is not easy to conceive a more harsh and clas.h.i.+ng line than this. There is the same imagery in Theocritus (Idyll viii. 55), but it is made more striking by the circ.u.mstances and picturesque accompaniments, as well as by the extraordinary effect of the lines adapted to the subject.--BOWLES.]

[Footnote 28: The name taken by Spenser in his Eclogues, where his mistress is celebrated under that of Rosalinda.--POPE.]

[Footnote 29: Virg. Ecl. ii. 36:

Est mihi disparibus septem compacta cicutis Fistula, Damoetas dono mihi quam dedit olim, Et dixit moriens, Te nunc habet ista secundum.--POPE.

Pope's couplet originally ran thus:

Of slender reeds a tuneful flute I have.

The tuneful flute which dying Colin gave.

"Objection," he says to Walsh, "that the first line is too much transposed from the natural order of the words, and that the rhyme is inharmonious." He subjoined the couplet in the text, and asked, "Which of these is best?" to which Walsh replies, "The second."]