Windsor Forest1
To the Right Honourable
George Lord Lansdown
Thy forest, Windsor! and thy green retreats,
At once the monarch’s and the muse’s seats,2
Invite my lays. Be present, sylvan maids!
Unlock your springs, and open all your shades.3
Granville commands; your aid, O muses, bring!5
What muse for Granville can refuse to sing?4
The groves of Eden, vanished now so long,
Live in description,5 and look green in song:
These, were my breast inspired with equal flame,6
Like them in beauty, should be like in fame.710
Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain,
Here earth and water, seem to strive again;
Not chaos-like together crushed and bruised,
But, as the world, harmoniously confused:8
Where order in variety we see,15
And where, though all things differ, all agree.9
Here waving groves a chequered scene display,
And part admit, and part exclude the day;
As some coy nymph her lover’s warm address
Nor quite indulges, nor can quite repress.1020
There, interspersed in lawns and opening glades,
Thin trees arise that shun each other’s shades.
Here in full light the russet plains extend:
There wrapt in clouds the blueish hills ascend.
Ev’n the wild heath displays her purple dyes,1125
And ’midst the desert fruitful fields arise,
That crowned with tufted trees12 and springing corn,
Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn.
Let India boast her plants, nor envy we
The weeping amber, or the balmy tree,1330
While by our oaks the precious loads are borne,
And realms commanded which those trees adorn.
Not proud Olympus yields a nobler sight,
Though gods assembled grace his tow’ring height,14
Than what more humble mountains offer here,35
Where, in their blessings, all those gods appear.15
See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned,16
Here blushing Flora paints th’ enamelled ground,
Here Ceres’ gifts in waving prospect stand,
And nodding tempt the joyful reaper’s hand;40
Rich Industry sits smiling on the plains,
And peace and plenty tell, a Stuart reigns.
Not thus the land appeared in ages past,
A dreary desert and a gloomy waste,17
To savage beasts and savage laws a prey,1845
And kings more furious and severe than they;19
Who claimed the skies, dispeopled air and floods,
The lonely lords of empty wilds and woods:20
Cities laid waste, they stormed the dens and caves,
(For wiser brutes were backward to be slaves.)2150
What could be free, when lawless beasts obeyed,22
And ev’n the elements23 a tyrant swayed?
In vain kind seasons swelled the teeming grain,
Soft show’rs distilled, and suns grew warm in vain;
The swain with tears his frustrate labour yields,2455
And famished dies amidst his ripened fields.25
What wonder then, a beast or subject slain26
Were equal crimes in a despotic reign?
Both doomed alike, for sportive tyrants bled,
But while the subject starved, the beast was fed.60
Proud Nimrod first the bloody chace began,
A mighty hunter, and his prey was man:
Our haughty Norman boasts that barb’rous name,
And makes his trembling slaves the royal game.
The fields are ravished from th’ industrious swains,65
From men their cities, and from gods their fanes:27
The levelled towns28 with weeds lie covered o’er;29
The hollow winds through naked temples roar;30
Round broken columns clasping ivy twined;
O’er heaps of ruin stalked the stately hind;3170
The fox obscene to gaping tombs retires,
And savage howlings32 fill the sacred choirs.33
Awed by his nobles, by his commons curst,
Th’ oppressor ruled tyrannic where he durst,34
Stretched o’er the poor and church his iron rod,75
And served alike his vassals and his God.35
Whom ev’n the Saxon spared, and bloody Dane,
The wanton victims of his sport remain.
But see, the man, who spacious regions gave
A waste for beasts, himself denied a grave!3680
Stretched on the lawn37 his second hope survey,38
At once the chaser, and at once the prey:39
Lo Rufus, tugging at the deadly dart,
Bleeds in the forest like a wounded hart.40
Succeeding monarchs heard the subject’s cries,85
Nor saw displeased the peaceful cottage rise.41
Then gath’ring flocks on unknown42 mountains fed,
O’er sandy wilds were yellow harvests spread,
The forest wondered at th’ unusual grain,43
And secret transport touched the conscious swain.4490
Fair Liberty, Britannia’s goddess, rears
Her cheerful head, and leads the golden years.45
Ye vig’rous swains! while youth ferments your blood,
And purer spirits swell the sprightly flood,4695
Now range the hills, the gameful47 woods beset,
Wind the shrill horn, or spread the waving net.
When milder autumn summer’s heat succeeds,48
And in the new-shorn field the partridge feeds,
Before his lord the ready spaniel bounds,
Panting with hope, he tries the furrowed grounds;100
But when the tainted gales the game betray,
Couched close he lies, and meditates the prey;49
Secure they trust th’ unfaithful field beset,
Till hov’ring o’er them sweeps the swelling net.
Thus (if small things we may with great compare)50105
When Albion sends her eager sons to war,
Some thoughtless town, with ease and plenty blest,51
Near, and more near, the closing lines invest;
Sudden they seize th’ amazed, defenceless prize,
And high in air Britannia’s standard flies.110
See! from the brake the whirring pheasant springs,
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings:52
Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound,
Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.
Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes,53115
His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes,
The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,
His painted wings,54 and breast that flames with gold?
Nor yet, when moist Arcturus clouds the sky,
The woods and fields their pleasing toils deny.55120
To plains with well-breathed beagles we repair,
And trace the mazes of the circling hare:
Beasts, urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue,
And learn of man each other to undo.56
With slaught’ring guns th’ unwearied fowler roves,125
When frosts have whitened all the naked groves;57
Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o’ershade,58
And lonely woodcocks haunt the wat’ry glade.
He lifts the tube, and levels with his eye;59
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky:130
Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath,
The clam’rous lapwings feel the leaden death:
Oft, as the mounting larks their notes prepare,
They fall, and leave their little lives in air.60
In genial spring, beneath the quiv’ring shade,135
Where cooling vapours breathe along the mead,
The patient fisher takes his silent stand,
Intent, his angle trembling in his hand:61
With looks unmoved, he hopes62 the scaly breed,
And eyes the dancing cork, and bending reed.140
Our plenteous streams a various race supply,
The bright-eyed perch with fins of Tyrian dye,
The silver eel, in shining volumes63 rolled,
The yellow carp, in scales bedropped with gold,64
Swift trouts, diversified with crimson stains,145
And pikes, the tyrants of the wat’ry plains.65
Now Cancer glows with Phœbus’ fiery car:66
The youth rush eager to the sylvan war,67
Swarm o’er the lawns, the forest walks surround,
Rouse the fleet hart, and cheer the opening hound.150
Th’ impatient courser pants in ev’ry vein,
And pawing, seems to beat the distant plain.
Hills, vales, and floods appear already crossed,
And ere he starts, a thousand steps are lost.68
See the bold youth strain up the threat’ning69 steep,155
Rush through the thickets, down the valleys sweep,
Hang o’er their coursers’ heads with eager speed,
And earth rolls back beneath the flying steed.70
Let old Arcadia boast her ample plain,
Th’ immortal huntress, and her virgin-train;160
Nor envy, Windsor! since thy shades have seen
As bright a goddess, and as chaste a queen;71
Whose care, like hers, protects the sylvan reign,72
The earth’s fair light, and empress of the main.73
Here too, ’tis sung, of old Diana strayed,165
And Cynthus’ top forsook for Windsor shade:
Here was she seen o’er airy wastes to rove,
Seek the clear spring, or haunt the pathless grove;74
Here armed with silver bows, in early dawn,
Her buskined virgins traced the dewy lawn.170
Above the rest a rural nymph was famed,75
Thy offspring, Thames! the fair Lodona named;
(Lodona’s fate, in long oblivion cast,
The muse shall sing, and what she sings shall last.)
Scarce could the goddess from her nymph be known,175
But by the crescent and the golden zone.76
She scorned the praise of beauty, and the care;
A belt her waist, a fillet binds her hair;77
A painted quiver on her shoulder sounds,78
And with her dart the flying deer she wounds.180
It chanced, as eager of the chace, the maid
Beyond the forest’s verdant limits strayed,
Pan saw and loved, and burning with desire79
Pursued her flight, her flight increased his fire.
