FullReads

Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul,
And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.
Eloisa.

There is another passage 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 sex:–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.

Oldham, the satirist, says in his satires upon the Jesuits, that had Cain been of this black fraternity, he had not been content with a quarter of mankind.

Had he been Jesuit, had he but put on
Their savage cruelty, the rest had gone!
Satire ii.

Doubtless at that moment echoed in his poetical ear the energetic and caustic epigram of Andrew Marvel, against Blood stealing the crown dressed in a parson’s cassock, and sparing the life of the keeper:

With the Priest’s vestment had he but put on
The Prelate’s cruelty–the Crown had gone!

The following passages seem echoes to each other, and it is but justice due to Oldham, the satirist, to acknowledge him as the parent of this antithesis:

On Butler who can think without just rage,
The glory and the scandal of the age?
Satire against Poetry.

It seems evidently borrowed by Pope, when he applies the thought to Erasmus:–

At length Erasmus, that great injured name,
The glory of the priesthood and the shame!

Young remembered the antithesis when he said,

Of some for glory such the boundless rage,
That they’re the blackest scandal of the age.