![Why boast we, Glaucus! our extended reign,
Where Xanthus' streams enrich the Lycian plain;
Our num'rous herds that range each fruitful field,
And hills where vines their purple harvest yield;
Our foaming bowls with gen'rous nectar crowned,
Our feasts enhanced with music's sprightly sound;
Why on those shores are we with joy surveyed,
Admired as heroes, and as gods obeyed;
Unless great acts superior merit prove,
And vindicate the bounteous pow'rs above?
'Tis ours, the dignity they give, to grace;
The first in valour, as the first in place:
That while with wond'ring eyes our martial bands
Behold our deeds transcending our commands,
Such, they may cry, deserve the sov'reign state,
Whom those that envy, dare not imitate.
Could all our care elude the greedy grave,
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war.
But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death's inexorable doom;
The life which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe;
Brave though we fall, and honoured if we live,
Or let us glory gain, or glory give.—Warburton.
The passage quoted by Warburton is from Pope's own translation of the
Episode of Sarpedon, which appeared in Dryden's Miscellany, in 1710.
[495] Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel:
The young men's vision, and the old men's dream.—Wakefield.
[496] Denham, in his version of the speech of Homer parodied by our
poet:
Why all the tributes land and sea affords?—
As gods behold us, and as gods adore.—Wakefield.
[497] Gay, in the Toilette:
Nor shall side-boxes watch my restless eyes,
And, as they catch the glance in rows arise
With humble bows; nor white-gloved beaux approach
In crowds behind to guard me to my coach.—Wakefield.
[498] The ladies at this time always sat in the front, the gentlemen in the
side-boxes.—Nichols.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-26-320.jpg)
![In Steele's Theatre, No. 3, January 9, 1720, his "representatives of a
British audience" are "three of the fair sex for the front boxes, two
gentlemen of wit and pleasure for the side-boxes, and three substantial
citizens for the pit." "The virgin ladies," he said, in the Guardian, No. 29,
April 14, 1713, "usually dispose themselves in the front of the boxes, the
young married women compose the second row, while the rear is
generally made up of mothers of long standing, undesigning maids, and
contented widows."—Cunningham.
[499] It is a verse frequently repeated in Homer after any speech,
——So spoke—and all the heroes applauded.—Pope.
[500] From hence the first edition goes on to the conclusion, except a
very few short insertions added to keep the machinery in view to the end
of the poem.—Pope.
[501] Æneid. v. 140:
———ferit æthera clamor.
Their shouting strikes the skies.—Wakefield.
[502] Homer, Il. xx.—Pope.
[503] This verse is an improvement on the original, Æneid. viii. 246:
———trebidentque immisse lumine manes.
And the ghosts tremble at intruding light.—Wakefield.
The concluding line of the paragraph is from Addison's translation of a
passage in Silius Italicus:
Who pale with fear the rending earth survey
And startle at the sudden flash of day.
There is more of bathos than of humour from ver. 43 to ver. 52. The
exaggeration is carried so far that even the similitude of caricature is lost.
[504] These four lines added, for the reason before mentioned.—Pope.
[505] Minerva in like manner, during the battle of Ulysses with the suitors
in the Odyssey, perches on a beam of the roof to behold it.—Pope.
[506] Like the heroes in Homer when they are spectators of a combat.—
Warton.
[507] This idea is borrowed from a couplet in the Duke of Buckingham's
Essay on Poetry where he ridicules the poetical dialogues of the dramatis
personæ in the reign of Charles II.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-27-320.jpg)
![Or else like bells, eternally they chime
They sigh in simile, and die in rhyme.
[508] Wakefield quotes passages from Sir Philip Sidney, Drummond, and
Milton, in which the phrase "living death" occurs.
[509] The words of a song in the Opera of Camilla.—Pope.
"Here," said Dennis, speaking of the death of the beau and witling, "we
have a real combat, and a metaphorical dying," and he did the lines no
injustice when he added that they were but a "miserable pleasantry."
[510]
Sic ubi fata vocant, udis abjectus in herbis,
Ad vada Mæandri concinit albus olor.
Ov. Ep.—Pope.
[511] Vid. Homer, Il. viii. and Virg. Æn. xii.—Pope.
The passage in Homer to which the poet refers is where Jupiter, before
the conflict between Hector and Achilles, weighs the issue in a pair of
scales.
[512] These two lines added for the above reason.—Pope.
[513] In imitation of the progress of Agamemnon's sceptre in Homer, Il. ii.
—Pope.
[514] Pins to adorn the hair were then called bodkins, and Sir George
Etherege, in Tonson's Second Miscellany, traces the genealogy of some
jewels through the successive stages of the ornament of a cap, the
handle of a fan, and ear-rings, till they became, like the gold seal rings, in
the Rape of the Lock,
A diamond bodkin in each tress,
The badges of her nobleness,
For every stone, as well as she,
Can boast an ancient pedigree.
[515] "Who," asked Dennis, "ever heard of a dead man that burnt in
Cupid's flames?" Pope had originally written,
And still burn on, in Cupid's flames, alive.
[516] Dryden's Alexander's Feast:
A present deity! they shout around:
A present deity! the vaulted roofs rebound.—Steevens.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-28-320.jpg)
![[517] Vide Ariosto, Canto xxxiv.—Pope.
From the catalogue which follows it appears that, by "all things lost on
earth," Pope meant only such things as, in his opinion, were hypocritical,
foolish, and frivolous. These mounted to the lunar sphere when they had
finished their course here below,—a career very short in instances like the
"tears of heirs," and, perhaps, very long in instances like the butterflies
preserved in the cabinets of collectors.
[518] Apparently Pope had the erroneous idea that distinguished soldiers
were men of dull and ponderous minds.
[519] The alms would not be "lost on earth," however unprofitable they
might be to the alms-givers, from whom they had been extorted by fear
instead of proceeding from a benevolent disposition.
[520] Dryden's Œdipus, act 2:
The smiles of courtiers, and the harlot's tears,
The tradesman's oaths, and mourning of an heir,
Are truths, to what priests tell.—Holt White.
[521] Denham, in Cooper's Hill, gave him a hint:
their airy shape
All but a quick poetic sight escape.—Wakefield.
[522]
Flammiferumque trahens spatioso limite crinem
Stella micat. Ovid.—Pope.
Dryden, Æneis, v. 1092:
Descends, and draws behind a trail of light.—Wakefield.
[523] These two lines added, for the same reason, to keep in view the
machinery of the poem.—Pope.
Dryden's Æneis, v. 691:
And as it flew
A train of following flames ascending drew;
Kindling they mount, and mark the shiny way
Across the skies, as falling meteors play.
[524] The promenades in the Mall lasted till the middle of the reign of
George III., and it would appear from this line that they were enlivened
by music.—Croker.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-29-320.jpg)
![[525] Rosamond's lake was a small oblong piece of water near the Pimlico
Gate of St. James's Park. When it was done away with, about the middle
of the last century, the public, unwilling to lose the romantic name,
transferred it to the dirty pond in the Green Park, which has, in its turn,
been filled up.—Croker.
[526] John Partridge was a ridiculous stargazer, who in his almanacks
every year never failed to predict the downfall of the Pope, and the King
of France, then at war with the English.—Pope.
He had been made the subject of ridicule by Swift, Steele, Addison and
others.—Croker.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-30-320.jpg)
![[527] Milton, Par. Lost, v. ver. 261, calls the telescope "the glass of
Galileo," who first employed it to observe the heavens.
[528] Phebe in As You Like It, Act iii. Sc. 5, says to her despised and
despairing lover,
Thou tell'st me there is murder in mine eye.
[529] The compliment was meant to be serious, but is marred by its
extravagance. "Millions" is too hyperbolical.
[530] Spenser in his 75th Sonnet:
Not so, quoth I: let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
And Cowley, in his imitation of Horace, Ode iv. 2:
He bids him live and grow in fame
Among the stars he sticks his name.—Wakefield.
[531] Wakefield says "there is an affectation and ambiguity in this account
which he does not comprehend." The uncertainty with which Pope
speaks, refers to his doubt of the identity of the lady celebrated by the
duke. Enough of "ambiguity and affectation" remains, which would have
been no mystery to Wakefield if he had been aware that Pope's object
was to deceive.
[532] The Memoirs by Ayre appeared in 1745, without the name of the
publisher. In a pamphlet which was printed the same year, under the title
of Remarks on Squire Ayre's Memoirs, it is stated that the work was put
together, and published by Curll, who being notorious for the manufacture
of vapid, lying biographies, suppressed a name which would have been
fatal to the sale of his trash.
[533] Warton's Essay, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 329.
[534] Pope's Correspondence, ed. Elwin, vol. i., pp. 144, 158-160, 162.
[535] "Pray in your next," writes Caryll to Pope, July 16, 1717, "tell me
who was the unfortunate lady you address a copy of verses to. I think you
once gave me her history, but it is now quite out of my head." Pope, in his
reply does not allude to the subject, and Caryll says to him on Aug. 18,
"You answer not my question who the unfortunate lady was that you
inscribe a copy of verses to in your book. I long to be re-told her story, for](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-31-320.jpg)
![I believe you already told me formerly; but I shall refer that, and a
thousand other things more, to chat over at our next meeting, which I
hope draws near." This letter was answered by Pope on Aug. 22, but
there is still not a word on the unfortunate lady.
[536] Dr. Morell, in his notes to Seneca's Epistles, says, "I remember
when I was a boy at Eton that an old almswoman, Mrs. Pain, having been
cut down alive, gave this reason for hanging herself, that she was afraid
of dying." To rush into death from the fear of death is not uncommon,
and shows how far suicide is from being an evidence of superior courage.
Acute philosophers have not always reasoned better than Pope. M.
Lerminier, a French writer of repute, eulogises, in his Philosophie du Droit,
the suicide of Cato for "a pure and majestic act." "In the Memoirs of the
Emperor's Valet," he says in the next sentence, "we learn that Napoleon
tried to destroy himself at Fontainebleau in 1814. He took poison;
remedies were applied, and he recovered. He was not to die thus. Would
you wish that Napoleon's end should have been that of an amorous sub-
lieutenant, or a ruined banker?" But this was the veritable end of Cato. He
died the death of "amorous sub-lieutenants and ruined bankers." The
question of M. Lerminier revealed his consciousness that suicide was not
heroism, or, in justification of the attempt of the Emperor, he would have
asked, "Would you not have wished that Napoleon's end should have
been the pure and majestic end of Cato?"
[537] Comus, ver. 205.
[538] I Viaggi di Marco Polo, ed. Pasini, 1847, p. 45.
[539] A belief akin to that which grew up in deserts prevailed in England.
Hamlet doubts whether his father's ghost is a "spirit of health or goblin
damned," and Horatio attempts to dissuade Hamlet from following it lest
it should prove to be an impostor. A "goblin damned" may have put on the
"fair and warlike form" of the King of Denmark, may "tempt" Hamlet to
the "dreadful summit of the cliff," may "there assume some other horrible
form which might draw him into madness," and impel him to commit
suicide. The radical idea is the same in Shakespeare and Marco Polo.
Fiends personate the relations or friends of an intended victim that they
may decoy him to his death.
[540]
And beck'ning woos me, from the fatal tree
To pluck a garland for herself or me.
[541] Elements of Criticism, 6th ed., vol. i. p. 477.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-32-320.jpg)
![[542] Ben Jonson's Elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester:
What gentle ghost besprent with April dew,
Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?
And beck'ning woos me?—Warton.