Not half so swift the trembling doves can fly,185
When the fierce eagle cleaves the liquid sky;
Not half so swiftly the fierce eagle moves,
When through the clouds he drives the trembling doves,80
As from the god she flew with furious pace,
Or as the god, more furious urged the chace.81190
Now fainting, sinking, pale, the nymph appears;
Now close behind, his sounding steps she hears;
And now his shadow reached her as she run,82
His shadow lengthened by the setting sun;
And now his shorter breath, with sultry air,195
Pants on her neck, and fans her parting hair.83
In vain on father Thames she calls for aid,
Nor could Diana help her injured maid.
Faint, breathless, thus she prayed, nor prayed in vain;
“Ah Cynthia! ah—though banished from thy train,200
Let me, O let me, to the shades repair,
My natives shades—there weep, and murmur there.”
She said, and melting as in tears she lay,
In a soft, silver stream dissolved away.
The silver stream her virgin coldness keeps,205
For ever murmurs, and for ever weeps;
Still bears the name the hapless virgin bore,84
And bathes the forest where she ranged before.
In her chaste current oft the goddess laves,
And with celestial tears augments the waves.85210
Oft in her glass the musing shepherd spies86
The headlong mountains and the downward skies,87
The wat’ry landscape of the pendant woods,
And absent88 trees that tremble in the floods;
In the clear azure gleam the flocks are seen,215
And floating forests paint the waves with green,
Through the fair scene roll slow the ling’ring streams,
Then foaming pour along, and rush into the Thames.
Thou too, great father of the British floods!
With joyful pride survey’st our lofty woods;220
Where tow’ring oaks their growing89 honours rear,
And future navies on thy shores appear.
Not Neptune’s self from all his90 streams receives
A wealthier tribute than to thine he gives.
No seas so rich, so gay no banks appear,91225
No lake so gentle, and no spring so clear.
Nor Po92 so swells the fabling poet’s lays,93
While led along the skies his current strays,94
As thine,95 which visits Windsor’s famed abodes,
To grace the mansion of our earthly gods:230
Nor all his stars above a lustre show,
Like the bright beauties on thy banks below;96
Where Jove, subdued by mortal passion still,
Might change Olympus for a nobler hill.
Happy the man whom this bright court approves,97235
His sov’reign favours, and his country loves:98
Happy next him, who to these shades retires,
Whom nature charms, and whom the muse inspires:
Whom humbler joys of home-felt quiet please,
Successive study, exercise, and ease.240
He gathers health from herbs the forest yields,
And of their fragrant physic spoils the fields:
With chemic art exalts the min’ral pow’rs,
And draws the aromatic souls of flow’rs:
Now marks the course of rolling orbs on high;245
O’er figured worlds now travels with his eye;
Of ancient writ unlocks the learned store,
Consults the dead, and lives past ages o’er:
Or wand’ring thoughtful in the silent wood,
Attends the duties of the wise and good,99250
T’ observe a mean, be to himself a friend,
To follow nature, and regard his end;100
Or looks on heav’n with more than mortal eyes,
Bids his free soul expatiate in the skies,
Amid her kindred stars familiar roam,255
Survey the region, and confess her home!
Such was the life great Scipio once admired,
Thus Atticus, and Trumbull thus retired.
Ye sacred Nine! that all my soul possess,
Whose raptures fire me, and whose visions bless,101260
Bear me, oh bear me to sequestered scenes,
The bow’ry mazes, and surrounding greens;102
To Thames’s banks which fragrant breezes fill,
Or where ye Muses sport on Cooper’s Hill.
On Cooper’s Hill eternal wreaths shall grow265
While lasts the mountain,103 or while Thames shall flow.
I seem through consecrated walks to rove,104
I hear soft music die along the grove:
Led by the sound, I roam from shade to shade,
By god-like poets venerable made:105270
Here his first lays106 majestic107 Denham sung;
There the last numbers flowed from Cowley’s tongue.108
O early lost!109 what tears the river shed,110
When the sad pomp along his banks was led!111
His drooping swans on ev’ry note expire,112275
And on his willows hung each muse’s lyre.113
Since fate relentless stopped their heav’nly voice,
No more the forests ring, or groves rejoice;
Who now shall charm the shades, where Cowley strung
His living114 harp, and lofty Denham sung?280
But hark! the groves rejoice, the forest rings!
Are these reviv’d? or is it Granville sings!115
’Tis yours, my lord, to bless our soft retreats,
And call the muses to their ancient seats;
To paint anew the flow’ry sylvan scenes,285
To crown the forests with immortal greens,
Make Windsor-hills in lofty numbers rise,
And lift her turrets nearer to the skies;
To sing those honours you deserve to wear,116
And add new lustre to her silver star.117290
Here118 noble Surrey119 felt the sacred rage,
Surrey, the Granville of a former age:
Matchless his pen, victorious was his lance,
Bold in the lists, and graceful in the dance:
In the same shades the Cupids tuned his lyre295
To the same notes of love, and soft desire:
Fair Geraldine,120 bright object of his vow,
Then filled the groves, as heavenly Mira now.121
Oh would’st thou sing what heroes Windsor bore,
What kings first breathed upon her winding shore,300
Or raise old warriors, whose adored remains
In weeping vaults her hallowed earth contains!122
With Edward’s acts adorn the shining page,123
Stretch his long triumphs down through ev’ry age,
Draw monarchs chained,124 and Crecy’s glorious field,305
The lilies125 blazing on the regal shield:126
Then, from her roofs when Verrio’s127 colours fall,
And leave inanimate the naked wall,
Still in thy song should vanquished France appear,
And bleed for ever under Britain’s spear.128310
Let softer strains ill-fated Henry129 mourn,
And palms eternal flourish round his urn.
Here o’er the martyr-king the marble weeps,
And, fast beside him, once-feared Edward130 sleeps:
Whom not th’ extended Albion could contain,315
From old Belerium131 to the northern main,132
The grave unites; where ev’n the great find rest,
And blended lie th’ oppressor and th’ oppressed!
Make sacred Charles’s tomb for ever known,133
(Obscure the place, and uninscribed the stone)134320
Oh fact accurst! what tears has Albion shed,135
Heav’ns, what new wounds! and how her old have bled!
She saw her sons with purple death expire,
Her sacred domes involved in rolling fire,136
A dreadful series of intestine wars,325
Inglorious triumphs and dishonest scars.137
At length great Anna said—“Let discord cease!”138
She said, the world obeyed, and all was peace!
In that blest moment, from his oozy bed
Old father Thames advanced his rev’rend head;139330
His tresses dropped with dews,140 and o’er the stream141
His shining horns142 diffused a golden gleam;
Graved on his urn, appeared the moon that guides
His swelling waters, and alternate tides;
The figured streams in waves of silver rolled,335
And on their banks Augusta143 rose in gold.
Around his throne the sea-born brothers144 stood,
Who swell with tributary urns his flood:
First the famed authors of his ancient name,145
The winding Isis and the fruitful Thame;146340
The Kennet swift, for silver eels renowned;147
The Loddon slow, with verdant alders crowned;148
Cole, whose dark streams his flow’ry islands lave;
And chalky Wey,149 that rolls a milky wave:
The blue, transparent Vandalis150 appears;345
The gulphy Lee his sedgy tresses rears;151
And sullen Mole, that hides his diving flood;152
And silent Darent, stained with Danish blood.153
High in the midst, upon his urn reclined,
(His sea-green mantle waving with the wind)154350
The god appeared: he turned his azure eyes
Where Windsor-domes and pompous turrets rise;
Then bowed and spoke;155 the winds forget to roar,
And the hushed waves glide softly to the shore.156
“Hail, sacred Peace! hail, long-expected days,355
That Thames’s glory to the stars shall raise!
Though Tiber’s streams immortal Rome behold,
Though foaming Hermus swells with tides of gold,157
From heav’n itself though sevenfold Nilus flows,
And harvests on a hundred realms bestows,158360
These now no more shall be the muse’s themes,
Lost in my fame, as in the sea their streams.
Let Volga’s banks with iron squadrons shine,159
And groves of lances glitter on the Rhine;
Let barb’rous Ganges arm a servile train;365
Be mine the blessings of a peaceful reign.
No more my sons shall dye with British blood
Red Iber’s sands, or Ister’s foaming flood:160
Safe on my shore each unmolested swain
Shall tend the flocks, or reap the bearded grain;370
The shady empire shall retain no trace161
Of war or blood, but in the sylvan chace;
The trumpet sleep while cheerful horns are blown,
And arms employed on birds and beasts alone.162
Behold! th’ ascending villas on my side,375
Project long shadows o’er the crystal tide;
Behold! Augusta’s glitt’ring spires increase,
And temples rise,163 the beauteous works of peace.
