This day, be bread and peace my lot: All else beneath the sun, To thee, whose temple is all space; 45 50 NOTICES ON THE RAPE OF THE LOCK. THE story of this most elegant of the pleasantries of Pope has been already given in the memoir: the style has been attributed to the invention of Tassoni in 1612, the author of the well-known Secchia Rapita' ('The Rape of the Bucket'); followed in 1676 by the Malmantile Racquistato' of Lorenzo Lippi. Roscoe, jealous for his author's originality, says, that Pope probably never thought of either, and that their nature is essentially different; the humor of the Italians consisting in the expression, that of Pope in the thought.' But the Secchia Rapita' was in the hands of all men of literary taste: Pope was a reader of Italian ; and the plan of the two poems is evidently of the same school. He is scarcely more fortunate in his view of the 'Lutrin.' The sharp satire and local ridicule of Boileau's celebrated poem are totally distinct from the delicate mockery and general allusions of Pope; while the abuses of the church and the law, which Boileau scourges with such reckless severity, are replaced in Pope by the graceful frivolities of fashionable life, the gallantry of courts, and the caprices of rival beauty. The poem was first published in two cantos; but the author, adopting the idea of enlivening it by the machinery of sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders, then a familiar topic, taken from the French romance of Le Comte de Gabalis,' in 1714, enlarged the two cantos to five. The romance was written by an abbé Villars, a man of talents, but of doubtful principle. He had come to Paris, in the idea of distinguishing himself as a preacher: there he associated with some men like himself, of ability, probably discontented, and as probably indulging their discontent against the existing administration of the Gallican church and the monarchy. Le Comte de Gabalis' was a series of five dialogues, containing their opinions, under the garb of the Rosicrucian fantasies. But the object was no sooner perceived, than vengeance fell on the writer: he was suspended from his functions, and his book put in the prohibited list: he loudly denied the charge; and was said to be preparing a second volume in vindication, when he was murdered, on his road to Lyons. The fame of The Rape of the Lock' broke through the contemptuous boundary by which France has excluded the literature of all other nations: it was translated into French by the princess of Conti in 1728. It was subsequently translated into Italian by Rangoni, the Modenese envoy to the court of George II.; by the abbate Conti, at Milan, in 1819; and has since appeared in a volume of 'Poesie di Alessandro Pope,' by Leone, at Pisa, in 1820. |