[543] Johnson gives two meanings for "to gore,"—"to stab," "to pierce;"
and "to pierce with a horn." The second, or special signification, has since
superseded the general sense in popular usage, though, as with many
other words, a sense which has become obsolete in conversation is
occasionally revived in books. Formerly, the general sense of "to pierce,"
without reference to the mode of piercing, was the predominant meaning,
and Milton, Par. Lost, vi. 386, employed the word to denote the gaps
made in the ranks of a defeated army:
the battle swerved
With many an inroad gored.
[544] The third Elegy of Crashaw:
And I, what is my crime, I cannot tell,
Unless it be a crime t' have loved too well.—Steevens.
[545] Shakespeare, Henry VIII. Act iii. Sc. 2:
Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition;
By that sin fell the angels.
[546] Dryden, To the Duchess of Ormond:
And where imprisoned in so sweet a cage
A soul might well be pleased to pass an age.
[547] Cowley has a couplet not unlike his, Davideis, i. 80:
Where their vast court the mother-waters keep,
And undisturbed by moons in silence sleep.—Wakefield.
[548] Duke's translation of Juvenal, Sat. iv.:
Without one virtue to redeem his fame.—Wakefield.
[549] Dryden, Ovid's Amor. ii. 19:
But thou dull husband of a wife too fair.—Wakefield.
[550] Lord Kames objects to the false antithesis between cold flesh and
mental warmth.
[551] Milton, Comus, ver. 753:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-33-320.jpg)
![Love-darting eyes or tresses like the morn.—Wakefield.
[552] Rolling eyes are contrary to the English idea of feminine refinement.
Pope admired them. He had previously said in the Rape of the Lock, Cant.
v. 33,
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll.
[553] Wakefield mentions that the phrase "unknowing how to yield" is
used by Dryden, Æneis, xi. 472, and that the entire couplet is almost
identical with two passages in Pope's own translation of the Iliad. The first
is at Book ix. 749. The second is at Book xxii. 447, and runs thus:
The furies that relentless breast have steeled
And cursed thee with a heart that cannot yield.
[554] From a fragment of Sir Edward Hungerford, according to a writer in
the Gentleman's Magazine for 1764:
The soul by pure religion taught to glow
At others' good, or melt at others' woe.—Wakefield.
[555] Dryden, Æneis, ix. 647, where the mother of Euryalus laments her
son, whose body remains with the enemy:
Nor was I near to close his dying eyes,
To wash his wounds, to weep his obsequies.—Wakefield.
The cruelties of the lady's relations, the desolation of the family, the being
deprived of the rights of sepulture, the circumstance of dying in a country
remote from her relations, are all touched with great tenderness and
pathos, particularly the four lines from the 51st, "By foreign hands," &c.—
Warton.
[556] The anonymous translator of Ariadne to Theseus:
Poor Ariadne! thou must perish here,
Breathe out thy soul in strange and hated air,
Nor see thy pitying mother shed one tear;
Want a kind hand, which thy fixed eyes may close,
And thy stiff limbs may decently compose.
So Gay in his Dione, Act ii. Sc. 1:
What pious care my ghastful lid shall close?
What decent hand my frozen limbs compose.—Wakefield.
De Quincey assumes that the term "decent limbs" refers to the lady's
shape, and he remarks that the language "does not imply much](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-34-320.jpg)
![enthusiasm of praise." Pope had perhaps the same idea in his mind as the
translator he imitated, and "thy decent limbs were composed" may be put
inaccurately for "thy limbs were composed decently."
[557] The poet in the previous couplet has employed the word "mourn" to
signify genuine regret. In this verse it is put for the act of wearing
mourning,—the appearing in the "sable weeds," which are, "the mockery
of woe" when the sorrow is not real.
[558] Dryden, Virg. Ecl. x. 51:
How light would lie the turf upon my breast.
A. Philips in his third Pastoral:
The flow'ry turf lie light upon thy breast.
This thought was common with the ancients.—Wakefield.
[559] Tasso's description of an angel in the translation of Fairfax, i. 14:
Of silver wings he took a shining pair
Fringed with gold.—Wakefield.
[560] The expression has reference to ver. 61. "No sacred earth allowed
her room," but her remains have "made sacred" the common earth in
which she was buried.
[561] Such a poem as Pope's Elegy, deeply serious and pathetic, rejects
with disdain all fiction. Upon that account the passage from ver. 59 to ver.
68 deserves no quarter; for it is not the language of the heart, but of the
imagination indulging its flights at ease, and by that means is eminently
discordant with the subject. It would be a still more severe censure if it
should be ascribed to imitation, copying indiscreetly what has been said
by others.—Lord Kames.
The ghost of the injured person appears to excite the poet to revenge her
wrongs. He describes her character, execrates the author of her
misfortunes, expatiates on the severity of her fate, the rites of sepulture
denied her in a foreign land. Then follows, "What though no weeping,"
&c. Can anything be more naturally pathetic? Yet the critic tells us he can
give no quarter to this part of the poem. Well might our poet's last wish
be to commit his writings to the candour of a sensible and reflecting
judge, rather than to the malice of every short-sighted and malevolent
critic.—Warburton.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-35-320.jpg)
![[562] When Pope describes the retribution which is to fall upon the
imperious relatives of the unfortunate lady, he says,
Thus unlamented pass the proud away;
and it is to these same relations, whose pride was their vice, that he
reverts in the line,
'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.
The persecutors who have hunted you into the grave, shall one day share
your fate.
[563] R. Herrick, in a Meditation for his Mistress:
You are the queen all flow'rs among,
But die you must, fair maid, ere long,
As he, the maker of this song.—Wakefield.
[564] Dean Milman, in his History of Latin Christianity, says that Heloisa
"was distinguished for her surpassing beauty." There is no authority for
this assertion, which is one of the embellishments of later romancers.
[565] "She knew Latin," says M. Rémusat, "and wrote it with facility and
talent. As to Greek and Hebrew I can hardly believe that she was
acquainted with more than the alphabet, and a few words which were
quoted habitually in theology or in philosophy." The treatises of Abelard
prove that he could read neither Greek nor Hebrew, and it is not likely
that Heloisa was more learned than her master. Latin was the literary
language of the day.
[566] The sentiments which Warton imagined to be borrowed from
Madame Guion and Fenelon were taken from the English translation of
the Letters of Heloisa and Abelard. Kindred thoughts may be found in the
works of almost any devotional writer.
[567] M. Rémusat, who accepts the letters without misgiving,
acknowledges that the form of the Historia Calamitatum "appears to be
an artificial frame to the picture." He assumes that the avowed purpose is
a pretext, and that the repentant philosopher commences his narrative
with a misstatement. The fiction which M. Rémusat is obliged to admit,
does not ward off the strongest objection to the genuineness of the
letters, and is the hypothesis least favourable to the reputation of
Abelard; for his treachery to Heloisa is immensely aggravated by the
admission that his narrative was meant for the public, and not for the eye
alone of a friend.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-36-320.jpg)
![[568] Essai Historique sur Abailard et Heloise, ed. 1861, p. xxvi.
[569] Essai Historique, p. lxiii.
[570] As You Like It, Act iv. sc. 3.
[571] History of Latin Christianity, vol. iii. p. 363.
[572] Philosophie du Moyen Age, ed. 1856, p. 3.
[573] Vie d'Abelard, Tome 1. p. 262.
[574] Hist. de France, tom. iii. 317.
[575] Horne's Works, vol. i. p. 248.
[576] Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 33. Fox,
the statesman, was one of those who thought "Eloisa much greater in her
letters than Pope had made her."
[577] Mason's Life of Whitehead, p. 35.
[578] The letter which Abelard addressed to his friend, and which had
fallen into the hands of Eloisa.
[579] Dryden's Don Sebastian:
And when I say Sebastian, dear Sebastian!
I kiss the name I speak.—Steevens.
[580] That is, a lively representation of his person was retained in her
mind. So Drayton where he speaks of his departed love:
Clear Ankor, on whose silver-sanded shore
My soul-shrined saint, my fair idea lies.—Wakefield.
[581] Claudian, De Nupt. Honor. et Mar. ver. 9:
Nomenque beatum
Injussæ scripsere manus.—Wakefield.
[582] Drayton's Heroical Epistle of Rosamond to Henry:
My hapless name with Henry's name I found—
Then do I strive to wash it out with tears,
But then the same more evident appears.—Holt White.
[583] Some of these circumstances have perhaps a little impropriety when
introduced into a place so lately founded as was the Paraclete; but are so
well imagined and so highly painted, that they demand excuse.—Warton.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-37-320.jpg)
![[584] This is borrowed from Milton's Comus, ver. 428:
By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades.—Wakefield.
[585] A suspected poem of the Duke of Wharton on the Fear of Death:
Where feeble tapers shed a gloomy ray
And statues pity feign;
Where pale-eyed griefs their wasting vigils keep.—Wakefield.
[586] A puerile conceit from the dew which runs down stone and metals
in damp weather.—Wakefield.
A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for October, 1836, quotes a parallel
couplet from a poem by the Duke of Wharton:
Where kneeling statues constant vigils keep,
And round the tombs the marble cherubs weep.
[587] He followed Milton in the Penseroso:
Forget thyself to marble.—Wakefield.
Heloisa to Abelard: "O vows! O convent! I have not lost my humanity
under your inexorable discipline. You have not made me marble by
changing my habit." With the exception of a passage or two quoted by
Wakefield, all the extracts in the notes are from Pope's chief text-book,
the English work of Hughes, which is very unfaithful to the Latin original.
[588] In every edition till that of Warburton the reading was,
Heav'n claims me all in vain while he has part.
[589] Heloisa to Abelard: "By that melancholy relation to your friend you
have awakened all my sorrows."
[590] Dryden's Æneis, v. 64:
A day for ever sad, for ever dear.—Wakefield.
[591] Heloisa to Abelard: "Shall my Abelard be never mentioned without
tears? Shall the dear name be never spoken but with sighs?"
[592] Heloisa to Abelard: "I met with my name a hundred times. I never
saw it without fear; some heavy calamity always followed it. I saw yours
too equally unhappy."
[593] Pomfret in his Vision:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-38-320.jpg)
![For sure that flame is kindled from below
Which breeds such sad variety of woe.—Wakefield.
Steevens quotes from Dryden's State of Innocence the expression "sad
variety of hell," and the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes from
Yalden's Force of Jealousy the expression "a large variety of woe."
[594] Dryden, Palamon and Arcite:
Now warm in love, now with'ring in the grave.—Wakefield.
[595] Fame is not a passion.—Warton.
Ambition is the passion, and fame is the object of the passion.
[596] Heloisa to Abelard: "Let me have a faithful account of all that
concerns you. I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate.
Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sorrows less."
[597] Heloisa to Abelard: "We may write to each other. Let us not lose
through negligence the only happiness which is left us, and the only one
perhaps which the malice of our enemies can never ravish from us."
[598] Heloisa to Abelard: "Tell me not by way of excuse you will spare our
tears; the tears of women shut up in a melancholy place, and devoted to
penitence, are not to be spared."
[599] Denham of Prudence:
To live and die is all we have to do.—Wakefield.
Prior's Celia to Damon:
And these poor eyes
No longer shall their little lustre keep,
And only be of use to read and weep.
[600] Heloisa to Abelard: "Be not then unkind, nor deny me that little
relief. All sorrows divided are made lighter."
[601] Heloisa to Abelard: "Letters were first invented for comforting such
solitary wretches as myself."
