And hence th' egregious wizard shall foredoom 140 Then cease, bright nymph! to mourn thy ravish'd hair, Which adds new glory to the fhining sphere! 145 150 UPON the whole, I hope it will not be thought an exaggerated panegyric to fay, that the Rape of the Lock is the best Satire extant; that it contains the trueft and liveliest picture of modern life; and that the subject is of a more elegant nature, as well as more artfully conducted, than any other heroi-comic poem. Pope here appears in the light of a man of gallantry, and of a thorough knowledge of the world; and indeed he had nothing, in his carriage and deportment, of that affected fingularity, which has induced fome men of genius to defpife, and depart from, the eftablished rules of politenefs and civil life. For all poets have not practised the sober and rational advice of Boileau ; 66 Que les vers ne foient pas votre eternel emploi ; C'eft peu d'etre agréeable et charmant dans un livre ; Il fait favoir encore et converser, et vivre." L'Art Poetique, chant. iv. Our nation can boaft alfo, of having produced fome other poems of the burlefque kind, that are excellent; particularly the Splendid Shilling, that admirable copy of the folemn irony of Cervantes, Cervantes, who is the father and unrivalled model of the true mock-heroic; and the Mufcipula, written with the purity of Virgil, whom the author fo perfectly understood, and with the pleasantry of Lucian; to which I cannot forbear adding, the Scribleriad of Mr. Cambridge, the Machine Gefticulantes of Addison, the Hobbinol of Somerville, and the Trivia of Gay; the Battle of the Wigs of Thornton, and the Triumph of Temper of Hayley. If fome of the most candid among the French critics begin to acknowledge, that they have produced nothing in point of fublimity and majefty equal to the Paradife Loft, we may also venture to affirm, that in point of delicacy, elegance, and fine-turned raillery, on which they have so much valued themselves, they have produced nothing equal to the Rape of the Lock. What comes nearest to it, is the pleafing and elegant Ver-vert of Greffet, in which the foibles of the Nuns are touched with fo delicate a hand, and fuch nice ridicule, that it cannot disgust the moft religious prude. I dare not even mention La Pucelle of Voltaire, except to lament that such a rich vein of sterling and uncommon wit, should be debased by the grofs alloy of so much abominable obfcenity. The learned and ingenious Mr. Cambridge has, in the Preface to his Scribleriad, made a remark so new and fo folid, as to deserve examination and attention. He says, that in firft reading the four celebrated mock-heroic poems, he perceived they had all fome radical defect. That at laft he found, by a diligent perufal of Don Quixote, that propriety was the fundamental excellence of that work. That all the marvellous was reconcileable to probability, as the author leads his hero into that, fpecies of abfurdity only, which it was natural for an imagination, heated with the continual reading of books of chivalry, to fall into. That the want of attention to this was the fundamental error of those poems. For with what propriety do Churchmen, Phyficians, Beaux, and Belles, or Booksellers, in the Lutrin, Difpenfary, Rape of the Lock, and Dunciad, address themselves to heathen gods, offer facrifices, consult oracles, or talk the language of Homer, and of the heroes of antiquity? This acute obfervation bears hard on the conduct of more than one of the heroi-comic poems above-mentioned. Nothing is here faid of Hudibras; because its unrivalled. excellence could not be difcuffed in a note. It is one of the poems that gives peculiar luftre to our nation and language. One circumstance only I will here mention, that the ancients had no no notion of fuch fort of Poems. The cruel wars between Pompey and Cæfar, and the execrable profcriptions of Auguftus, were never treated in a burlesque style, as the horrors of the league in France, and the bloody civil war in England, were described in the Satyre Menippée, and in Hudibras. One of the most accurate Greek scholars, of our time and nation, is of opinion, that the Batracomachia is not by Homer, but a burlefque poem in imitation of his manner, by fome ancient poet, who, though he adopted the words and expreffions of the Greek Bard, formed his metre according to the pronunciation of his own country. With equal confidence we may pronounce the Margites to have been a forgery, though there are only four lines of it extant, three of which are quoted by Plato and Ariftotle; but in these we have a compound verb, with the augment upon the prepofition (T), which Homer's grammar did not admit. Knight's Analytical Effay on the Greek Alphabet, page 30. ELE GY TO THE MEMORY OF AN UNFORTUNATE LADY *. WH HAT beck'ning ghost, along the moon-light fhade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade? 'Tis fhe ;-but why that bleeding bofom gor'd, Why dimly gleams the vifionary fword! Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! tell, Is it, in heav'n, a crime to love too well? To bear too tender, or too firm a heart, NOTES. 5 ΙΟ Why * See the Duke of Buckingham's ver es to a Lady defigning to retire into a monaftery, compared with Mr. Pope's Letters to feveral Ladies, p. 206. quarto Edition. She feems to be the fame perfon whofe unfortunate death is the subject of this poem. P. VER. 1. What beck'ning ghoft,] Who does not, by this striking abruptnefs, imagine, with the poet, that he fuddenly beholds the phantom of his murdered friend? He might, perhaps, have a paffage of Ben Jonfon in his head, in an elegy on the Marchiones of Winchester, which opens thus; "What gentle ghost besprent with April dew, Hails me fo folemnly to yonder yew? And beck'ning wooes me-?". The |