I see, I see, where two fair cities bend
Their ample bow, a new Whitehall ascend!164380
There mighty nations shall inquire their doom,
The world’s great oracle in times to come;165
There kings shall sue, and suppliant states be seen
Once more to bend before a British Queen.166
Thy trees, fair Windsor!167 now shall leave their woods,168
And half thy forests rush into thy floods,169386
Bear Britain’s thunder, and her cross170 display,
To the bright regions of the rising day;171
Tempt icy seas,172 where scarce the waters roll,
Where clearer flames glow round the frozen pole;390
Or under southern skies exalt173 their sails,
Led by new stars, and borne by spicy gales!174
For me the balm shall bleed, and amber flow,
The coral redden, and the ruby glow,
The pearly shell its lucid globe infold,395
And Phœbus warm the ripening ore to gold.175
The time shall come, when, free as seas or wind,176
Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind,177
Whole nations enter with each swelling tide,
And seas but join the regions they divide;178400
Earth’s distant ends our glory shall behold,
And the new world launch forth to seek the old.
Then ships of uncouth form shall stem the tide,
And feathered people crowd my wealthy side,
And naked youths179 and painted chiefs admire180405
Our speech, our colour, and our strange attire.
Oh stretch thy reign, fair Peace! from shore to shore,
Till conquest cease, and slav’ry be no more;
Till the freed Indians in their native groves
Reap their own fruits, and woo their sable loves,410
Peru once more a race of kings behold,
And other Mexicos be roofed with gold.181
Exiled by thee from earth to deepest hell,
In brazen bonds,182 shall barb’rous Discord dwell:
Gigantic Pride, pale Terror, gloomy Care,415
And mad Ambition shall attend her there:
There purple Vengeance bathed in gore retires,
Her weapons blunted, and extinct her fires:
There hateful Envy her own snakes shall feel,
And Persecution mourn her broken wheel:420
There Faction roar, Rebellion bite her chain,183
And gasping Furies thirst for blood in vain.”
Here cease thy flight, nor with unhallowed lays
Touch the fair fame of Albion’s golden days:
The thoughts of gods let Granville’s verse recite,425
And bring the scenes of opening fate to light.184
My humble muse, in unambitious strains,
Paints the green forests and the flow’ry plains,185
Where Peace descending bids her olive spring,
And scatters blessings from her dove-like wing.430
Ev’n I more sweetly pass my careless days,
Pleased in the silent shade with empty praise;
Enough for me, that to the list’ning swains
First in these fields I sung the sylvan strains.186
Footnotes:
1 Notwithstanding the many praises lavished on this celebrated nobleman as a poet, by Dryden, by Addison, by Bolingbroke, by our Author, and others, yet candid criticism must oblige us to confess, that he was but a feeble imitator of the feeblest parts of Waller. After having been secretary at war, 1710, controller and treasurer to the household, and of her majesty’s privy council, and created a peer, 1711, he was seized as a suspected person, at the accession of George I., and confined in the Tower. Whatever may be thought of Lord Lansdowne as a poet, his character as a man was highly valuable. His conversation was most pleasing and polite; his affability, and universal benevolence, and gentleness, captivating; he was a firm friend and a sincere lover of his country. This is the character I received of him from his near relation, the late excellent Mrs. Delany.—Warton.
2 Thus Hopkins, in his History of Love:
Ye woods and wilds, serene and blest retreats,
At once the lovers’ and the Muses’ seats
To you I fly.
—Wakefield.
3 Originally thus:
Chaste goddess of the woods,
Nymphs of the vales, and Naïads of the flood,
Lead me through arching bow’rs, and glimin’ring glades,
Unlock your springs.
—Pope.
Dryden’s Virgil, Geor. ii. 245:
Once more unlock for thee the sacred spring.
Æn. x. 241:
Now, sacred sisters, open all your spring.
—Wakefield.
4 Neget quis carmina Gallo? Virg.—Warburton.
5 Evidently suggested by Waller:
Of the first Paradise there’s nothing found,
Yet the description lasts.
—Holt White.
Addison’s Letter from Italy:
Sometimes misguided by the tuneful throng,
I look for streams immortalised in song,
That lost in silence and oblivion lie;
Dumb are their fountains, and their channels dry;
Yet run for ever by the muse’s skill,
And in the smooth description murmur still.
—Wakefield.
6 There is an inaccuracy in making the flame equal to a grove. It might have been Milton’s flame.—Warton.
Addison’s Letter from Italy:
O, could the muse my ravished breast inspire
With warmth like yours, and raise an equal fire.
—Wakefield.
7 This is borrowed from the lines, quoted by Bowles, in which Denham alludes to the founder of Windsor Castle being as doubtful as was the birth-place of Homer:
Like him in birth, thou should’st be like in fame,
As thine his fate, if mine had been his flame.
8 From Waller:
As in old chaos heav’n with earth confused,
And stars with rocks together crushed and bruised.
—Wakefield.
9 Evidently from Cooper’s Hill:
Here Nature, whether more intent to please
Us, or herself, with strange varieties,
Wisely she knew the harmony of things,
As well as that of sounds, from discord springs.
Such was the discord which did first disperse
Form, order, beauty through the universe.
—Warton.
10 There is a levity in this comparison which appears to me unseasonable, and but ill according with the serene dignity of the subject.—Wakefield.
11 Originally thus:
Why should I sing our better suns or air,
Whose vital draughts prevent the leech’s care,
While through fresh fields th’ enlivening odours breathe,
Or spread with vernal blooms the purple heath?
—Pope.
The first couplet of the lines in Pope’s note, was from Dryden’s epistle to his kinsman:
He scapes the best, who, nature to repair,
Draws physic from the fields, in draughts of vital air.
12 Milton’s Allegro, ver. 78:
Bosomed high in tufted trees.
—Wakefield.
13 Milton, Par. Lost, iv. 248:
Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balms.
This fancy was borrowed from the ancients. According to Ovid (Met. x. 500), Myrrha, changed into a tree, weeps myrrh, and the sisters of Phæton (Met. ii. 364), transformed into poplars, shed tears which harden in the sun, and turn into amber.
14 This fabulous mixture of stale images, Olympus and the Gods, is, in my opinion, extremely puerile, especially in a description of real scenery. Pan, Pomona, and the rest, mere representative substitutions, give no offence.—Wakefield.
15 The making the hills nobler than Olympus with all its gods, because the gods appeared “in their blessings” on the humbler mountains of Windsor, is a thought only to be excused in a very young writer.—Bowles.
16 The word “crowned” is exceptionable; it makes Pan crowned with flocks.—Warton.
Pope, in his manuscript, has underscored “Pan with flocks,” and “crowned,” and set a mark against the line, as if he had detected, and intended to remove, the defect.
17 Dryden’s Translations from Ovid:
A dismal desert, and a silent waste.
Pope weakened the line in varying it. “Dreary desert” and “gloomy waste” are synonymous, but “silent” adds a distinct idea to “dismal.”
18 The Forest Laws.—Pope.
The killing a deer, boar, or hare, was punished with the loss of the delinquent’s eyes.—Warton.
Thierry believes that the forest laws had a more serious object than to secure for the king a monopoly of sport. The chief intention was to keep the newly conquered Saxons from going armed under the pretext that they were in pursuit of game. Hence the penalty was of a nature to incapacitate the offender for military service.
19 This is in imitation of Waller:
Prove all a desert! and none there make stay
But savage beasts, or men as wild as they.
—Wakefield.
Sir William Temple says of the forests on the continent that they
give a shade
To savage beasts who on the weaker prey,
Or human savages more wild than they.
Wakefield remarks that there is an inaccuracy in Pope’s couplet, since the “savage laws” to which the pronoun “they” in part refers, were the mode in which the severity of the king displayed itself.
20 The representation is erroneous. The “air, floods, and wilds” were not “dispeopled.” The forest laws occasioned an increase in the quantity of game, which was preserved more carefully when it became the property of the privileged few, and was no longer liable to be exterminated by the many. Pope is not consistent with himself, for he afterwards complains that “while the subject starved the beast was fed.”