[602] Heloisa to Abelard: "What cannot letters inspire? They have souls;
they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the
transports of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions; they can
raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present; they have
all the softness and delicacy of speech, and sometimes a boldness of
expression even beyond it."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-39-320.jpg)
![[603] Otway's translation of Phædra to Hippolytus:
Thus secrets safe to farthest shores may move:
By letters foes converse, and learn to love.—Wakefield.
[604] This is the most exquisite description of the first commencement of
passion that our language, or perhaps any other, affords.—Bowles.
[605] Prior's Celia to Damon:
In vain I strove to check my growing flame,
Or shelter passion under friendship's name.
[606] The Divinity himself. Dryden, in his 12th Elegy:
So faultless was the frame, as if the whole
Had been an emanation of the soul.—Wakefield.
[607] Heloisa to Abelard: "That life in your eyes which so admirably
expressed the vivacity of your mind; your conversation, which gave
everything you spoke such an agreeable and insinuating turn; in short,
everything spoke for you."
[608] She says herself, "You had, I confess, two qualities in great
perfection with which you could instantly captivate the heart of any
woman,—a graceful manner of reading and singing." She mentions in
another place also the excellence of his singing.—Wakefield.
[609] He was her preceptor in philosophy and divinity.—Pope.
Dryden, Epistle, 14:
The fair themselves go mended from thy hand.—Wakefield.
[610] Dryden's Œdipus, end of Act iii.:
And backward trod the paths I sought to shun.
[611] Thy holy precepts and the sanctity of thy character had made me
conceive of thee as of a being more venerable than man, and
approaching the nature of superior existences. But thy personal
allurements soon inspired those tender feelings which gradually
conducted me from a veneration of the angel to a less pure and dignified
sensation—love for the man.—Wakefield.
[612] Dryden, Ovid's Met. x.:
And own no laws but those which love ordains.—Wakefield.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-40-320.jpg)
![Heloisa to Abelard: "The bonds of matrimony, however honourable, still
bear with them a necessary engagement, and I was very unwilling to be
necessitated to love always a man who perhaps would not always love
me."
[613]
Love will not be confined by maisterie:
When maisterie comes, the lord of Love anon
Flutters his wings, and forthwith is he gone. Chaucer.—Pope.
Hudibras, Part iii. Cant. i. 553:
Love that's too generous to abide
To be against its nature tied,
Disdains against its will to stay,
But struggles out and flies away.—Wakefield.
Dryden's Aurengezebe:
'Tis true of marriage bands I'm weary grown,
Love scorns all ties but those that are his own.—Steevens.
The passage cited by Pope from Chaucer is in the Franklin's Tale. Spenser
copied and altered the lines, which led Wakefield to imagine that Pope
had committed the double error of falsely imputing them to Chaucer, and
quoting them incorrectly.
[614] Heloisa to Abelard: "It is not love but the desire of riches and
honour which makes women run into the embraces of an indolent
husband: ambition, not affection, forms such marriages. I believe indeed
they may be followed with some honours and advantages, but I can never
think that this is the way to enjoy the pleasures of an affectionate union."
[615] Heloisa to Abelard: "This restless tormenting passion"—ambition
—"punishes them for aiming at other advantages by love than love itself."
[616] Heloisa to Abelard: "How often I have made protestations that it
was infinitely preferable to me to live with Abelard as his mistress than
with any other as empress of the world, and that I was more happy in
obeying you than I should have been in lawfully captivating the lord of the
universe."
[617] Heloisa to Abelard: "Though I knew that the name of wife was
honourable in the world, and holy in religion, yet the name of your
mistress had greater charms because it was more free. I despised the
name of wife that I might live happy with that of mistress."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-41-320.jpg)
![[618] Heloisa to Abelard: "We are called your sisters, and if it were
possible to think of any expressions which would signify a dearer relation
we would use them."
[619] Denham, Cooper's Hill:
Happy when both to the same centre move,
When kings give liberty, and subjects love.—Cunningham.
[620] Heloisa to Abelard: "If there is anything which may properly be
called happiness here below, I am persuaded it is in the union of two
persons who love each other with perfect liberty, who are united by a
secret inclination, and satisfied with each other's merit. Their hearts are
full, and leave no vacancy for any other passion."
[621] Heloisa to Abelard: "If I could believe you as truly persuaded of my
merit as I am of yours, I might say there has been a time when we were
such a pair."
[622] Mrs. Rowe in her Elegy:
A dying lover pale and gasping lies.— Wakefield.
[623] Heloisa to Abelard: "Where was I? where was your Heloise then?
What joy should I have had in defending my lover. I would have guarded
you from violence, though at the expense of my life; my cries and shrieks
alone would have stopped the hand."
[624] For "stroke" Pope, in all editions till that of 1736, read "hand," the
word in the translation. He had used "hand" in the rhyme of the previous
couplet, and it was probably to avoid the repetition that he made the
alteration.
[625] Careless readers may misapprehend the sense. "Pain" here means
punishment, pœna.—Holt White.
Like a verse of Drummond's:
The grief was common, common were the cries.—Wakefield.
Heloisa to Abelard: "You alone expiated the crime common to us both.
You only were punished though both of us were guilty."
[626] Heloisa to Abelard: "Oh whither does the excess of passion hurry
me! Here love is shocked, and modesty joined with despair deprive me of
speech."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-42-320.jpg)
![[627] A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes Settle's Empress of
Morocco:
Muly Hamet.—Speak.
Empress.—Let my tears and blushes speak the rest.
[628] The altar of Paraclete, says Mr. Berrington, did not then exist. They
were not professed at the same time or place; one was at Argenteuil, the
other at St. Denys.—-Warton.
[629] Abelard to Heloisa: "I accompanied you with terror to the foot of
the altar, and while you stretched out your hand to touch the sacred cloth,
I heard you pronounce distinctly those fatal words which for ever
separated you from all men."
[630] Her kissing the veil with "cold lips" strongly marks her want of that
fervent zeal and devotion which should influence those votaries who
renounce the world. The presages, likewise, which attended the rites are
finely imagined,—the trembling of the shrines, and the pallid hue of the
lamps as if they were conscious of the reluctant sacrifice she was making.
—Ruffhead.
[631] Prior, in Henry and Emma, has a verse of similar pauses, and similar
phraseology:
Thy lips all trembling, and thy cheeks all pale.—Wakefield.
[632] Abelard to Heloisa: "I saw your eyes when you spoke your last
farewell fixed upon the cross." Heloisa to Abelard: "It was your command
only, and not a sincere vocation, as is imagined, that shut me up in these
cloisters." The two passages combined suggested the line in the text.
[633] Heloisa to Abelard: "You may see me, hear my sighs, and be a
witness of all my sorrows, without incurring any danger, since you can
only relieve me with tears and words."
[634] Roscoe remarks that the lines which follow cannot be justified by
anything in the letters of Eloisa. Sentiments equally gross are however
expressed both in the original Latin and in the adulterated translation
which was Pope's authority.
[635] Concannen's Match at Football, Canto iii.:
And drank in poison from her lovely eye.
Creech, at the beginning of his Lucretius:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-43-320.jpg)
![Where on thy bosom he supinely lies,
And greedily drinks love at both his eyes.—Wakefield.
Smith's Phædra and Hippolytus, Act i.:
Drank gorging in the dear delicious poison.—Steevens.
[636] "If thou canst forget me, think at least upon thy flock," says
Wakefield, in explanation of the train of thought; and he adds a passage
from a letter of Eloisa in which she terms the monastery Abelard's "new
plantation," and assures him that frequent watering is essential to the
tender plants.
[637] Heloisa to Abelard: "The innocent sheep, tender as they are, would
yet follow you through deserts and mountains."
[638] He founded the monastery.—Pope.
Heloisa to Abelard: "You only are the founder of this house. You by
inhabiting here have given fame and sanctity to a place known before
only for robbers and murderers."
[639] So Dryden says of Absalom,
And Paradise was opened in his face.
The original of the image in the text is in Isaiah li. 3:
He will make her wilderness like Eden,
And her desert like the garden of Jehovah.
Whence Milton derived it, Par. Reg. i. 7:
And Eden raised in the waste wilderness.—Wakefield.
[640] The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes Boileau, Le Moine:
Là les salons sont peints, les meubles sont dorés
Des larmes et du sang des pauvres devorés.
[641] Heloisa to Abelard: "These cloisters owe nothing to public charities;
our walls were not raised by the usury of publicans, nor their foundations
laid on base extortion. The God whom we serve sees nothing but innocent
riches, and harmless votaries whom you have placed here."
[642] There were no benefactors whose praises were celebrated in the
services, but the building was vocal only with the praise of the Deity.
[643] Our author imitates Milton:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-44-320.jpg)
![And storied windows richly dight
Casting a dim religious light.—Wakefield.
[644] Dryden had said of his Good Parson:
His eyes diffused a venerable grace.—Wakefield.
[645] Mrs. Rowe on the Creation:
And kindling glories brighten all the skies.—Wakefield.
[646] By pretending that she desires Abelard to visit the Paraclete in
obedience to the call of her sister nuns.
[647] Heloisa to Abelard: "But why should I entreat you in the name of
your children? Is it possible I should fear obtaining anything of you when
I ask in my own name? And must I use any other prayers than my own to
prevail upon you?"
[648] From the superscription of Heloisa's letter to Abelard: "To her lord,
her father, her husband, her brother; his servant, his child, his wife, his
sister, and to express all that is humble, respectful, and loving to her
Abelard, Heloisa writes this."
[649] Our poet is indebted to a translation of the Virgilian cento of
Ausonius in Dryden's Miscellanies, vi. p. 143:
My love, my life,
And every tender name in one, my wife.—Wakefield.
[650] Mr. Mills, a clergyman, who visited the Paraclete about the year
1765, says, "Mr. Pope's description is ideal. I saw neither rocks, nor pines,
nor was it a kind of ground which ever seemed to encourage such
objects."
[651] Addison's translation of book iii, of the Æneis:
The hollow murmurs of the winds that blow.
[652] The little river Ardusson glittered along the valley of the Paraclete.—
Mills.
[653] Philips, in his fourth Pastoral:
Nor dropping waters which from rocks distil,
And welly grots with tinkling echoes fill.—Wakefield.
[654] Milton's Penseroso:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-45-320.jpg)
![When the gust hath blown his fill
Ending on the rustling leaves.—Wakefield.
[655] Dryden, Virg. Geo. iv. 432:
When western winds on curling waters play.
[656] Dryden, Virg. Æn. iii. 575:
Most upbraid
The madness of the visionary maid.—Wakefield.
[657] Milton's Penseroso:
To arched walks of twilight groves.—Wakefield.
[658] Waller's version of Æneid iv.:
A death-like quiet, and deep silence fell.
Dryden's Astræa Redux:
A dreadful quiet felt.—Wakefield.
Charles Bainbrigg on the death of Edward King:
Abyssum
Terribilis requies et vasta silentia cingant.—Steevens.
[659] Fenton in his version of Sappho to Phaon:
With him the caves were cool, the grove was green,
But now his absence withers all the scene.—Wakefield.
[660] Dryden's Theodore and Honoria:
With deeper brown the grove was overspread.—Steevens.
Dryden, Æn. vii. 40:
The Trojan from the main beheld a wood,
Which thick with shades and a brown horror stood.—Wakefield.
[661] In allusion to this sacrifice of herself at his will she says in her first
letter: "You are of all mankind most abundantly indebted to me; and
particularly for that proof of absolute submission to your commands in
thus destroying myself at your injunction."—Wakefield.
