Curiosities of Literature Volume Ii Part 12

Young says of nature:

In distant wilds by human eye _unseen_ She rears her _flowers_ and spreads her velvet green; Pure gurgling rills the lonely _desert_ trace, And _waste their music_ on the savage race.

And Shenstone has--

And like the _desert's lily_ bloom to fade!

Elegy iv.

Gray was so fond of this pleasing imagery, that he repeats it in his Ode to the Installation; and Mason echoes it in his Ode to Memory.

Milton thus paints the evening sun:

If chance the radiant SUN with FAREWELL SWEET Extends his evening beam, the fields revive, The birds their notes renew, &c.

_Par. Lost_, B. ii. v. 492.

Can there be a doubt that he borrowed this beautiful _farewell_ from an obscure poet, quoted by Poole, in his "English Parna.s.sus," 1657? The date of Milton's great work, I find since, admits the conjecture: the first edition being that of 1669. The homely lines in Poole are these,

To Thetis' watery bowers the _sun_ doth hie, BIDDING FAREWELL unto the gloomy sky.

Young, in his "Love of Fame," very adroitly improves on a witty conceit of Butler. It is curious to observe that while Butler had made a remote allusion of a _window_ to a _pillory_, a conceit is grafted on this conceit, with even more exquisite wit.

Each WINDOW like the PILLORY appears, With HEADS thrust through: NAILED BY THE EARS!

_Hudibras_, Part ii. c. 3, v. 301.

An opera, like a PILLORY, may be said To NAIL OUR EARS down, and EXPOSE OUR HEAD.

YOUNG'S _Satires_.

In the Duenna we find this thought differently ill.u.s.trated; by no means imitative, though the satire is congenial. Don Jerome alluding to the _serenaders_ says, "These amorous orgies that steal the senses in the _hearing_; as they say Egyptian embalmers serve mummies, _extracting the brain through the ears_." The wit is original, but the subject is the same in the three pa.s.sages; the whole turning on the allusion to the _head_ and to the _ears_.

When Pope composed the following lines on Fame,

How vain that second life in others' breath, The ESTATE which wits INHERIT after death; Ease, health, and life, for this they must resign, (Unsure the _tenure_, but how vast the _fine!_) _Temple of Fame_.

he seems to have had present in his mind a single idea of Butler, by which he has very richly amplified the entire imagery. Butler says,

Honour's a LEASE for LIVES TO COME, And cannot be extended from The LEGAL TENANT.

_Hudibras_, Part i. c. 3, v. 1043.

The same thought may be found in Sir George Mackenzie's "Essay on preferring Solitude to public Employment," first published in 1665: Hudibras preceded it by two years. The thought is strongly expressed by the eloquent Mackenzie: "_Fame is a revenue payable only to our ghosts_; and to deny ourselves all present satisfaction, or to expose ourselves to so much hazard for this, were as great madness as to starve ourselves, or fight desperately for food, to be laid on our tombs after our death."

Dryden, in his "Absalom and Achitophel," says of the Earl of Shaftesbury,

David for him his tuneful harp had strung, _And Heaven had wanted one immortal song_.

This verse was ringing in the ear of Pope, when with equal modesty and felicity he adopted it in addressing his friend Dr. Arbuthnot.

Friend of my life; which did not you prolong, _The world had wanted many an idle song!_

Howell has prefixed to his Letters a tedious poem, written in the taste of the times, and he there says of _letters_, that they are

The heralds and sweet harbingers that move From _East to West, on emba.s.sies of love_; They can the _tropic cut_, and _cross the line_.

It is probable that Pope had noted this thought, for the following lines seem a beautiful heightening of the idea:

Heaven first taught _letters_, for some wretch's aid, Some banish'd _lover_, or some captive maid.

Then he adds, they

_Speed the soft intercourse_ from soul to soul, And waft a sigh from _Indus_ to the _Pole_.

_Eloisa_.

There is another pa.s.sage in "Howell's Letters," which has a great affinity with a thought of Pope, who, in "the Rape of the Lock," says,

Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare, And _beauty draws us with a single hair_.

Howell writes, p. 290, "'Tis a powerful s.e.x:--they were too strong for the first, the strongest and wisest man that was; they must needs be strong, when _one hair of a woman can draw more than an hundred pair of oxen_."

Pope's description of the death of the lamb, in his "Essay on Man," is finished with the nicest touches, and is one of the finest pictures our poetry exhibits. Even familiar as it is to our ear, we never examine it but with undiminished admiration.

The _lamb_, thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?

Pleased to the last he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.

After pausing on the last two fine verses, will not the reader smile that I should conjecture the image might originally have been discovered in the following humble verses in a poem once considered not as contemptible:

A gentle _lamb_ has rhetoric to plead, And when she sees the butcher's knife decreed, Her voice entreats him not to make her bleed.

DR. KING'S _Mully of Mountown_.

This natural and affecting image might certainly have been observed by Pope, without his having perceived it through the less polished lens of the telescope of Dr. King. It is, however, a _similarity_, though it may not be an _imitation_; and is given as an example of that art in composition which can ornament the humblest conception, like the graceful vest thrown over naked and sordid beggary.

I consider the following lines as strictly copied by Thomas Warton:

The daring artist Explored the pangs that rend the royal breast, _Those wounds that lurk beneath the tissued vest_.

T. WARTON on Shakspeare.

Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Defence of Poesie," has the same image. He writes, "Tragedy openeth the greatest _wounds_, and showeth forth the _ulcers_ that are _covered with tissue_."

The same appropriation of thought will attach to the following lines of Tickell:

While the charm'd reader with thy thought complies, And views thy _Rosamond_ with _Henry's_ eyes.

TICKELL to ADDISON.

Evidently from the French Horace:

En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue; Tout Paris, pour _Chimene_, a les yeux de _Rodrigue_.

BOILEAU.