21 Originally thus in the MS.:
From towns laid waste, to dens and caves they ran
(For who first stooped to be a slave was man).
—Warburton.
The conceit is childish, because dens and caves are the residence of these brutes at all times, and therefore their retreat to these places constitutes no argument of their aversion to slavery. And the following couplet is by no means worthy of the poet.—Wakefield.
22 According to this doctrine no nation can lie free in which lawless beasts are subjugated by man.
23 Pope puts “the elements” for the creatures which inhabited them.
24 In the first edition it was,
The swain with tears to beasts his labour yields,
which defined the poet’s idea more clearly. He changed the expression to avoid the recurrence of the same word when he introduced “beast” into the next couplet.
25 Addison’s Letter from Italy:
The poor inhabitant beholds in vain
The reddening orange, and the swelling grain:
Joyless he sees the growing oils and wines,
And in the myrtle’s fragrant shade repines:
Starves, in the midst of nature’s bounty curst,
And in the loaden vineyard dies for thirst.
—Holt White.
This passage, which describes the misery entailed upon the Italian peasants by an oppressive government, plainly suggested the lines of Pope. The death from thirst, which Addison adds to the death from starvation, is too great an exaggeration. Water could always be had.
26 No wonder savages or subjects slain—
But subjects starved, while savages were fed.
It was originally thus, but the word “savages” is not properly applied to beasts, but to men; which occasioned the alteration.—Pope.
27 Translated from
Templa adimit divis, fora civibus, arva colonis,
an old monkish writer, I forget who.—Pope.
28 Alluding to the destruction made in the New Forest, and the tyrannies exercised there by William I.—Pope.
I have the authority of three or four of our best antiquarians to say, that the common tradition of villages and parishes, within the compass of thirty miles, being destroyed, in the New Forest, is absolutely groundless, no traces or vestiges of such being to be discovered, nor any other parish named in Doomsday Book, but what now remains.—Warton.
The argument from Doomsday Book is of no weight if, as Lingard asserts, the New Forest was formed before the registration took place. William was an eager sportsman. “He loved the beasts of chase,” says the Saxon chronicle, “as if he had been their father,” and the source of his love was the pleasure he took in killing them. His hunting grounds, however, were ample without the New Forest, and Thierry thinks that his motive in forming it may have been political. The wooded district, denuded of a hostile population, and stretching to the sea, would have afforded shelter to the Normans in the event of a reverse, and enabled them to disembark in safety.
29 Addison’s Campaign:
O’er prostrate towns and palaces they pass,
Now covered o’er with weeds, and hid in grass.
30 Donne, in his second Satire,
When winds in our ruined abbeys roar.
—Wakefield.
31 It is a blemish in this fine passage that a couplet in the past tense should be interposed for the sake of the rhyme, in the midst of a description in the present tense.
32 Originally:
And wolves with howling fill, &c.
The author thought this an error, wolves not being common in England at the time of the Conqueror.—Pope.
33 “The temples,” “broken columns,” and “choirs,” of the poet, suppose a much statelier architecture than belonged to the rude village churches of the Saxons. With the same exaggeration the hamlets which stood on the site of the New Forest are converted by Pope into “cities,” and “towns.”
34 William did not confine his oppression to the weak and succumb to the strong. The statement that he was “awed by his nobles” is opposed to the contemporary testimony of the Saxon chronicle. “No man,” says the writer, “durst do anything against his will; he had earls in his bonds who had done against his will, and at last he did not spare his own brother, Odo; him he set in prison.” “His rich men moaned,” says the chronicler again, “and the poor men murmured, but he was so hard that he recked not the hatred of them all.”
35 The language is too strong. “When his power or interest was concerned,” says Lingard, “William listened to no suggestions but those of ambition or avarice, but on other occasions he displayed a strong sense of religion, and a profound respect for its institutions.” While resisting ecclesiastical usurpation, and depriving individuals who were disaffected or incompetent, of their preferment, he upheld the church and its dignitaries, and left both in a more exalted position than he found them.
36 It is incorrect to say that William was denied a grave. As his body was about to be lowered into the vault in the church of St. Stephen, which he had founded at Caen, a person named Fitz-Arthur forbade the burial, on the plea that the land had been taken by violence from his father, but the prelates having paid him sixty shillings on the spot, and promised him further compensation, the ceremony was allowed to proceed.
37 “An open space between woods,” is Johnson’s definition of “lawn,” which is the meaning here, and at ver. 21 and 149. The term has since been appropriated to the dressed green-sward in gardens.
38 Richard, second son of William the Conqueror.—Pope.
Richard is said by some to have been killed by a stag in the New Forest, by others to have been crushed against a tree by his horse.
39 This verse is taken from one of Denham’s in his translation of the Second Æneis:
At once the taker, and at once the prey.
—Wakefield.
40 The oak under which Rufus was shot, was standing till within these few years.—Bowles.
A stone pillar now marks the spot.—Croker.
41 In the New Forest, where the cottages had been swept away by William. “Succeeding monarchs” did not, as Pope implies, suffer encroachments on the forest out of pity for their subjects. The concession was extorted. Some of the provisions of Magna Charta were directed against the increase of the royal forests and against the “evil customs” maintained with respect to them.
42 Mountains hitherto unknown to the flocks, who were now for the first time permitted to feed there.
43 Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma. Virg.
—Warburton.
Virgil is treating of grafts, and says that the parent stock, when the slips grow, wonders at leaves and fruit not its own. Here the imagination keeps pace with the description, but stops short before the notion that the trees in the forest wondered to behold the crops of corn.
44 He doubtless had in his eye, Vir. Æn. i. 506:
Latonæ tacitum pertentant gaudia pectus.
—Wakefield.
Dryden’s translation:
And feeds with secret joy her silent breast.
In Virgil the silent exultation is felt by a mother, who, in an assembly of nymphs, marks the superior beauty of her goddess daughter. There was not the same reason why the swain should keep secret the transport he felt at the sight of wheat fields.
45 Originally:
O may no more a foreign master’s rage,
With wrongs yet legal, curse a future age!
Still spread, fair liberty! thy heav’nly wings,
Breathe plenty on the fields, and fragrance on the springs.
—Pope.
The last couplet was suggested by Addison’s Letter to Lord Halifax:
O Liberty, thou goddess heav’nly bright,
Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight!
Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign,
And smiling plenty leads thy wanton train.
46 Addison’s Campaign:
Their courage dwells not in a troubled flood
Of mounting spirits, and fermenting blood.
47 “Thickest woods” till Warburton’s edition. The epithet “gameful,” to express that the woods were full of game, seems to be peculiar to Pope.
48 Originally:
When yellow autumn summer’s heat succeeds,
And into wine the purple harvest bleeds,
The partridge feeding in the new-shorn fields,
Both morning sports and evening pleasures yields.
—Pope.
Richardson transcribes from the margin of Pope’s MS. “Qu. if allowable to describe the season by a circumstance not proper to our climate, the vintage?” And the line which speaks of the making of wine was no doubt altered to obviate this objection.
49 Dryden’s Sigismonda and Guiscardo:
Watchful to betray
With inward rage he meditates his prey.
—Holt White.
50 From Virgil, Geo. iv. 176:
si parra licet componere magnis.
If little things with great we may compare. Dryden.
—Wakefield.
51 It stood thus in the first editions:
Pleased in the general’s sight, the host lie down
Sudden before some unsuspecting town;
The young, the old, one instant make our prize,
And o’er their captive heads Britannia’s standard flies.
—Warburton.
Pope, as Wakefield observes, has joined together in the simile in the text the inconsistent notions of a town surprised, and a town taken by the regular approaches of a siege. “The passage,” adds Wakefield, “as it originally stood was free from this heterogeneous intermixture, and by a little polish might have been made superior to the present reading.”
52 Richardson gives a more descriptive line from the manuscript:
Exults in air and plies his whistling wings.
The poet doubtless substituted the later version, because the expression “whirring pheasant” conveyed the same idea as “whistling wings.”
53 This fine apostrophe was probably suggested by that of Virgil on the ox dying of the plague:
Now what avails his well-deserving toil. Dryden.
—Wakefield.
54 Steevens quotes Pictæque volucres. Virg. Painted birds. Dryden.—Bowles.
Pope probably took the phrase from Paradise Lost, where the birds are described as spreading “their painted wings.” In transferring the expression he overlooked the fact that the wings are not the part of the pheasant to which the epithet “painted” is especially applicable.