[662] Heloisa to Abelard: "Death only can make me leave the place where
you have fixed me, and then too my ashes shall rest there, and wait for
yours."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-46-320.jpg)
![[663] Abelard to Heloisa: "I hope you will be contented when you have
finished this mortal life to be buried near me. Your cold ashes need then
fear nothing."
[664] Heloisa to Abelard: "Among those who are wedded to God I serve a
man. What a prodigy am I! Enlighten me, O Lord! Does thy grace or my
despair draw these words from me?"
[665] Heloisa to Abelard: "I am sensible I am in the temple of chastity
only with the ashes of that fire which has consumed us."
[666] This couplet, and its wretched rhymes, seem derived from an elegy
of Walsh in Dryden's Miscellanies:
I know I ought to hate you for the fault;
But oh! I cannot do the thing I ought.—Wakefield.
[667] Heloisa to Abelard: "I am here a sinner, but one, who far from
weeping for her sins, weeps only for her lover; far from abhorring her
crimes endeavours only to add to them, and then who pleases herself
continually with the remembrance of past actions when it is impossible to
renew them." And again: "I, who have experienced so many pleasures in
loving you feel, in spite of myself, that I cannot repent of them, nor
forbear enjoying them over again as much as is possible by recollecting
them in my memory." Abelard, in the translation of the letters, expresses
the same sentiment: "Love still preserves its dominion in my fancy, and
entertains itself with past pleasures."
[668] Abelard to Heloisa: "To forget in the case of love is the most
necessary penitence, and the most difficult."
[669] Dryden's Cymon and Iphigenia:
Then impotent of mind, with altered sense
She hugged th' offender, and forgave th' offence.—Wakefield.
[670] Abelard to Heloisa: "How can I separate from the person I love the
passion I must detest? Will the tears I shed be sufficient to render it
odious to me? It is difficult in our sorrow to distinguish penitence from
love."
[671] Heloisa to Abelard: "A heart which has been so sensibly affected as
mine cannot soon be indifferent. We fluctuate long between love and
hatred before we can arrive at a happy tranquillity." Abelard to Heloisa:
"In such different disquietudes I contradict myself; I hate you; I love
you."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-47-320.jpg)
![[672] Heloisa to Abelard: "God has a peculiar right over the hearts of
great men. When he pleases to touch them he ravishes them, and lets
them not speak nor breathe but for his glory."
[673] Heloisa to Abelard: "Yes, Abelard, I conjure you teach me the
maxims of divine love. Oh! for pity's sake help a wretch to renounce her
desires, herself, and, if it be possible, even to renounce you."
[674] Heloisa to Abelard: "When I shall have told you what rival hath
ravished my heart from you, you will praise my inconstancy, and will pray
this rival to fix it. By this you may judge that it is God alone that takes
Heloise from you. What other rival could take me from you? Could you
think me guilty of sacrificing the virtuous and learned Abelard to any
other but God?"
[675] Horace, Epist. Lib. i. xi. 9:
Oblitusque meorum, obliviscendus et illis.
My friends forgetting, by my friends forgot.—Wakefield.
[676] Taken from Crashaw.—Pope.
Wakefield gives the complete couplet from Crashaw's Description of a
religious House:
A hasty portion of prescribed sleep;
Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep.
[677] The idea of the "wings of seraphs shedding perfumes" is from
Milton, Par. Lost, v. 286, where Raphael "shakes heavenly fragrance" from
"his plumes," and Dryden in his Tyrannic Love, Act v., mentions the
perfumes, the spousals, and the celestial music as accompaniments of the
death of St. Catherine:
Æthereal music did her death prepare,
Like joyful sounds of spousals in the air;
A radiant light did her crowned temple gild,
And all the place with fragrant scents was filled;
Of charming notes we heard the last rebounds,
And music dying in remoter sounds.
[678] Adapted from Dryden's Britannia Redivivus:
As star-light is dissolved away
And melts into the brightness of the day.
[679] Dryden's Cinyras and Myrrha, translated from Ovid:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-48-320.jpg)
![For guilty pleasure gives a double gust.
[680] Heloisa to Abelard: "I will own to you what makes the greatest
pleasure I have in my retirement. After having passed the day in thinking
of you, full of the dear idea I give myself up at night to sleep. Then it is
that Heloise, who dares not without trembling think of you by day, resigns
herself entirely to the pleasure of hearing you, and speaking to you. I see
you Abelard, and glut my eyes with the sight. Sometimes forgetting the
perpetual obstacles to our desires, you press me to make you happy, and
I easily yield to your transports. Sleep gives me what your enemies' rage
has deprived you of, and our souls, animated with the same passion, are
sensible of the same pleasure. But, oh, you delightful illusions, soft errors,
how soon do you vanish away! At my awaking I open my eyes, and see
no Abelard; I stretch out my arms to take hold of him, but he is not there;
I call upon him, he hears me not."
[681] Dryden, Æneis, iv. 677, supplied the idea:
She seems, alone,
To wander in her sleep through ways unknown,
Guideless and dark; or in a desert plain
To seek her subjects, and to seek in vain.
[682] The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes the same
expression from Steele's Miscellanies:
No more severely kind affect to put
That lovely anger on.
[683] Heloisa to Abelard: "You are happy, Abelard, and your misfortunes
have been the occasion of your finding rest. The punishment of your body
has cured the deadly wounds of your soul. I am a thousand times more to
be lamented than you; I must resist those fires which love kindles in a
young heart."
[684] Dryden's Ovid, Met. i.:
Then, with a breath, he gave the winds to blow,
And bade the congregated waters flow.—Wakefield.
[685] Sir William Davenant's Address to the Queen:
Smooth as the face of waters first appeared,
Ere tides began to strive, or winds were heard;
Kind as the willing saints, and calmer far
Than in their sleeps forgiven hermits are.—Wakefield.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-49-320.jpg)
![[686] Heloisa to Abelard: "When we love pleasures we love the living and
not the dead." In all editions till that of 1736 this couplet followed:
Cut from the root my perished joys I see,
And love's warm tide for ever stopped in thee.
[687] Hudibras, Part ii. Canto i. 309:
Love in your heart as idly burns
As fire in antique Roman urns
To warm the dead, and vainly light
Those only that see nothing by 't.—Wakefield.
[688] Heloisa to Abelard: "Whatever endeavours I use, on whatever side I
turn me, the sweet idea still pursues me, and every object brings to my
mind what I ought to forget. Even into holy places before the altar, I carry
with me the memory of our guilty loves. They are my whole business."
[689] Abelard to Heloisa: "In spite of severe fasts your image appears to
me, and confounds all my resolutions."
[690] Sedley's verses on Don Alonzo:
The gentle nymph,
Drops tears with every bead.—Wakefield.
The force of the line is, however, in the phrase "too soft" which Pope has
added. "With every bead I drop a tear of tender love instead of a tear of
bitter repentance."
[691] Smith's Phædra and Hippolytus, Act i.:
All the idle pomp,
Priests, altars, victims swam before my
sight.—Steevens.
[692] How finely does this glowing imagery introduce the transition,
While prostrate here, &c.—Bowles.
[693] The whole of this paragraph is from Abelard's letter to Heloisa:
"I am a miserable sinner prostrate before my judge, and with my face
pressed to the earth I mix my tears and sighs in the dust when the beams
of grace and reason enlighten me. Come, see me in this posture and
solicit me to love you! Come, if you think fit, and in your holy habit thrust
yourself between God and me, and be a wall of separation! Come and
force from me those sighs, thoughts, and vows which I owe to him only!](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-50-320.jpg)
![Assist the evil spirits and be the instrument of their malice! But rather
withdraw yourself and contribute to my salvation."
[694] Abelard to Heloisa: "Let me remove far from you, and obey the
apostle who hath said, fly."
[695] Wakefield quotes the lines of Hopkins to a lady, where, speaking of
her beauties, he entreats that she will
Drive 'em somewhere, as far as pole from pole;
Let winds between us rage, and waters roll.
[696] Abelard to Heloisa: "It will always be the highest love to show
none: I here release you of all your oaths and engagements to me."
[697] The combination "heavenly-fair" is also found in Sandys, Congreve,
and Tickell.—Wakefield.
[698] "Low-thoughted care" is from Milton's Comus.—Warton.
[699] This resembles a passage in Crashaw:
Fair hope! our earlier heaven.—Wakefield.
[700] "It should," says Mr. Mills, "be near her cell. The doors of all cells
open into the common cloister. In that cloister are often tombs." Steevens
adds the frivolous objection that the "Paraclete had been too recently
founded for monuments of the dead to be expected there." Heloisa had
been five years abbess when she wrote her first letter to Abelard, and it is
certainly not an extravagant supposition that a death might have occurred
among the nuns in that space of time.
[701] Dryden's Palamon and Arcite:
And issuing sighs that smoked along the wall.—Wakefield.
Addison's translation of a passage from Claudian:
Oft in the winds is heard a plaintive sound
Of melancholy ghosts that hover round.
[702] Fenton's translation of Sappho to Phaon:
Here, while by sorrow lulled to sleep I lay,
Thus said the guardian nymph, or seemed to say.—Wakefield.
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act iv. Sc. 4:
Hark! you are called: some say, the Genius so
Cries, "Come!" to him that instantly must die.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-51-320.jpg)
![[703] Pope owes much throughout this poem to the character of Dido as
drawn by Virgil, and this passage seems directly formed upon one in
Dryden, Æn. iv. 667:
Oft when she visited this lonely dome
Strange voices issued from her husband's tomb:
She thought she heard him summon her away,
Invite her to his grave, and chide her stay.
The imitation of the passage in Ovid, Epist. vii. 101, similar to this from
Virgil, is still more palpable:
Hinc ego me sensi noto quater ore citari:
Ipse sono tenui dixit, "Elissa, veni!"
Nulla mora est; venio; venio, tibi debita conjux.—Wakefield.
[704] It is well contrived that this invisible speaker should be a person
that had been under the very same kind of misfortunes with Eloisa.—
Warton.
[705] Dryden's version of the latter part of the third book of Lucretius:
But all is there serene in that eternal sleep.—Wakefield.
[706] In the first edition:
I come ye ghosts.—Wakefield.
[707] Ogilby, Virg. Æn. xi.:
And to the dead our last sad duties pay.
Dryden, Æn. xi. 322:
Perform the last sad office to the slain.—Wakefield.
[708] Dryden's Aurengezebe at the commencement of Act iv.:
I thought before you drew your latest breath,
To sooth your passage, and to soften death.
[709] Oldham's translation of Bion on the death of Adonis:
Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll,
Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul.
Dryden's Virg. Æn. iv. 984:
While I in death
Lay close my lips to hers, and catch the flying breath.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-52-320.jpg)
![And in his Cleomenes, the end of Act iv.:
———sucking in each other's latest breath.—Wakefield.
[710] Rowe's ode to Delia:
When e'er it comes, may'st thou be by,
Support my sinking frame, and teach me how to die.—Wakefield.
[711] Dryden Æn., xi. 1194:
And from her cheeks the rosy colour flies.
[712] Abelard to Heloisa: "You shall see me to strengthen your piety by
the horror of this carcase, and my death, then more eloquent than I can
be, will tell you what you love when you love a man."
[713] Spenser, Faerie Queen, i. 4, 45:
Cause of my new grief, cause of new joy.—Wakefield.
[714] Abelard and Eloisa were interred in the same grave, or in
monuments adjoining, in the monastery of the Paraclete. He died in the
year 1142, she in 1163 [4].—Pope.
