No. 11, a brief introduction to a letter by Pope. No. 1491 is a humorous and knowing essay on the dress of the men and women of society of that period-in which matter Gay was a connoisseur. In the paper he keeps up a running parallel of literary comparison, and twice brings in quotations from Horace. "There are,' he says, 'some pretenders to dress who shine out but by halves; whether it be for want of genius or money. .. We may say of these sorts of dressers what Horace says of his patchwork poets,2 Purpureus, late qui splendeat, unus et alter And again: 'A poet will now and then, to serve his purpose, coin a word, so will a lady of genius venture at an innovation in the fashion; but as Horace advises,3 that all new-minted words should have a Greek derivation to give them an indisputable authority, so I would counsel all our improvers of fashion always to take the hint from France, which may as properly be called the fountain of dress, as Greece was of literature.' In the letters of Gay to Swift, to Pope, and to the Countess of Suffolk, there are no allusions to Horace; indeed, his letters show what his writings have shown, that he forgot and neglected his classical learning as he grew older. Once, in a letter written jointly with Pope to Swift, there occurs the remark: 'We all rejoice that you have fixed the precise time of your coming to be "cum hirundine prima." " But for this allusion Pope was responsible, not Gay, for both he and Bolingbroke use it elsewhere as if it were a frequent mode of expression 4 1 See Chalmers' British Essayists, 1802, vol. 18. 2 A. P. 15-16. 3 A. P. 52-53. 4 Nov. 17, 1726 (Corresp. of Swift 3. 360). 5 E. 1. 7. 13. between them. Austin Dobson has noted, however,' that 'from the fact that there exists in the Forster Library at South Kensington a large-paper copy of Maittaire's Horace, copiously annotated in his beautiful handwriting, it must be assumed that subsequent to 1715, the date of the volume, he still preserved a love of the classics.' 1 See Dobson's article on John Gay in the Dictionary of National Biography. ALEXANDER POPE, 1688-1744 Alexander Pope is the recognized leader of the English Augustan poets. Early in life he set for himself an ideal in poetry, toward which he constantly strove and to which he attained in almost perfection—the ideal of correctness. To the setting of this ideal he had been admonished by a friend, but his own genius would have directed him to it without any impulse from without. His early reading of the classics led him naturally in that direction, and his early efforts in poetry, the translating of the Latin poets Statius and Ovid, and the turning of Chaucer's poetry into contemporary, fashionable couplets-all strengthened the inclination. For this reason, in considering the poets of the eighteenth century in the light of their indebtedness to the poets of the reign of Augustus, and to Horace in particular, it is Pope's name that rises first and most naturally to the mind. For he cultivated, and succeeded preeminently in producing, poetry of the quality of that of the great Augustan poets, especially of Horace, who has described this quality in two brilliant words, 'lucidus ordo.' Pope's effort was a fully conscious one; he never lost sight of his ideal, and when he erred, it was not in the careful polishing of his lines, or in the conciseness of the thought contained in them. Throughout his work Horace was often his model, consciously so, if not, as in the Imitations, avowedly so:1 Let me be Horace, and be Ovid you. ugh! 1 Imitations of Horace, The Second Epistle of the Second Book 144 (The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. by Whitwell Elwin and W. J. Courthope, 1871-1889, 3. 385). He sums up what he wishes his poetry to be, in a line in the Essay on Man,1 Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, which Horace has already implied in his lines:2 Sectantem levia nervi Deficiunt animique. The truth that, contained in the 'spirit' and essential to it, there must be wise thinking,3 Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons, he has recognized, and expressed in a couplet of one of the Moral Essays:* Something there is more needful than expense, These Moral Essays, when they were published in 1743, had as motto the following lines of Horace:5 Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia, neu se Then there is his famous definition of wit," True wit is nature to advantage dressed; 1 Essay on Man 4. 381 (Wks. 2. 455). 2 A. P. 26-27. 3 A. P. 309. 4 Moral Essays 4. 41-42 (Wks. 3. 175). 5 S. 1. 10. 9-14. Essay on Criticism 297-298 (Wks. 2. 51). which he himself notes as derived from Quintilian, but in which he is clearly following Boileau, who in his turn was probably following Horace, who has expressed the thought with the greatest simplicity:1 Difficile est proprie communia dicere. 2 Finally, in his imitation of the Second Epistle of the Second Book, Pope has found opportunity for a fuller expression of his own rules and method of work. In this Epistle Horace has laid down his rules for the writing of a poem that is to be a true work of art. Beginning with the admonition,3 Qui legitimum cupiet fecisse poema, Cum tabulis animum censoris sumet honesti: in which Pope can follow him with his own strict injunctions to the poet, But how severely with themselves proceed The men, who write such verse as we can read! Horace continues until he has presented what he considers the full duties of the poet; and Pope gladly follows him, for he finds in his lines rules for the kind of writing that he emulates. His paraphrase of the last lines of this passage 1 A. P. 128. 2 Imitations of Horace, The Second Epistle of the Second Book 157-179 (Wks. 3. 386-387). 3 E. 2. 2. 109-113. See the whole passage 109-125. |