55 Originally thus:
When hoary-winter clothes the years in white,
The woods and fields to pleasing toils invite.
—Pope.
56 The reflection is misplaced; for dogs by nature chase hares, and man avails himself of their instinctive propensities.
57 Originally:
O’er rustling leaves around the naked groves.
—Warburton.
This is a better line.—Warton.
58 Wakefield understood Pope to mean that the trees shaded the doves, and he objected that leafless trees could not properly be said to overshadow. Steevens pointed out that it was the doves, on the contrary, which overshadowed the trees, by alighting on them in flocks. The ambiguity was caused by Pope’s bad and inveterate habit of putting the accusative case before the verb.
59 The fowler lifts his levelled tube on high.
—Pope.
He owed the line in the text to Dryden’s Virgil, Geor. ii. 774.
And bends his bow, and levels with his eyes.
“Tube” is an affected term for a gun, but the word is adopted by Cowper and Campbell. Thomson, in his lines on partridge-shooting, was not afraid to call the gun by its own name, and yet is more poetical than Cowper, Campbell, or Pope:
the gun
Glanced just and sudden from the fowler’s eye,
O’ertakes their sounding pinions.
The last expression is nobly descriptive.
60 Præcipites altá vitam sub nube relinquunt. Virg.
—Warburton.
So before Pope, Philips in his Cider:
——they leave their little lives above the clouds.
—Steevens.
61 It is singular, that in a poem on a forest, the majestic oak, the deer, and many other interesting and characteristic circumstances, should be all thrown in the distant ground, whilst objects much less appropriate, the fisher, the fowler, &c. are brought forward.—Bowles.
62 The active use of the word hope, though authorised by Dryden, appears to my taste intolerably harsh and affected.—Wakefield.
63 “Volume,” except in its application to books, now carries with it an idea of magnitude. In Pope’s day it was still used in its strictly etymological sense. When Milton, in his personification of Sin (Par. Lost, ii. 651), says that she
ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast,
“voluminous” is the synonym for “many a scaly fold,” and not for the conjoint epithet “vast.”
64 Wakefield points out that Pope borrowed the language from Lauderdale’s translation of the fourth Georgic, where he says of the bees that they are “bedropped with gold,” or from Milton’s description of the fish, which
sporting with quick glance
Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold.
65 “The wat’ry plain” from the campi liquentes of Virgil, is an expression of Dryden’s in his translation of Ovid, Met. i., and elsewhere. Drayton in his Polyolbion has the tyrant pike.—Wakefield.
“The luce, or pike,” says Walton, “is the tyrant of the fresh waters.”
66 Originally thus:
But when bright Phœbus from the twins invites
Our active genius to more free delights,
With springing day we range the lawns around.
—Pope.
67 “Sylvan war,” is an expression borrowed from writers who described the chase of ferocious beasts,—the lion, tiger, and boar. The language is inapplicable to the pursuit of such timid creatures as the hare, deer, and fox.
68 Translated from Statius.
Stare adeo miserum est, pereunt vestigia mille
Ante fugam, absentemque ferit gravis ungula campum.
These lines Mr. Dryden, in his preface to his translation of Fresnoy’s Art of Painting, calls wonderfully fine, and says “they would cost him an hour, if he had the leisure, to translate them, there is so much of beauty in the original,” which was the reason, I suppose, why Mr. Pope tried his strength with them.—Warburton.
69 “Threatening” is an inappropriate epithet for the sloping hills up which the hunters rode in the neighbourhood of Windsor.
70 Instead of this couplet, Pope had written in his early manuscript,
They stretch, they sweat, they glow, they shout around;
Heav’n trembles, roar the mountains, thunders all the ground.
He was betrayed into this bombast, which his better taste rejected, by the attempt to carry on the hyperbolical strain of Statius.
71 Queen Anne.—Warburton.
Congreve’s Prologue to the Queen:
For never was in Rome nor Athens seen
So fair a circle, and so bright a queen.
72 This use of the word “reign” for the territory ruled over, instead of for the sway of the ruler, was always uncommon, and is now obsolete. Queen Anne is mentioned in connection with the chase and the “immortal huntress,” because her favourite diversion before she grew unwieldy and inactive, was to follow the hounds in her chaise.
73 Better in the manuscript:
And rules the boundless empire of the main.
By the alteration Pope increased the compliment to Anne by making her the light of the earth as well as mistress of the forest and the sea. Wakefield thinks that this application to the queen of the offices of Diana as goddess of the woods, the luminary of the night, and the chief agent in the production of the tides, is happily conceived, but the moon and the monarch were “the light of the earth “and “empress of the main” in such different senses, that the line is a trivial play upon words.
74 In the last edition published in Pope’s lifetime, the four previous lines, with the variation of “sunny heaths” for “airy wastes,” were printed in a note, and their place in the text was supplied by a single couplet:
Here, as old bards have sung, Diana strayed,
Bathed in the springs, or sought the cooling shade.
Wakefield suggests that Pope rejected this latter line, as not being suited to the prevailing character of the English climate, but at ver. 209 he represents the goddess as often “laving” in the Lodona, and to bathe and luxuriate in shade are surely common enough in England.
75 Dr. Warton says, “that Johnson seems to have passed too severe a censure on this episode of Lodona; and that a tale in a descriptive poem has a good effect.” Johnson does not object to a tale in a descriptive poem. He objects only to the triteness of such a tale as this.—Bowles.
76 Dryden’s Translations from Ovid:
The nicest eye did no distinction know,
But that the goddess bore a golden bow.
77 Nec positu variare comas; uni fibula vestem,
Vitta coercuerat neglectos alba capillos. Ovid.
—Warburton.
78 This thought of the quiver sounding is found both in Homer and Virgil.—Wakefield.
Pope remembered Dryden’s translation of Virgil, Æneis, xi. 968:
Diana’s arms upon her shoulder sounds.
And xi. 1140:
A gilded quiver from his shoulder sounds.
79 Dryden’s Æneis, xii. 108:
The lover gazed, and burning with desire,
The more he looked the more he fed the fire.
80 Ut fugere accipitrem penna trepidante columbæ,
Ut solet accipiter trepidas agitare columbas. Ovid, Met. lib. v.
—Warburton.
Sandys’ translation:
As trembling doves the eager hawks eschew;
As eager hawks the trembling dovers pursue.
81 In the first edition:
As from the god with fearful speed she flew,
As did the god with equal speed pursue.
82 Wakefield remarks that Pope, yielding to the exigencies of rhyme, has put “run” for “ran.”
83 Sol erat a tergo: vidi præcedere longam
Ante pedes umbram; nisi timor illa videbat.
Sed certe sonituque pedum terrebar; et ingens
Crinales vittas afflabat anhelitus oris. Ovid, Met. lib. v.
—
Warburton.
Sandys, whom our bard manifestly consulted, renders thus:
The sun was at our backs; before my feet
I saw his shadow, or my fear did see’t.
Howere his sounding steps, and thick-drawn breath
That fanned my hair, affrighted me to death.
—Wakefield.
Not only is the story of Lodona copied from the transformation of Arethusa into a stream, but nearly all the particulars are taken from different passages in Ovid, of which Warburton has furnished a sufficient specimen.
84 The river Loddon.—Pope.
85 The idea of “augmenting the waves with tears” was very common among the earliest English poets, but perhaps the most ridiculous use ever made of this combination, was by Shakespeare:
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears.
—Bowles.
Dryden’s translation of the first book of Ovid’s Art of Love:
Her briny tears augment the briny flood.
86 These six lines were added after the first writing of this poem.—Pope.
And in truth they are but puerile and redundant.—Warton.
87 Eve, looking into the fountain, in Dryden’s State of Innocence, Act ii.:
What’s here? another firmament below
Spread wide, and other trees that downward grow.
—Steevens.
88 The epithet “absent,” employed to denote that the trees were only a reflection in the water, is more perplexing than descriptive, particularly as the “absent trees” are distinguished from the “pendant woods,” which must equally have been absent.
89 In every edition before Warburton’s it was “spreading honours.” Pope probably considered that “rear,” which denoted an upward direction, could not be consistently conjoined with “spreading.” For “shores,” improperly applied in the next line to a river, all the editions before 1736 had “banks.”