Abelard and Heloisa are said to have been both sixty-three when they
died. They were buried in the same crypt, but it was not till 1630, or near
five hundred years after the death of Heloisa, that their remains were
consigned to the same grave. Then their bones are reported to have been
put into a double coffin, divided by a partition of lead. They subsequently
underwent various disinterments and removals, till in 1817 the alleged
relics were transferred to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, at Paris, and
have not since been disturbed.
[715] Dryden, in his translation of Canace to Macareus:
I restrained my cries
And drunk the tears that trickled from my eyes.—Wakefield.
[716] Milton, Il Penseroso:
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced choir below.
[717] "Dreadful sacrifice" is the ritual term. So in the History of Loretto,
1608, ch. 20, p. 278, "The priest, as the use is, assisted the cardinal in
the time of the dreadful sacrifice."—Steevens.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-53-320.jpg)
![[718] Warton says that the eight concluding lines of the Epistle "are
rather flat and languid." It is indeed an absurd supposition that a woman
who had been speaking the fervid language of christianity should imagine
that her state in the world beyond the grave would be that of a "pensive
ghost," and that her consolation would consist in having her woes "well-
sung" on earth. And it is in the tremendous conflict between piety and
passion, while divine and human love are contending fiercely for the
mastery, that she finds relief in this unsubstantial idea that some future
lover would make her the subject of a poem.
[719] The last line is imitated from Addison's Campaign.
Marlb'rough's exploits appear divinely bright—
Raised of themselves their genuine charms they boast,
And those who paint them truest, praise them most.
This Pope had in his thoughts; but not knowing how to use what was not
his own, he spoiled the thought when he had borrowed it. Martial exploits
may be painted; perhaps woes may be painted; but they are surely not
painted by being well sung: it is not easy to paint in song, or to sing in
colours.—Johnson.
[720] Roscoe supposes Richardson to have asserted that there was an
"entire discrepancy between the Essay on Man as published, and the
original manuscripts," and to have implied that the change was from
"infidelity" to its opposite. This is not the statement of Richardson. He
says, on the contrary, that when the "exceptionable passages" were
pointed out Pope "did not think of altering them," and "never dreamed of
adopting" a more orthodox "scheme" for his Essay till after "its fatalism
and deistical tendency" had excited that "general alarm" which could not
precede the publication of the poem, and which only, in fact, commenced
some three years later. Richardson is enforcing his charge against
Warburton of inventing forced meanings, and the instance would
contradict the accusation if Pope had altered his language from deism to
orthodoxy before he printed the work. The commentary would then have
expressed the natural sense of the text. The change of which Richardson
speaks was not in the Essay itself, but in the interpretation Pope put upon
it. While he was composing the poem he accepted the deistical
construction of the Richardsons; and when he was terrified at the
"general alarm" he endorsed the christian construction of Warburton.
[721] Dr. Desaguliers, the son of a French refugee, was born at Rochelle
in 1683, and died, Feb. 29, 1744, at the Bedford Coffee-house, Covent
Garden. He was a clergyman of the church of England, a great lover of
science, and a friend of Newton. He delivered lectures for many years on](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-54-320.jpg)
![Experimental Philosophy, and published an excellent work on the subject
in 2 vols. 4to. He does not appear to have shown any turn for poetry, and
those who ascribed to him the Essay on Man may have had no better
ground for their opinion than that the poem treated of one kind of
philosophy, and Desaguliers was learned in another.
[722] Thomas Catesby, Lord Paget, son of the Earl of Uxbridge, died
before his father in Jan. 1742. He published in 1734, a poem called An
Essay on Human Life; and in 1737 An Epistle to Mr. Pope, in Anti-heroics.
"The former," says Horace Walpole, "is written in imitation of Pope's ethic
epistles, and has good lines, but not much poetry."
[723] In the Life of Pope by the pretended Squire Ayre, it is said that "a
certain gentleman," meaning Mallet, was at Pope's house shortly after the
first Epistle was published, and in answer to the question "What new
pieces were brought to light?" replied, "That there was a thing come out
called an Essay on Man, and it was a most abominable piece of stuff;
shocking poetry, insufferable philosophy, no coherence, no connection at
all." Pope confessed he was the author, which, says Ayre, "was like a clap
of thunder to the mistaken bard; with a blush and a bow he took his leave
of Pope, and never ventured to show his unlucky face there again." The
final statement is contradicted by the letters of Pope and Mallet, which
prove that they carried on a cordial intercourse to the last. The rest of the
story is improbable, for it is not likely that Pope, who was bent at this
early period upon keeping the authorship a secret, would have unmasked
himself in a manner to preclude confidence, and provoke Mallet to divulge
the truth to the world. Ayre's authority is good for nothing, and Ruffhead
only copied Ayre, but his repetition of the anecdote gave it currency, and
it has ever since passed unquestioned from writer to writer.
[724] Warburton. "Your Travels I hear much of," says Pope in the letter to
Swift; "my own I promise you shall never more be in a strange land, but a
diligent, I hope, useful investigation of my own territories. I mean no
more translations, but something domestic, fit for my own country, and
my own time." The allusion is obscure, and it may be doubted whether
Pope referred to his ethical scheme, which he did not commence till four
years later.
[725] Bolingbroke.
[726] The authority was Lord Bathurst. Dr. Hugh Blair dined with him in
1763, and says in a letter to Boswell, that "the conversation turning on Mr.
Pope, Lord Bathurst told us that the Essay on Man was originally
composed by Lord Bolingbroke in prose, and that Mr. Pope did no more
than put it into verse: that he had read Lord Bolingbroke's manuscript in](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1200161-250528192919-19570e95/85/Built-Environments-Constructed-Societies-Inverted-Spatial-Analysis-Benjamin-N-Vis-55-320.jpg)
Built Environments Constructed Societies Inverted Spatial Analysis Benjamin N Vis
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- 5. Built Environments Constructed Societies Benjamin N. Vis
- 7. Built Environments, Constructed Societies Sidestone Press
- 9. Built Environments, Constructed Societies Inverting spatial analysis Benjamin N. Vis
- 10. This book is based on the original MPhil thesis supervised by Prof. Dr. Jan Kolen and Alexander Geurds, PhD, written at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, Leiden, January 2009. Committee in charge: Prof. Dr. Jan Kolen Alexander Geurds, PhD Prof. Dr. John Bintliff Prof. Dr. Huib Ernste Prof. Dr. Maarten Jansen © 2009 Benjamin N. Vis Published by Sidestone Press, Leiden www.sidestone.com Sidestone registration number: SSP38670002 ISBN: 978-90-8890-038-9 Illustrations, book design: Micha Meijer
- 11. “For the layman and scientist alike I would like to say I feel very strongly that we must recognize and understand the cultural process. We don’t need more missiles and H- bombs nearly so much as we need more specific knowledge of ourselves as partici- pants in culture.” Edward T. Hall 1959: 215
- 13. Contents Preface X Introduction Biographic-calls 3 Content-wise 6 Subjectivist Objectification 11 Chapter 1 Axes of Developing Societies Epistemology 17 Axis of Time - Absolute Time 18 Axis of Time - Social Time 20 Axis of Time - Subjective Time 23 Axis of Human Action - Disciplined Humanism 25 Axis of Human Action - Max Weber 26 Axis of Human Action - Ludwig von Mises 28 Axis of Human Action - Alfred Schütz 30 Axis of Human Action - Michel de Certeau 35 Axis of Human Space - Existentialism and Embodiment 39 Axis of Human Space - Territoriality and Proxemics 41 Axis of Human Space - Built Environment 45 Axis of Human Space - Space Syntax 48 Chapter 2 Along Disciplinary Lines Foundations of Human Geography 57 New Geography, New Archaeology 58 Present and Future Discource 61 Social Evolutionism 63 Culture History, Culture Areas 67 Chapter 3 Processes of Becoming Time-geography and Structuration 73 Introducing Allan Pred, Criticising Anthony Giddens 74 Place and the Social 79 Place beyond Structuration 81 Towards Place as Historically Contingent Process 84 What about the Built Environment? 92
- 14. Chapter 4 Theorising towards Datasets From Regionalisation and Culture Areas 99 Towards Regionalisation and Culture Areas 102 Constructing Detailed Systemisation 111 Towards Built Environments 116 Chapter 5 Theoretical Integration for Datasets Some Fundamentals 129 Social Positioning of Spatialities 133 Spatial Datasets, Interpretive Issues 137 Spatial Features 143 Boundaries and the Macro Scale 148 Disputation of Potentialities Are Things Stirring in Archaeology? 155 Basing a Theory 157 Building a Theory 160 A Methodological Turn 162 Concluding Remarks 163 Acknowledgements 166 References 168
- 16. Built Environments, Constructed Societies X Preface This book was originally written as a Master’s thesis resulting from an academic pro- gramme in archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University. Before the final publication of the thesis text some minor revisions regarding content and linguis- tics were carried out. During the writing process it soon became clear that through the focus of this study it could contribute to ongoing debates in archaeological theory. Some people strongly advised against getting involved with archaeological theory, often stressing the obvious pitfalls, highlighting the risk of getting detached from what practical archaeology is all about. Taking this advice to heart, it is still theory which is the primary topic of this book. However, care is taken to make a solid connection to es- sential characteristics of archaeological datasets. At the same time it was insurmount- able that this study would not keep within archaeological discourse alone. Since I have a lifelong fascination with big philosophical questions it is hardly sur- prising my research would fumble with the foundations of the discipline. Invested with the relative freedom of a young scientist, I allowed myself the audacity to get involved with significant aspects of various disciplines in the social sciences. The most important contribution was made by social geographical theory. Geography and archaeology were befriended for a significant period in their disciplinary formations, but chose diverting paths along the way. As demonstrated in this research, this proves to be a most unfortunate event. Approaching archaeological problems from a perspective derived from social sciences opened up opportunities for reasoning from a dissentient point of departure unrestricted by typical practice respected in current archaeological discourse. Therefore the ideas contained in this book are born from logical reasoning rather than concrete knowledge. That is also why its main arguments are based on closely-reasoned theories instead of empirical evidence. This type of approach asks for the reader to adopt a stance that diverts from usual discourse. My conviction that there is not one way to soundly conduct science is derived from my personal relativ- ist and individualist worldview, much of which is explained in the Introduction to the book. Shedding the constraints of testing hypotheses, this study is the result of a search into what plausible academic solutions can be offered to certain inadequacies I noted in prevalent discourse. Rather than working from a comparative angle, this study follows a curiosity about the interpretive value of social scientific theory in its own right. In such effort theory may become both constitutive as well as a heuristic device. Next to the presented theory the interdisciplinary angle of the current book may still renew mutual disciplinary interests, which gives a sound basis for disciplinary advances in various directions. Despite its firm basis in disciplinary and paradigmatic debates, the specific spatial interest of the research is no coincidence either. From my first introduction to field
- 17. Preface XI archaeology onwards I developed a strong interest in the spatial aspect of datasets. Maps, site lay-out and dispersion patterns all appealed to me. As I became acquainted with geophysical prospection and aerial archaeology during my first field seasons, I was immediately drawn to it. Perhaps, in the beginning it was a masculine affection caused by prospection’s technological marvels rather than professionalism. Neverthe- less, the great potential the future holds for these techniques, being a powerful source of information joined with the advantage of being non-invasive, could not escape my attention. Prospection produces increasingly detailed and good quality data of the spatial features of material remains. Space, however, is not merely a material feature. Its principal position in the archaeological discipline is particularly made explicit by the culture-specific interests I cherish. The original incentive to start my studies in archaeology was a strong affection for the history of Mesoamerican cultures. My BA research treats the case of the Postclassic K’iche’ Maya city of Q’umarkaaj in Guatemala, focusing on the utilitarian relationship between archaeology and (ethno)archaeology. The attention given to the relation be- tween site lay-out and social organisation in Q’umarkaaj triggered my interest in par- ticular. It demonstrates the distinct influence of urbanism and architecture as products of historical social processes. However, it also made me wonder about the rash use of terms like culture and society, especially considering the way they have determined the history of archaeology and still influence the subdivision of the archaeological world. The borders within Mesoamerica drawn on most maps, may seem to be clear-cut, yet they are far from uncontested. Hence, I was attracted to focus on the eastern border of the Maya culture area and beyond. The eastern Maya periphery and Intermediate/ Chibchan/Circum-Caribbean area are poorly researched. Therefore they would make a great place to start to redefine the designation of cultural or societal labels from a truly social scientific point of departure. The application of such labels to spatial entities interferes with our understanding of regions and boundaries. Despite their differences the various research themes contained in these personal interests turn out to have more in common than expected. Eventually it was decided that a culture-specific angle was too extensive to ad- equately address at this stage. Since the primary contribution of the thesis is theoreti- cal, a secondary case study probably would not have been beneficial. Because of this decision the explicitly general and overtly theoretical nature is preserved, which now makes the research in this book widely applicable. I encourage the reader to use its ideas independent from the discipline it originated from. Benjamin N. Vis Leiden, October 2009
