grace and polish that were peculiar to the age of Queen Anne. Two lines of this Ode,1 Non sum qualis eram bonæ Sub regno Cinaræ, -a favorite complaint of Swift, Pope, and Prior—he has rendered in the delightful translation:2 I am not now, alas! the man As in the gentle reign of my Queen Anne. Of the Ninth Ode of the Fourth Book Pope imitated the first thirty lines. Though Homer holds the first place in song, yet the verse of Pindar, Alcæus, Stesichorus, is not lost to sight: so Horace begins his Ode; and Pope translates though Milton sits sublime, yet Spenser, nor yet Waller and Cowley, shall yield to time. Upon all alike, hero and coward, darkness rests, where no poet has lived to sing their deeds. These two thoughts of Horace's Ode Pope has rendered in his paraphrase. The first Dialogue of the Epilogue to the Satires was originally published under the title, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty-eight. A Dialogue Something like Horace. Both Dialogues are based upon the discourse between Horace and Trebatius on the subject of satire in the First Satire of the Second Book. Pope is Horace; a friend takes the part of Trebatius, who protests against the poet's use of satire, in order to give an opportunity— to Horace in the original, to Pope in the imitated poemto vindicate his employment of it. The first Dialogue begins,3 Not twice a twelvemonth you appear in print, 1 O. 4. 1. 3-4. 2 Imitations of Horace, O. 4. 1. 3-4 (Wks. 3. 415). 3 Wks. 3. 457. like the beginning of the dialogue between Damasippus and Horace in the Third Satire of the Second Book: Sic raro scribis, ut toto non quater anno There are a few scattered allusions throughout the Epilogue to lines in Horace's Epistles and Satires, but it is in no sense an imitation of any one of his writings. Though by reason of the easy, polished, conversational tone in which it is written, it may be said to be in the Horatian manner, yet its many satiric strokes are too sharp and too personal to be really in unison with the spirit of the satire of Horace. Pope wrote one other Imitation of Horace, with the title Sober Advice from Horace, As delivered in his Second Sermon. This satire he never openly acknowledged; it was published in Dodsley's edition of his Works in 1738, but has been included in no other edition. It has little value either as an imitation of Horace, as a piece of satirical writing, or from a more general, literary point of view. As footnotes to the Latin text, which he printed with his Imitation, he has introduced parodies upon Bentley's methods of emendation and elucidation. The Dunciad is entirely un-Horatian in character. A mock-heroic poem, parodying Homer and Virgil with its hero, its lesser heroes, and its action, it is not surprising to find in it a great deal of imitation of the Æneid. Its fierce invectives and personalities remove it even further from any likeness to the writings of Horace. Allusions, however, are to be found in single lines of the poem, and quite frequently in the commentary notes added by Pope and his friends. In Pope's short miscellaneous poems, in his Epitaphs, Epigrams, Characters, Odes, etc., there is no allusion to Horace, with the exception of an epitaph, On Mr. Elijah Fenton, in which the lines,' From Nature's temp'rate feast rose satisfy'd, Thank'd Heav'n that he had liv'd, and that he died, seem to echo these of Horace,2 Et exacto contentus tempore vita Cedat uti conviva satur; and the epitaph For One who would not be buried in Westminster Abbey, which expresses once more Pope's pride in his independence of pensions and patronage:3 Heroes and kings! your distance keep: In his few prose writings Pope has made use of Horace in a more direct manner than in his poetry. His most frequent reference to him occurs in the Art of Sinking in Poetry, which is a sort of parody of the Ars Poetica. In it he leans upon Horace and perverts his authority to his own satiric uses, borrows examples from him to illustrate his own rules, and ironically misapplies Horace's rules; in the general tenor of the essay, the 'Horatian manner' is discernible. Like his contemporaries, he quotes Horace frequently in his letters, especially in those that are of a distinctly literary character. 1 Wks. 4. 388. 2 S. 1. 1. 118-119. 3 Wks. 4. 392. JONATHAN SWIFT, 1667-1745 The distinctive quality in the character and writings of Swift is the power displayed of thinking and of expressing himself clearly, simply, and directly. Living in an age which in its literary life was an echo of the Augustan period, which clothed its thoughts in classic garb, and polished its language in emulation of the restrained beauty of Latin poetry at its best, he has succeeded in winning for himself a position, not only in his own generation, but in the whole history of English literature, as exponent of what the English language is capable of in clear, unadorned force and direct intensity of expression. Cardinal Polignac' uttered the final judg ment upon his character when he said of him, ‘il a l'esprit créateur.' Swift prepared himself for a life that was to be so full of political and personal influence by a course of extensive reading. His favorite subject, and the one which he studied most systematically, was history, especially Roman history. Besides this, the catalogue of his library and his lists of books read show that he was interested in the writers on ancient medicine this must have been a deeply personal interest-in the Church Fathers, and in the literature of the classics, Latin much more especially than Greek, except where the subjectmatter touches upon questions political, as in Plato. Judging from the contents of his library,' and from the 1 William King to Mrs. Whiteway, Jan. 30, 1738-9 (Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. by F. Elrington Ball, 1910-1914, 6. 112). 2 See Dean Swift's Library, by T. P. LeFanu (Proc. Roy. Soc. of Antiq. of Ireland, July, 1896, p. 113). scattered comments that appear in his writings, the Latin dramatists held greater favor with him than the Greek,1 though to this Aristophanes must be excepted. Like all men of learning of his time, he was thoroughly familiar with Homer, Virgil, and Horace. Lucretius he notes in a list of reading for the year 1697 as having read three times, and he seems to have been considerably imbued with the genius of Lucretius while writing the Tale of a Tub. Of Juvenal he was apparently fond, judging from his citations of him; and this is but natural, for there is a certain kinship between them; the genius of both is embittered by a power to see and to expose unflinchingly the evil impulses of men, which often blinds them to the higher strain existing in mankind. Henry Fielding2 finds a resemblance in Swift to Lucian. There may be a resemblance in the methods of ridicule which they used; but Swift was no sceptic, nor did he bear willingly with sceptics, at least with those who were his contemporaries; and his simplicity of style is of the kind which results from directness and clarity of thought, and which could not have come through imitation, though his genius no doubt sought a kindred element in every author that he read. It becomes quickly apparent upon studying Swift how little kinship there is between his nature and that of Horace. He had not that geniality and sweetness of disposition that distinguishes Horace's writings; the experiences of life embittered him, while they made of Horace a philosopher-sometimes Stoic, sometimes Epicurean. This difference is not to be accounted for by the fact that the one attained the position in life that he desired, and the other was disappointed, but lay far deeper, in the character and in the physical constitution 1 He possessed five editions of Terence, four of Plautus. 2 Amelia, Book 8, ch. 5. |