90 “Her” appears for the first time in the edition of Warburton in the place of “his,” and is now the accepted reading, but it is manifestly a misprint, since “her” has no antecedent. The couplet is obscure. Pope could hardly intend to assert that the flow of the tide poured as much water into the Thames as all the other rivers of the world discharged into the ocean, and he probably meant that all the navigable rivers of the globe did not send more commerce to the sea than came from the sea up the Thames. Even in this case it was a wild, without being a poetical, exaggeration.
91 In the first edition:
No seas so rich, so full no streams appear.
The epithets “clear,” “gentle,” “full,” which Pope applies to the Thames, show that he had in his mind the celebrated passage in Cooper’s Hill:
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o’er-flowing full.
92 The ancients gave the name of the terrestrial Eridanus or Po, to a constellation which has somewhat the form of a winding river. Pope copied Denham:
Heav’n her Eridanus no more shall boast,
Whose fame in thine, like lesser currents lost,
By nobler streams shall visit Jove’s abodes,
To shine amongst the stars and bathe the gods.
93 Very ill expressed, especially the rivers swelling the lays.—Warton.
94 The original readings were beyond all competition preferable both in strength and beauty:
Not fabled Po more swells the poet’s lays
While through the skies his shining current strays.
—Wakefield.
95 In saying that the Po did not swell the lays of the poet in the same degree as the Thames, Pope more especially alluded to the celebrated description of the latter in Cooper’s Hill.
96 In the earlier editions,
Nor all his stars a brighter lustre show,
Than the fair nymphs that gild thy shore below.
The MS. goes on thus:
Whose pow’rful charms enamoured gods may move
To quit for this the radiant court above;
And force great Jove, if Jove’s a lover still,
To change Olympus, &c.
97 Originally:
Happy the man, who to these shades retires,
But doubly happy, if the muse inspires!
Blest whom the sweets of home-felt quiet please;
But far more blest, who study joins with ease.
—Pope.
The turn of this passage manifestly proves that our poet had in view that incomparable encomium of Virgil’s second Georgic on philosophy and a country life.—Wakefield.
In addition to the imitation of the second Georgic, and the translation of lines in Horace and Lucan, Pope adopted hints, as Warton has remarked, from Philips’s Cider:
He to his labour hies
Gladsome, intent on somewhat that may ease
Unhealthy mortals, and with curious search
Examines all the properties of herbs,
Fossils and minerals, &c.
or else his thoughts
Are exercised with speculations deep,
Of good, and just, and meet, and th’ wholesome rules
Of temperance, and ought that may improve
The moral life; &c.
98 Lord Lansdowne.—Croker.
99 This is taken from Horace’s epistle to Tibullus:
An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?
—Wakefield.
Pope remembered Creech’s translation of the passage:
Or dost thou gravely walk the healthy wood,
Considering what befits the wise and good.
100 ——servare modum, finemque tenere,
Naturamque sequi. Lucan.
—Warburton.
101 Dryden’s Virgil, Geor. ii. 673:
Ye sacred muses! with whose beauty fired,
My soul is ravished, and my brain inspired.
—Wakefield.
Addison in his Letter from Italy has the expression “fired with a thousand raptures.”
102 O, qui me gelidis in vallibus Hæmi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra! Virg.
—Warburton.
103 Cooper’s Hill is the elevation, not deserving the name of mountain, just over Egham and Runnymede.—Croker.
104 It stood thus in the MS.
Methinks around your hold scenes I rove,
And hear your music echoing through the grove:
With transport visit each inspiring shade,
By god-like poets venerable made.
—Warburton.
105 From Philips’s Cider, ii. 6:
or what
Unrivalled authors by their presence made
For ever venerable.
—Steevens.
106 By “first lays,” Pope means Cooper’s Hill, but Denham had previously written the Sophy, a tragedy, and translated the second book of the Æneid.
107 Dryden says of the Cooper’s Hill, “it is a poem which for majesty of style is, and ever will be, the standard of good writing.” From hence, no doubt, Pope took the word “majestic.”—Bowles.
108 Mr. Cowley died at Chertsey, on the borders of the Forest, and was from thence conveyed to Westminster.—Pope.
Pope told Spence that Cowley was killed by a fever brought on by lying out all night in the fields. He had got drunk, in company with his friend Dean Sprat, at the house of a neighbour, and they lost their way in the attempt to walk home. Sprat had long before related that Cowley caught his last illness in the “meadows,” but says it was caused “by staying too long amongst his labourers in the heat of the summer.” The drunkenness, and the lying out all night, appear to have been the embellishments of scandal.
109 Cowley died July 28, 1667, in the 49th year of his age. Pope’s “O early lost!” is copied from the “O early ripe!” of Dryden in his lines to the Memory of Oldham.
110 Oldham’s Imitation of Moschus:
This, Thames, ah! this, is now thy second loss
For which in tears thy weeping current flows.
111 On the margin of his manuscript Pope wrote the passage of Virgil which he imitated:
quæ, Tiberine, videbis
Funera, cum tumulum præterlabere recentem.
The “pomp” was not a poetical exaggeration. Evelyn, who attended the funeral, says that Cowley’s body was “conveyed to Westminster Abbey in a hearse with six horses, near a hundred coaches of noblemen, and persons of quality following.”
112 Originally:
What sighs, what murmurs, filled the vocal shore!
His tuneful swans were heard to sing no more.
—Pope.
113 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. Psalm cxxxvii. 2.—Wakefield.
Pope says that “each muse” hung up her lyre because Cowley was thought to excel in many departments of verse. “He was beloved,” said Dr. Felton, “by every muse he courted, and has rivalled the ancients in every kind of poetry but tragedy.” Dr. Sprat entitled his poem on him an “Ode to the English Ovid, Anacreon, Pindar, and Virgil.”
114 Warton mentions, that “living lyre” is used by Cowley.
115 This couplet was a triplet in the manuscript with the following middle line:
What bard, what angel, tunes the warbling strings?
It is surprising that Pope did not feel the bathos of the expression, “’Tis yours, my lord,” introduced into the midst of the high-flown adulation.
116 Philips:
And paint those honours thou art sure to wear.
—Steevens.
117 Meaning, I apprehend, the star of the knights of the Garter installed at Windsor.—Wakefield.
The order was founded by Edward III., the builder of Windsor Castle, which further connected it with Pope’s subject. Denham had celebrated the institution of the garter in Cooper’s Hill, and Lord Lansdowne, in his Progress of Beauty, “sung the honours” in a few despicable verses, which certainly added no “lustre to the silver star.”
118 All the lines that follow were not added to the poem till the year 1710 [1712]. What immediately followed this, and made the conclusion, were these;
My humble muse in unambitious strains
Paints the green forests and the flow’ry plains;
Where I obscurely pass my careless days,
Pleased in the silent shade with empty praise,
Enough for me that to the list’ning swains
First in these fields I sung the sylvan strains.
—Pope.
119 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, one of the first refiners of the English poetry; famous in the time of Henry VIII. for his sonnets, the scene of many of which is laid at Windsor.—Pope.
120 The Fair Geraldine, the general object of Lord Surrey’s passionate sonnets, was one of the daughters of Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare. In Warton’s History of English Poetry, is a poem of the elegiac kind, in which Surrey laments his imprisonment in Windsor Castle.—Warton.
121 The Mira of Granville was the Countess of Newburgh. Towards the end of her life Dr. King, of Oxford, wrote a very severe satire against her, in three hooks, called The Toast.—Warton.
She proved in her conduct to be the reverse of “heavenly.” “Granville,” says Johnson, “wrote verses to her before he was three-and-twenty, and may be forgiven if he regarded the face more than the mind. Poets are sometimes in too much haste to praise.”
122 Not to recount those several kings, to whom
It gave a cradle, and to whom a tomb. Denham.
—Bowles.
123 Edward III. born here.—Pope.
124 David Bruce, king of Scotland, taken prisoner at the battle of Nevil’s Cross, 1346, and John, king of France, captured at the battle of Poitiers, 1356. “Monarchs chained” conveys the idea of a rigorous imprisonment, and belies the chivalry, which was the pride of Edward and the Black Prince. David, who was the brother-in-law of Edward III., was subjected to so little constraint, that he was allowed to visit Scotland, and confer with his people on the terms of his ransom. John was received with royal honours in England, and during the whole of his residence here was surrounded with regal luxury and state.