- 19. Introduction
- 21. Introduction 3 Biographic-calls Objective science does not exist. I realised this early on in my studies at Leiden Univer- sity. Though many scholars will share this insight, few have used it as a constructive power in their academic practice. If objective science does not exist, consequentially it becomes essential not only to be aware of your own subjectivity, but make others aware of that subjectivity too. For both, neutrality will be abrogated as a frame of ref- erence. One’s personal subjective background, against which research is conducted, eventually affects the ways its outcomes are comprehended. This thesis is witness to the fact that science can explicitly concur with personal development. It contains sev- eral concise reproductions of potent theoretical assertions proposed by others. These represent a selective body of literature that variably appeals to my personal worldview, and thus acts as a theoretical mediator for basing arguments. Closing in the combina- tion of themes presented in this work are the instantaneous result of the disciplinary interests I pursued over the past few years. My worldview, subscribed epistemological notions, and personal history largely comprise my subjectivity. They are often quite directly responsible for the questions that generated this research. In order to better appreciate its theoretically argumented disputations, in addition to my conviction that science is not objective, I feel obliged to introduce this study slightly autobiographi- cally. Through accumulative interests in the past cultures of Native America, archaeo- logical prospection techniques and theories of social archaeology, this thesis originally meant to set out focusing on the latter, whilst starting with the first. Slowly, however, cultural particularism disappeared into the background as I came to realise that the contribution I could make concentrated around theory, due to practical and intel- lectual reasons. Nevertheless, these three main ponderings eventually prompted the research objectives. These quickly came to concentrate around issues with the con- tinually intertwined themes of time, space and sociality. The main problem focuses on the seemingly inferential inability to regard human space as socially meaningful without referring to stylistic fineries. It appeared problematic to me that archaeology starts with presumably objective measurable information on spatial data, in order to interpret the social. Therefore the first aim would be to find a theorisation explicat- ing the way space becomes materialised by sociality. Associated questions regard the static character ascribed to space and place, following the lack of temporality in spa- tial analysis. Yet meaningful and variable concepts of time should connect inferential perspectives. Archaeology, both as a material and social science, apparently does not use its strength to explain socio-spatial phenomena by offering a time-space specific developmental view. (Throughout this study, time-space is used adjectivally to express that that notion pertains to time and space simultaneously, instead of ‘interval’ as its
- 22. Built Environments, Constructed Societies 4 meaning in physics.) At the interface of space and society, temporal solutions need to be explored. At the start there was my fascination with the south-eastern Maya neighbours in the small of Central America, which grew as I co-organised the European Maya Con- ference held in Leiden in 2005 and conducted the research for my Bachelor’s degree. This part of the world in archaeology is alternately known as the Intermediate area (es- pecially Willey 1971), the Isthmo-Colombian area with the inclusion of northern South America (Fonseca and Cooke 1993), the Circum-Carribean area excluding the Pacific Coast (John Hoopes; personal communication) or Chibchan Area (Constenla Umaña 1991, John Hoopes personal communication). The problem with its designation lies in the culture history approaches generally used towards the definition of culture areas. As the area is usually considered terra incognita, and the issue is nourished by the very limited understanding of its commonalities in virtually all fields of research. Besides the determinations of major culture areas bordering Central American cultures, like Maya or Moche, were often made in the same reductionist ways. The linguistically and anthropologically defined Lenca culture located in Honduras and El Salvador in par- ticular caught my interest. Scholars assume the Lenca had the strongest ties with the monumentality of its Mesoamerican neighbours of all surrounding groups, providing portals and pathways for contact and trade with societies residing in the south. Subse- quently, Wyllis Andrews’ (1976) excavations of Quelepa, presumably the largest urban settlement outside of the Mesoamerican area, and the existence of substantial mounds in northern Nicaragua (Jorge Zambrana personal communication), broadened my ho- rizons to the possibility of applying constantly improving prospection techniques in the area. Initially these methods could be used for detecting and mapping architectur- ally constructed sites from air and outer space, verifying and expanding the currently poor archives of archaeological sightings. Afterwards, more detailed techniques, such as LiDAR and geophysics, could be employed to produce spatial datasets. These rival the accuracy of excavation maps whilst operating on extensive scales. Most impor- tantly, it could change the general tendency of archaeological research on space in the Americas that focused almost exclusively on datasets of elite architecture, obstructing a grasp of the full complexity of any indigenous society. The commonality between these two interests is found in their spatiality, though operating on different levels of detail. The primary source of information produced by prospection techniques is of a spatial nature, and so a theme started to develop. Despite my eagerness to get my hands dirty, even plans limited to the site of Quelepa proved perhaps overambitious for this thesis. In further exploring the Lenca culture I came across Andrea Gerstle’s (1988) PhD-research on Copán. Gerstle’s focus on the characterisation of its built en- vironment to ascribe compounds to certain socio-cultural groups foreign to the Maya administration (Gerstle 1988) opened my eyes to the possibility of combining my
- 23. Introduction 5 three main interests from a theoretical angle. This led to a rather sudden interest in theoretical advancements made in social geography. After all, this discipline explicitly featured all things spatial, informed by social theories. This consolidated especially when geography was tipped-off again as a promising source of inspiration in meetings with Rosemary Joyce and John Bintliff. Despite Gerstle’s (1988) interesting line of reasoning she eventually based almost all social ascriptions on the basis of ceramic typologies. Similarly, her view of architectural traits at Copán was rather static also. Instead of using social theories to study spatial patterning, archaeology appeared to have its mind set on statistical pattern analysis, leaving social inference mostly to specific stylistic traits. Societies are thus reduced to mathematical formulas and hierarchical classifications. This feels as if the socio-cultural interests of archaeology are mainly limited to the most voluntary, arbitrary and changeable stylistic aspects of material remains. In addi- tion to the inductive and reductionist tradition of designating culture areas, restricting interpretive research by not taking into account the past societies inhabiting them, there appears to be no solid ground for a social theoretical vantage point. Despite repetitive postprocessual attempts to explore other approaches to social, cultural and perceptive inquiries with various contextualisations allowing for individualism, archae- ology seems inadequately equipped to address big questions on the fundamental as- pects of developing societies. Archaeology makes little use of its disciplinary abilities. The most important contribution to such grand themes was the postprocessualist en- dowment of discourse with everyday life. Since archaeology’s material records are basically comprised of usually measurable spatial and temporal properties (although it is recognised that all human production to various extents is a social affair), I think it will be helpful to attempt to formulate a truly social theory informing and perhaps changing its persisting current empiricist meth- odologies. This should avoid the obvious pitfalls marked by postpressualism. Change, as the most meaningful component of continuity, needs to be made intelligible. The most readily available way to do this would be to focus on performed processes, i.e. social processes. Development and process are also part and parcel of evolutionary approaches. The increased interest in biology, lateral to the approaches resulting from interpretive postprocessualism, thrives for obvious reasons in (fields of prehistoric) ar- chaeology. However, Darwinian models of evolution often prove inadequate for the explanation of the variability in social expressions as well. Evolutionary thought stood at the cradle of the archaeological discipline, but early social adaptations have led to prejudicial political practices and consequentially fell from grace in archaeology, although their generalities still pervade archaeological discourse. The study of proc- ess was, of course, one of the main interests of processual practices following the New Archaeology movement of the 1970s. Reacting against previous traditions and
- 24. Built Environments, Constructed Societies 6 inspired by the natural sciences, at the time it was not realised that their practice let earlier reductionist and classificatory methods prevail. Next to the use of biology, now archaeological research focusing on process is rather scattered and narrowly defined. If a return to social processes is desired, I must take care not to be mistakenly cat- egorised as a newborn processualist. Therefore, when applicable, I choose to use the word processive rather than processual here. Some initial investigations of theoretical literature on the humanisation of space brought me to anthropological interests in proxemics and associated embodied space. There, certain social geographical theories were mentioned. Upon reading, I strongly felt that such theories do not only incorpo- rate everyday life, they put individuals to operate social processes in order to address cultural and historical questions on the regions and geographies these individuals both produced and inhabited. Moreover, I believe the way individuals are treated, takes in the full complexity of the processes that generate and meaningfully inform spatial da- tasets. Such datasets will be much like the ones we are able to produce in archaeology, especially taking into account the progressing opportunities offered by prospectional techniques. Rather than starting from reductionist classifications or hierarchies, ge- ography appears to concentrate on the fundamental dealings of humans with space. What archaeology uncovers, are the results of its materialised transformation. So my mind was set on trying to establish the potential of such social geographical theories to inform our spatial records, and interpretively enable and reinstate the central big issue of developing societies. Archaeology should become better prepared to make assertions on socio-spatial identities. Content-wise The well informed reader will probably know that the disciplines of archaeology and geography have had a lot in common in the past. In fact, it is remarkable how simi- lar the development of geography and archaeology was up to the present. After the emergence of postprocessualism primarily some phenomenological geography was imported. In the USA this occurred often through anthropology, where the meaning of place became a main concern. Specifically in England the New Cultural Geography of Dennis Cosgrove e.a. also was occasionally adopted, informing the concept of place in archaeology. Less specified, it could be suggested that archaeology almost lost sight of geography in favour of more particularist approaches. Before exploring the possible potential of other perspectives developed by geog- raphy, the difference that grew between the disciplines needs to be understood. In spite of their comparable histories, geography never structurally noticed archaeology. Yet, more importantly, the question of why archaeology came to be selective in its interest towards its significant other arises. In the second chapter of this thesis, a short
- 25. Other documents randomly have different content
- 26. Why boast we, Glaucus! our extended reign, Where Xanthus' streams enrich the Lycian plain; Our num'rous herds that range each fruitful field, And hills where vines their purple harvest yield; Our foaming bowls with gen'rous nectar crowned, Our feasts enhanced with music's sprightly sound; Why on those shores are we with joy surveyed, Admired as heroes, and as gods obeyed; Unless great acts superior merit prove, And vindicate the bounteous pow'rs above? 'Tis ours, the dignity they give, to grace; The first in valour, as the first in place: That while with wond'ring eyes our martial bands Behold our deeds transcending our commands, Such, they may cry, deserve the sov'reign state, Whom those that envy, dare not imitate. Could all our care elude the greedy grave, Which claims no less the fearful than the brave, For lust of fame I should not vainly dare In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war. But since, alas! ignoble age must come, Disease, and death's inexorable doom; The life which others pay, let us bestow, And give to fame what we to nature owe; Brave though we fall, and honoured if we live, Or let us glory gain, or glory give.—Warburton. The passage quoted by Warburton is from Pope's own translation of the Episode of Sarpedon, which appeared in Dryden's Miscellany, in 1710. [495] Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel: The young men's vision, and the old men's dream.—Wakefield. [496] Denham, in his version of the speech of Homer parodied by our poet: Why all the tributes land and sea affords?— As gods behold us, and as gods adore.—Wakefield. [497] Gay, in the Toilette: Nor shall side-boxes watch my restless eyes, And, as they catch the glance in rows arise With humble bows; nor white-gloved beaux approach In crowds behind to guard me to my coach.—Wakefield. [498] The ladies at this time always sat in the front, the gentlemen in the side-boxes.—Nichols.
- 27. In Steele's Theatre, No. 3, January 9, 1720, his "representatives of a British audience" are "three of the fair sex for the front boxes, two gentlemen of wit and pleasure for the side-boxes, and three substantial citizens for the pit." "The virgin ladies," he said, in the Guardian, No. 29, April 14, 1713, "usually dispose themselves in the front of the boxes, the young married women compose the second row, while the rear is generally made up of mothers of long standing, undesigning maids, and contented widows."—Cunningham. [499] It is a verse frequently repeated in Homer after any speech, ——So spoke—and all the heroes applauded.—Pope. [500] From hence the first edition goes on to the conclusion, except a very few short insertions added to keep the machinery in view to the end of the poem.—Pope. [501] Æneid. v. 140: ———ferit æthera clamor. Their shouting strikes the skies.—Wakefield. [502] Homer, Il. xx.—Pope. [503] This verse is an improvement on the original, Æneid. viii. 246: ———trebidentque immisse lumine manes. And the ghosts tremble at intruding light.—Wakefield. The concluding line of the paragraph is from Addison's translation of a passage in Silius Italicus: Who pale with fear the rending earth survey And startle at the sudden flash of day. There is more of bathos than of humour from ver. 43 to ver. 52. The exaggeration is carried so far that even the similitude of caricature is lost. [504] These four lines added, for the reason before mentioned.—Pope. [505] Minerva in like manner, during the battle of Ulysses with the suitors in the Odyssey, perches on a beam of the roof to behold it.—Pope. [506] Like the heroes in Homer when they are spectators of a combat.— Warton. [507] This idea is borrowed from a couplet in the Duke of Buckingham's Essay on Poetry where he ridicules the poetical dialogues of the dramatis personæ in the reign of Charles II.
- 28. Or else like bells, eternally they chime They sigh in simile, and die in rhyme. [508] Wakefield quotes passages from Sir Philip Sidney, Drummond, and Milton, in which the phrase "living death" occurs. [509] The words of a song in the Opera of Camilla.—Pope. "Here," said Dennis, speaking of the death of the beau and witling, "we have a real combat, and a metaphorical dying," and he did the lines no injustice when he added that they were but a "miserable pleasantry." [510] Sic ubi fata vocant, udis abjectus in herbis, Ad vada Mæandri concinit albus olor. Ov. Ep.—Pope. [511] Vid. Homer, Il. viii. and Virg. Æn. xii.—Pope. The passage in Homer to which the poet refers is where Jupiter, before the conflict between Hector and Achilles, weighs the issue in a pair of scales. [512] These two lines added for the above reason.—Pope. [513] In imitation of the progress of Agamemnon's sceptre in Homer, Il. ii. —Pope. [514] Pins to adorn the hair were then called bodkins, and Sir George Etherege, in Tonson's Second Miscellany, traces the genealogy of some jewels through the successive stages of the ornament of a cap, the handle of a fan, and ear-rings, till they became, like the gold seal rings, in the Rape of the Lock, A diamond bodkin in each tress, The badges of her nobleness, For every stone, as well as she, Can boast an ancient pedigree. [515] "Who," asked Dennis, "ever heard of a dead man that burnt in Cupid's flames?" Pope had originally written, And still burn on, in Cupid's flames, alive. [516] Dryden's Alexander's Feast: A present deity! they shout around: A present deity! the vaulted roofs rebound.—Steevens.
- 29. [517] Vide Ariosto, Canto xxxiv.—Pope. From the catalogue which follows it appears that, by "all things lost on earth," Pope meant only such things as, in his opinion, were hypocritical, foolish, and frivolous. These mounted to the lunar sphere when they had finished their course here below,—a career very short in instances like the "tears of heirs," and, perhaps, very long in instances like the butterflies preserved in the cabinets of collectors. [518] Apparently Pope had the erroneous idea that distinguished soldiers were men of dull and ponderous minds. [519] The alms would not be "lost on earth," however unprofitable they might be to the alms-givers, from whom they had been extorted by fear instead of proceeding from a benevolent disposition. [520] Dryden's Œdipus, act 2: The smiles of courtiers, and the harlot's tears, The tradesman's oaths, and mourning of an heir, Are truths, to what priests tell.—Holt White. [521] Denham, in Cooper's Hill, gave him a hint: their airy shape All but a quick poetic sight escape.—Wakefield. [522] Flammiferumque trahens spatioso limite crinem Stella micat. Ovid.—Pope. Dryden, Æneis, v. 1092: Descends, and draws behind a trail of light.—Wakefield. [523] These two lines added, for the same reason, to keep in view the machinery of the poem.—Pope. Dryden's Æneis, v. 691: And as it flew A train of following flames ascending drew; Kindling they mount, and mark the shiny way Across the skies, as falling meteors play. [524] The promenades in the Mall lasted till the middle of the reign of George III., and it would appear from this line that they were enlivened by music.—Croker.
- 30. [525] Rosamond's lake was a small oblong piece of water near the Pimlico Gate of St. James's Park. When it was done away with, about the middle of the last century, the public, unwilling to lose the romantic name, transferred it to the dirty pond in the Green Park, which has, in its turn, been filled up.—Croker. [526] John Partridge was a ridiculous stargazer, who in his almanacks every year never failed to predict the downfall of the Pope, and the King of France, then at war with the English.—Pope. He had been made the subject of ridicule by Swift, Steele, Addison and others.—Croker.
- 31. [527] Milton, Par. Lost, v. ver. 261, calls the telescope "the glass of Galileo," who first employed it to observe the heavens. [528] Phebe in As You Like It, Act iii. Sc. 5, says to her despised and despairing lover, Thou tell'st me there is murder in mine eye. [529] The compliment was meant to be serious, but is marred by its extravagance. "Millions" is too hyperbolical. [530] Spenser in his 75th Sonnet: Not so, quoth I: let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: My verse your virtues rare shall eternise, And in the heavens write your glorious name. And Cowley, in his imitation of Horace, Ode iv. 2: He bids him live and grow in fame Among the stars he sticks his name.—Wakefield. [531] Wakefield says "there is an affectation and ambiguity in this account which he does not comprehend." The uncertainty with which Pope speaks, refers to his doubt of the identity of the lady celebrated by the duke. Enough of "ambiguity and affectation" remains, which would have been no mystery to Wakefield if he had been aware that Pope's object was to deceive. [532] The Memoirs by Ayre appeared in 1745, without the name of the publisher. In a pamphlet which was printed the same year, under the title of Remarks on Squire Ayre's Memoirs, it is stated that the work was put together, and published by Curll, who being notorious for the manufacture of vapid, lying biographies, suppressed a name which would have been fatal to the sale of his trash. [533] Warton's Essay, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 329. [534] Pope's Correspondence, ed. Elwin, vol. i., pp. 144, 158-160, 162. [535] "Pray in your next," writes Caryll to Pope, July 16, 1717, "tell me who was the unfortunate lady you address a copy of verses to. I think you once gave me her history, but it is now quite out of my head." Pope, in his reply does not allude to the subject, and Caryll says to him on Aug. 18, "You answer not my question who the unfortunate lady was that you inscribe a copy of verses to in your book. I long to be re-told her story, for
- 32. I believe you already told me formerly; but I shall refer that, and a thousand other things more, to chat over at our next meeting, which I hope draws near." This letter was answered by Pope on Aug. 22, but there is still not a word on the unfortunate lady. [536] Dr. Morell, in his notes to Seneca's Epistles, says, "I remember when I was a boy at Eton that an old almswoman, Mrs. Pain, having been cut down alive, gave this reason for hanging herself, that she was afraid of dying." To rush into death from the fear of death is not uncommon, and shows how far suicide is from being an evidence of superior courage. Acute philosophers have not always reasoned better than Pope. M. Lerminier, a French writer of repute, eulogises, in his Philosophie du Droit, the suicide of Cato for "a pure and majestic act." "In the Memoirs of the Emperor's Valet," he says in the next sentence, "we learn that Napoleon tried to destroy himself at Fontainebleau in 1814. He took poison; remedies were applied, and he recovered. He was not to die thus. Would you wish that Napoleon's end should have been that of an amorous sub- lieutenant, or a ruined banker?" But this was the veritable end of Cato. He died the death of "amorous sub-lieutenants and ruined bankers." The question of M. Lerminier revealed his consciousness that suicide was not heroism, or, in justification of the attempt of the Emperor, he would have asked, "Would you not have wished that Napoleon's end should have been the pure and majestic end of Cato?" [537] Comus, ver. 205. [538] I Viaggi di Marco Polo, ed. Pasini, 1847, p. 45. [539] A belief akin to that which grew up in deserts prevailed in England. Hamlet doubts whether his father's ghost is a "spirit of health or goblin damned," and Horatio attempts to dissuade Hamlet from following it lest it should prove to be an impostor. A "goblin damned" may have put on the "fair and warlike form" of the King of Denmark, may "tempt" Hamlet to the "dreadful summit of the cliff," may "there assume some other horrible form which might draw him into madness," and impel him to commit suicide. The radical idea is the same in Shakespeare and Marco Polo. Fiends personate the relations or friends of an intended victim that they may decoy him to his death. [540] And beck'ning woos me, from the fatal tree To pluck a garland for herself or me. [541] Elements of Criticism, 6th ed., vol. i. p. 477.