125 Denham’s Cooper’s Hill:
——Great Edward, and thy greater son,
The lilies which his father wore, he won.
Edward III. claimed the crown of France by descent, and quartered the French fleur-de-lis on his shield before the victories of the Black Prince had made the assumption something more than an empty boast.
126 Originally thus in the MS.
When brass decays, when trophies lie o’er-thrown,
And mould’ring into dust drops the proud stone,
From Windsor’s roofs, &c.
—Warburton.
127 He was a Neapolitan. Without much invention, and with less taste, his exuberant pencil was ready at pouring out gods, goddesses, kings, emperors, and triumphs, over those public surfaces on which the eye never rests long enough to criticise,—I mean ceilings and staircases. Charles II. consigned over Windsor to his pencil. He executed most of the ceilings there, one whole side of St. George’s Hall, and the chapel. On the accession of James II., Verrio was again employed at Windsor in Wolsey’s Tomb-house.—Horace Walpole.
128 Pope had in his head this couplet of Halifax:
The wounded arm would furnish all their rooms,
And bleed for ever scarlet in the looms.
—Holt White.
129 Henry VI.—Pope.
130 Edward IV.—Pope.
131 The Land’s End in Cornwall is called by Diodorus Siculus, Belerium promentorium, perhaps from Bellerus, one of the Cornish giants with which that country and the poems of old British bards were once filled.—T. Warton.
132 Dryden’s translation of the tenth Satire of Juvenal, ver. 236:
Whom Afric was not able to contain
Whose length runs level with th’ Atlantic main.
—Wakefield.
133 Dr. Chetwood’s verses to Roscommon:
Make warlike James’s peaceful virtues known.
—Wakefield.
134 Charles I. was buried in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. The precise spot was a matter of doubt till an accidental aperture was made in 1813 into the vault of Henry VIII., when a lead coffin was discovered bearing the inscription “King Charles, 1648.” It was opened in the presence of the Regent; and the corpse was in a sufficient state of preservation to enable the spectators to recognise the likeness of the countenance to Vandyke’s portraits of the king, and to ascertain that the head had been severed from the body.
135 Originally thus in the MS.
Oh fact accurst! oh sacrilegious brood,
Sworn to rebellion, principled in blood!
Since that dire morn what tears has Albion shed,
Gods! what new wounds, &c.
—Warburton.
136 To say that the plague in London, and its consumption by fire, were judgments inflicted by heaven for the murder of Charles I., is a very extraordinary stretch of tory principles indeed.—Warton.
137 This couplet is directed at the Revolution, considered by Pope, in common with all jacobites, to be a like public calamity with the plague and the fire of London.—Croker.
Pope had in his mind, when he wrote the couplet, Creech’s Hor., Ode xxxv. lib. 1.
I blush at the dishonest show,
I die to see the wounds and scars,
Those glories of our civil wars.
138 Thus in the MS.
Till Anna rose, and bade the Furies cease;
Let there be peace—she said, and all was peace.
—Warburton.
It may be presumed that Pope varied the couplet from perceiving the impropriety of a parody on the fiat of the Creator.
139 Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis:
Old Father Thames raised up his rev’rend head.
And again, at the conclusion of his Threnodia Augustalis:
While, starting from his oozy bed,
Th’ asserted ocean rears his rev’rend head.
—Wakefield.
The gods of rivers are invariably represented as old men.
140 Spenser of Father Thames:
his beard all gray
Dewed with silver drops that trickled down alway.
—Wakefield.
141 Between verse 330 and 331, originally stood these lines;
From shore to shore exulting shouts he heard,
O’er all his banks a lambent light appeared,
With sparkling flames heav’n’s glowing concave shone,
Fictitious stars, and glories not her own.
He saw, and gently rose above the stream
His shining horns diffused a golden gleam:
With pearl and gold his tow’ry front was drest,
The tributes of the distant East and West.
—Pope.
142 Horns were a classical attribute of rivers,—not I think, according to the common view, as a mark of dignity, but as a symbolical expression of the fact that the principal streams, like the ocean itself, are formed from a confluence of tributaries.—Croker.
Pope’s personification of the Thames is the echo of Addison’s translation of a passage in Claudian, describing the deity of the Eridanus:
His head above the floods he gently reared,
And as he rose his golden horns appeared,
That on the forehead shone divinely bright
And o’er the banks diffused a yellow light:
Beneath his arm an urn supported lies
With stars embellished, and fictitious skies.
143 Augusta was the name which the Romans at one period gave to London. The representation of the god attended by
All little rivers, which owe vassalage
To him, as to their lord, and tribute pay,
and the accompanying enumeration of the subsidiary streams, is closely imitated from the Faery Queen. Pope professes to describe the river-gods who stood round the throne of Father Thames, but he has confounded the river-gods with the rivers, and some of his epithets,—“winding Isis,” “blue transparent Vandalis,” “gulphy Lee,”—are not applicable to persons.
144 The river-gods were said to be the children of Oceanus and Tethys, but in the earlier mythology, Oceanus was himself a river (not a sea), surrounding the earth, and the lesser rivers were his progeny.
145 The Tamesis. It was a common but erroneous notion, that the appellation was formed from appending the name Isis to Thame.
146 Warton observes that Pope has here copied and equalled the description of rivers in Spenser, Drayton, and Milton. The description is beautiful, but in some points it is deficient. “Winding Isis” and “fruitful Thame” are ill designated. No peculiar and visible image is added to the character of the streams, either interesting from beauty, or incidental circumstances. Most rivers wind and may be called fruitful, as well as the Isis and Thame. The latter part of the description is much more masterly, as every river has its distinctive mark, and that mark is picturesque. It may be said, however, that all the epithets, in a description of this sort, cannot be equally significant, but surely something more striking should have been given as circumstantially characteristic of such rivers as the Isis and Thames, than that they were “winding” and “fruitful,” or of the Kennet that it was renowned for “silver eels.”—Bowles.
147 Drayton:
The crystal Trent for fords and fish renowned.
—Bowles.
The Kennet is not linked by Pope to any poetical association when he simply says that it is “renowned for silver eels,” but Spenser brings a delightful picture before the eye when he speaks of the
still Darent in whose waters clean
Ten thousand fishes play, and deck his pleasant stream.
148 Addison:
Where silver lakes with verdant shadows crowned.
149 Several of Pope’s epithets are borrowed, although he has not always coupled them with the same streams to which they are applied in his originals. For “Kennet swift” Milton has “Severn swift,” and for “chalky Wey” Spenser has “chalky Kennet.”
150 The Wandle.—Croker.
151 Milton has “gulphy Dun” and “sedgy Lee,” and Pope combined the characteristics. The remainder of the couplet is from Addison’s translation of a passage in Claudian:
Her dropping locks the silver Tessin rears,
The blue transparent Adda next appears.
152 Milton’s Vacation Exercise:
Or sullen Mole, that runneth underneath.
—Wakefield.
The Mole at particular spots, called the swallows, sinks through crevices in the chalk, and during dry seasons, when there is not sufficient water to till both the subterranean and the upper channel, the bed of the river is laid bare in parts of its course. The stream sometimes entirely disappears from Burford-bridge to the neighbourhood of Thorncroft-bridge, a distance of nearly three miles.
153 Drayton:
And the old Lee brags of the Danish blood.
—Bowles.
Pope’s epithet “silent” was suggested by “the still Darent” of Spenser, and the same poet had said of the Eden that it was
——stained with blood of many a band
Of Scots and English.
154 Addison’s translation of an extract from Ovid:
While thus she rested on her arm reclined,
The hoary willows waving with the wind.
155 The river god bowing respectfully to his human audience, before he commenced his speech, is a ludicrous idea, into which Pope was seduced by his courtly desire to represent even the deities as doing homage to Queen Anne.
156 So Dryden, Æneis, x. 156:
The winds their breath restrain,
And the hushed waves lie flatted on the main.
—Wakefield.
Pope’s lines are compiled from the passage quoted by Wakefield and a couplet in the Court Prospect of Hopkins:
Unrolling waves steal softly to the shore,
They know their sovereign and they fear to roar.
157 The Hermus is characterised by Virgil as “turbid with gold.” The property was more usually ascribed to its tributary, the Pactolus, but there was no gold in either.
158 An undoubted imitation, I think, of Dr. Bathurst’s verses on Selden:
As when old Nilus, who with bounteous flows
Waters a hundred nations as he goes,
Scattering rich harvests, keeps his sacred head
Amidst the clouds still undiscovered.
Homer denominates the Nile, whose sources were unknown, a river that falls from Jupiter or heaven. And our countryman calls it sevenfold, as Ovid before him septemfluus, and Catullus still earlier septemgeminus, from the seven mouths by which its waters are discharged into the Mediterranean.—Wakefield.
159 Originally thus in the MS.
Let Venice boast her tow’rs amidst the main,
Where the rough Adrian swells and roars in vain;
Here not a town, but spacious realms shall have
A sure foundation on the rolling wave.
—Warburton.
This he altered with his usual discernment, on account of the mean conceit in the equivocal use of the word “foundation.”—Wakefield.
160 This alludes to General Stanhope’s campaigns on the Ebro, and the Duke of Marlborough’s on the Danube.—Croker.
In saying that British blood should no more dye foreign lands, Pope meant to furnish an argument for the Peace by intimating that the war was kept up, at the sacrifice of English life, for the benefit of other nations.
161 In the manuscript:
O’er all the Forests shall appear no trace.
162 And certainly sufficient ferocity is displayed even in these amusements. Cowley says,
And all his malice, all his craft is shown
In innocent wars, on beasts and birds alone.
His commentator, Dr. Hurd, remarks in a spirit that endears him to the reader, “Innocent, he means, in comparison with wars on his own kind.”—Wakefield.
163 The fifty new churches.—Pope.
164 This seems imitated from Hopkins’ Court Prospect:
As far as fair Augusta’s buildings reach,
Bent, like a bow, along a peaceful beach.
—Wakefield.
Cowley’s Somerset House:
And here, behold, in a long bending row,
How two joint cities make one glorious bow.
Whitehall is just above that circular sweep of the Thames in the midst of which the cities of London and Westminster unite. Pope wrote in the belief that the magnificent design of Inigo Jones for the palace at Whitehall would one day be executed.
165 Addison’s translation of a passage in Claudian on the imperial palace at Rome:
Thither the kingdoms and the nations come,
In supplicating crowds to learn their doom.
To Delphi less th’ inquiring worlds repair.
166 “Once more,” as in the renowned reign of Elizabeth.—Holt White.
After holding out a prospect of perpetual peace, Pope conjures up a future vision of “sueing kings,” and “suppliant states,” which are the consequences of war and victory.
167 This return to the trees of Windsor Forest, his original subject, is masterly and judicious; and the whole speech of Thames is highly animated and poetical,—forcible and rich in diction, as it is copious and noble in imagery.—Bowles.
168 Originally thus:
Now shall our fleets the bloody cross display
To the rich regions of the rising day,
Or those green isles, where headlong Titan steeps
His hissing axle in th’ Atlantic deeps:
Tempt icy seas, &c.
—Pope.
The original lines were rejected, probably as too nearly resembling a passage in Comus:
And the gilded car of day
His glowing axle doth allay
In the steep Atlantic stream.
—Bowles.
169 Pope has written “if obscure?” against this line in the manuscript. It is plain he meant that the trees were converted into ships, but the language is extravagant.
170 The red cross upon the Union Jack.
171 Waller’s verses on Tea:
To the fair region where the sun does rise.
172 “To tempt the sea” is a classical expression, significant of hazard and resolution. Dryden’s Iliad:
What now remains
But that once more we tempt the wat’ry plains.
—Wakefield.
173 “Exalt” is an inefficient and prosaic word.—Wakefield.
The word is certainly not “prosaic,” for no one in prose would talk of exalting a sail, but it is “inefficient,” just because it is one of those deviations from common speech, which sound affected.
174 The whole passage seems a grand improvement from Philips’ Cider, book ii.:
uncontroll’d
The British navy, through the ocean vast,
Shall wave her double cross t’ extremest climes
Terrific, and return with od’rous spoils
Of Araby well fraught, or Indus’ wealth,
Pearl and barbaric gold.
—Wakefield.
Pope also drew upon Addison’s lines to William III.:
Where’er the waves in restless errors roll,
The sea lies open now to either pole:
Now may we safely use the northern gales,
And in the polar circle spread our sails:
Or deep in southern climes, secure from wars,
New lands explore, and sail by other stars;
Fetch uncontrolled each labour of the sun,
And make the product of the world our own.
Towards the close of 1712 Tickell published his poem on the Prospect of Peace. “The description,” Pope wrote to Caryll, “of the several parts of the world in regard to our trade has interfered with some lines of my own in Windsor Forest, though written before I saw his. I transcribe both, and desire your sincere judgment whether I ought not to strike out mine, either as they seem too like his, or as they are inferior.” The close resemblance arose from their having copied a common original. The couplet of Pope on the West India islands, which he subsequently omitted, has no counterpart in Tickell, because it was not derived from the passage in Addison.
175 In poetical philosophy the crude material from which jewels and the precious metals were formed, was supposed to be ripened into maturity by the sun. Tickell has the same idea:
Here nearer suns prepare the ripening gem,
And here the ore, &c.
176 This was suggested by a couplet of Denham’s on the same subject in his Cooper’s Hill:
Nor are his blessings to his banks confined,
But free and common as the sea or wind.
—Wakefield.
177 A wish that London may be made a free Port.—Pope.
178 This resembles Waller in his panegyric on Cromwell:
While by your valour and your bounteous mind,
Nations, divided by the sea, are joined.
—Wakefield.
179 Better in the first edition, “Whose naked youth,” and in the Miscellanies better still, “While naked youth.”—Wakefield.
180 “Admire” was formerly applied to anything which excited surprise, whether the surprise was coupled with commendation or censure, or was simply a sentiment of wonder. Thus Milton, using the word in this last sense, says, Par. Lost, i. 690:
Let none admire
That riches grow in hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.
“Admire” has the same signification in Windsor Forest. Pope means that the savages would be astonished at “our speech, our colour, and our strange attire,” and not that they would admire them in our present laudatory sense of the term, which would be contrary to the fact. “A fair complexion,” says Adam Smith, “is a shocking deformity upon the coast of Guinea. Thick lips and a flat nose are a beauty.”
181 As Peru was particularly famous for its long succession of Incas, and Mexico for many magnificent works of massy gold, there is great propriety in fixing the restoration of the grandeur of each to that object for which each was once so remarkable.—Warton.
182 Rage in Virgil is bound in “brazen bonds,” and Envy is tormented by “the snakes of Ixion.” These coincidences are specified by Wakefield.
183 Sir J. Beaumont’s Bosworth Field:
Beneath her feet pale envy bites her chain,
And snaky discord whets her sting in vain.
184 Hor., Ode iii. lib. 3:
Quo, Musa, tendis? desine pervicax
Referre sermones Deorum et
Magna modis tenuare parvis.
—Warburton.
Addison’s translation of Horace’s Ode:
But hold, my muse, forbear thy tow’ring flight
Nor bring the secrets of the gods to light.
Pope says that he will not presume “to touch on Albion’s golden days,” and “bring the scenes of opening fate to light,” oblivious that the speech which Father Thames has just delivered is entirely made up of these two topics. As might be inferred from their feebleness, the lines from ver. 426 formed part of the original Windsor Forest, with the exception of the couplet beginning “Where Peace descending,” which is of another order of poetry. The second line is exquisite.
185 He adopted one or two hints, and especially the turn of the compliment to Lord Lansdowne, from the conclusion of Addison’s Letter to Lord Halifax:
But I’ve already troubled you too long,
Nor dare attempt a more adventurous song.
My humble verse demands a softer theme,
A painted meadow, or a purling stream:
Unfit for heroes; whom immortal lays
And lines like Virgil’s, or like yours, should praise.
186 It is observable that our author finishes this poem with the first line of his Pastorals, as Virgil closed his Georgics with the first line of his Eclogues. The preceding couplet scarcely rises to mediocrity, and seems modelled from Dryden’s version of the passage imitated:
Whilst I at Naples pass my peaceful days,
Affecting studies of less noisy praise.
—Wakefield.
The conclusion is feeble and flat. The whole should have ended with the speech of Thames.—Warton.