- 33. [542] Ben Jonson's Elegy on the Marchioness of Winchester: What gentle ghost besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew? And beck'ning woos me?—Warton. [543] Johnson gives two meanings for "to gore,"—"to stab," "to pierce;" and "to pierce with a horn." The second, or special signification, has since superseded the general sense in popular usage, though, as with many other words, a sense which has become obsolete in conversation is occasionally revived in books. Formerly, the general sense of "to pierce," without reference to the mode of piercing, was the predominant meaning, and Milton, Par. Lost, vi. 386, employed the word to denote the gaps made in the ranks of a defeated army: the battle swerved With many an inroad gored. [544] The third Elegy of Crashaw: And I, what is my crime, I cannot tell, Unless it be a crime t' have loved too well.—Steevens. [545] Shakespeare, Henry VIII. Act iii. Sc. 2: Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition; By that sin fell the angels. [546] Dryden, To the Duchess of Ormond: And where imprisoned in so sweet a cage A soul might well be pleased to pass an age. [547] Cowley has a couplet not unlike his, Davideis, i. 80: Where their vast court the mother-waters keep, And undisturbed by moons in silence sleep.—Wakefield. [548] Duke's translation of Juvenal, Sat. iv.: Without one virtue to redeem his fame.—Wakefield. [549] Dryden, Ovid's Amor. ii. 19: But thou dull husband of a wife too fair.—Wakefield. [550] Lord Kames objects to the false antithesis between cold flesh and mental warmth. [551] Milton, Comus, ver. 753:
- 34. Love-darting eyes or tresses like the morn.—Wakefield. [552] Rolling eyes are contrary to the English idea of feminine refinement. Pope admired them. He had previously said in the Rape of the Lock, Cant. v. 33, Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll. [553] Wakefield mentions that the phrase "unknowing how to yield" is used by Dryden, Æneis, xi. 472, and that the entire couplet is almost identical with two passages in Pope's own translation of the Iliad. The first is at Book ix. 749. The second is at Book xxii. 447, and runs thus: The furies that relentless breast have steeled And cursed thee with a heart that cannot yield. [554] From a fragment of Sir Edward Hungerford, according to a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1764: The soul by pure religion taught to glow At others' good, or melt at others' woe.—Wakefield. [555] Dryden, Æneis, ix. 647, where the mother of Euryalus laments her son, whose body remains with the enemy: Nor was I near to close his dying eyes, To wash his wounds, to weep his obsequies.—Wakefield. The cruelties of the lady's relations, the desolation of the family, the being deprived of the rights of sepulture, the circumstance of dying in a country remote from her relations, are all touched with great tenderness and pathos, particularly the four lines from the 51st, "By foreign hands," &c.— Warton. [556] The anonymous translator of Ariadne to Theseus: Poor Ariadne! thou must perish here, Breathe out thy soul in strange and hated air, Nor see thy pitying mother shed one tear; Want a kind hand, which thy fixed eyes may close, And thy stiff limbs may decently compose. So Gay in his Dione, Act ii. Sc. 1: What pious care my ghastful lid shall close? What decent hand my frozen limbs compose.—Wakefield. De Quincey assumes that the term "decent limbs" refers to the lady's shape, and he remarks that the language "does not imply much
- 35. enthusiasm of praise." Pope had perhaps the same idea in his mind as the translator he imitated, and "thy decent limbs were composed" may be put inaccurately for "thy limbs were composed decently." [557] The poet in the previous couplet has employed the word "mourn" to signify genuine regret. In this verse it is put for the act of wearing mourning,—the appearing in the "sable weeds," which are, "the mockery of woe" when the sorrow is not real. [558] Dryden, Virg. Ecl. x. 51: How light would lie the turf upon my breast. A. Philips in his third Pastoral: The flow'ry turf lie light upon thy breast. This thought was common with the ancients.—Wakefield. [559] Tasso's description of an angel in the translation of Fairfax, i. 14: Of silver wings he took a shining pair Fringed with gold.—Wakefield. [560] The expression has reference to ver. 61. "No sacred earth allowed her room," but her remains have "made sacred" the common earth in which she was buried. [561] Such a poem as Pope's Elegy, deeply serious and pathetic, rejects with disdain all fiction. Upon that account the passage from ver. 59 to ver. 68 deserves no quarter; for it is not the language of the heart, but of the imagination indulging its flights at ease, and by that means is eminently discordant with the subject. It would be a still more severe censure if it should be ascribed to imitation, copying indiscreetly what has been said by others.—Lord Kames. The ghost of the injured person appears to excite the poet to revenge her wrongs. He describes her character, execrates the author of her misfortunes, expatiates on the severity of her fate, the rites of sepulture denied her in a foreign land. Then follows, "What though no weeping," &c. Can anything be more naturally pathetic? Yet the critic tells us he can give no quarter to this part of the poem. Well might our poet's last wish be to commit his writings to the candour of a sensible and reflecting judge, rather than to the malice of every short-sighted and malevolent critic.—Warburton.
- 36. [562] When Pope describes the retribution which is to fall upon the imperious relatives of the unfortunate lady, he says, Thus unlamented pass the proud away; and it is to these same relations, whose pride was their vice, that he reverts in the line, 'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be. The persecutors who have hunted you into the grave, shall one day share your fate. [563] R. Herrick, in a Meditation for his Mistress: You are the queen all flow'rs among, But die you must, fair maid, ere long, As he, the maker of this song.—Wakefield. [564] Dean Milman, in his History of Latin Christianity, says that Heloisa "was distinguished for her surpassing beauty." There is no authority for this assertion, which is one of the embellishments of later romancers. [565] "She knew Latin," says M. Rémusat, "and wrote it with facility and talent. As to Greek and Hebrew I can hardly believe that she was acquainted with more than the alphabet, and a few words which were quoted habitually in theology or in philosophy." The treatises of Abelard prove that he could read neither Greek nor Hebrew, and it is not likely that Heloisa was more learned than her master. Latin was the literary language of the day. [566] The sentiments which Warton imagined to be borrowed from Madame Guion and Fenelon were taken from the English translation of the Letters of Heloisa and Abelard. Kindred thoughts may be found in the works of almost any devotional writer. [567] M. Rémusat, who accepts the letters without misgiving, acknowledges that the form of the Historia Calamitatum "appears to be an artificial frame to the picture." He assumes that the avowed purpose is a pretext, and that the repentant philosopher commences his narrative with a misstatement. The fiction which M. Rémusat is obliged to admit, does not ward off the strongest objection to the genuineness of the letters, and is the hypothesis least favourable to the reputation of Abelard; for his treachery to Heloisa is immensely aggravated by the admission that his narrative was meant for the public, and not for the eye alone of a friend.
- 37. [568] Essai Historique sur Abailard et Heloise, ed. 1861, p. xxvi. [569] Essai Historique, p. lxiii. [570] As You Like It, Act iv. sc. 3. [571] History of Latin Christianity, vol. iii. p. 363. [572] Philosophie du Moyen Age, ed. 1856, p. 3. [573] Vie d'Abelard, Tome 1. p. 262. [574] Hist. de France, tom. iii. 317. [575] Horne's Works, vol. i. p. 248. [576] Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 33. Fox, the statesman, was one of those who thought "Eloisa much greater in her letters than Pope had made her." [577] Mason's Life of Whitehead, p. 35. [578] The letter which Abelard addressed to his friend, and which had fallen into the hands of Eloisa. [579] Dryden's Don Sebastian: And when I say Sebastian, dear Sebastian! I kiss the name I speak.—Steevens. [580] That is, a lively representation of his person was retained in her mind. So Drayton where he speaks of his departed love: Clear Ankor, on whose silver-sanded shore My soul-shrined saint, my fair idea lies.—Wakefield. [581] Claudian, De Nupt. Honor. et Mar. ver. 9: Nomenque beatum Injussæ scripsere manus.—Wakefield. [582] Drayton's Heroical Epistle of Rosamond to Henry: My hapless name with Henry's name I found— Then do I strive to wash it out with tears, But then the same more evident appears.—Holt White. [583] Some of these circumstances have perhaps a little impropriety when introduced into a place so lately founded as was the Paraclete; but are so well imagined and so highly painted, that they demand excuse.—Warton.
- 38. [584] This is borrowed from Milton's Comus, ver. 428: By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades.—Wakefield. [585] A suspected poem of the Duke of Wharton on the Fear of Death: Where feeble tapers shed a gloomy ray And statues pity feign; Where pale-eyed griefs their wasting vigils keep.—Wakefield. [586] A puerile conceit from the dew which runs down stone and metals in damp weather.—Wakefield. A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for October, 1836, quotes a parallel couplet from a poem by the Duke of Wharton: Where kneeling statues constant vigils keep, And round the tombs the marble cherubs weep. [587] He followed Milton in the Penseroso: Forget thyself to marble.—Wakefield. Heloisa to Abelard: "O vows! O convent! I have not lost my humanity under your inexorable discipline. You have not made me marble by changing my habit." With the exception of a passage or two quoted by Wakefield, all the extracts in the notes are from Pope's chief text-book, the English work of Hughes, which is very unfaithful to the Latin original. [588] In every edition till that of Warburton the reading was, Heav'n claims me all in vain while he has part. [589] Heloisa to Abelard: "By that melancholy relation to your friend you have awakened all my sorrows." [590] Dryden's Æneis, v. 64: A day for ever sad, for ever dear.—Wakefield. [591] Heloisa to Abelard: "Shall my Abelard be never mentioned without tears? Shall the dear name be never spoken but with sighs?" [592] Heloisa to Abelard: "I met with my name a hundred times. I never saw it without fear; some heavy calamity always followed it. I saw yours too equally unhappy." [593] Pomfret in his Vision:
- 39. For sure that flame is kindled from below Which breeds such sad variety of woe.—Wakefield. Steevens quotes from Dryden's State of Innocence the expression "sad variety of hell," and the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes from Yalden's Force of Jealousy the expression "a large variety of woe." [594] Dryden, Palamon and Arcite: Now warm in love, now with'ring in the grave.—Wakefield. [595] Fame is not a passion.—Warton. Ambition is the passion, and fame is the object of the passion. [596] Heloisa to Abelard: "Let me have a faithful account of all that concerns you. I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sorrows less." [597] Heloisa to Abelard: "We may write to each other. Let us not lose through negligence the only happiness which is left us, and the only one perhaps which the malice of our enemies can never ravish from us." [598] Heloisa to Abelard: "Tell me not by way of excuse you will spare our tears; the tears of women shut up in a melancholy place, and devoted to penitence, are not to be spared." [599] Denham of Prudence: To live and die is all we have to do.—Wakefield. Prior's Celia to Damon: And these poor eyes No longer shall their little lustre keep, And only be of use to read and weep. [600] Heloisa to Abelard: "Be not then unkind, nor deny me that little relief. All sorrows divided are made lighter." [601] Heloisa to Abelard: "Letters were first invented for comforting such solitary wretches as myself." [602] Heloisa to Abelard: "What cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions; they can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present; they have all the softness and delicacy of speech, and sometimes a boldness of expression even beyond it."
- 40. [603] Otway's translation of Phædra to Hippolytus: Thus secrets safe to farthest shores may move: By letters foes converse, and learn to love.—Wakefield. [604] This is the most exquisite description of the first commencement of passion that our language, or perhaps any other, affords.—Bowles. [605] Prior's Celia to Damon: In vain I strove to check my growing flame, Or shelter passion under friendship's name. [606] The Divinity himself. Dryden, in his 12th Elegy: So faultless was the frame, as if the whole Had been an emanation of the soul.—Wakefield. [607] Heloisa to Abelard: "That life in your eyes which so admirably expressed the vivacity of your mind; your conversation, which gave everything you spoke such an agreeable and insinuating turn; in short, everything spoke for you." [608] She says herself, "You had, I confess, two qualities in great perfection with which you could instantly captivate the heart of any woman,—a graceful manner of reading and singing." She mentions in another place also the excellence of his singing.—Wakefield. [609] He was her preceptor in philosophy and divinity.—Pope. Dryden, Epistle, 14: The fair themselves go mended from thy hand.—Wakefield. [610] Dryden's Œdipus, end of Act iii.: And backward trod the paths I sought to shun. [611] Thy holy precepts and the sanctity of thy character had made me conceive of thee as of a being more venerable than man, and approaching the nature of superior existences. But thy personal allurements soon inspired those tender feelings which gradually conducted me from a veneration of the angel to a less pure and dignified sensation—love for the man.—Wakefield. [612] Dryden, Ovid's Met. x.: And own no laws but those which love ordains.—Wakefield.
- 41. Heloisa to Abelard: "The bonds of matrimony, however honourable, still bear with them a necessary engagement, and I was very unwilling to be necessitated to love always a man who perhaps would not always love me." [613] Love will not be confined by maisterie: When maisterie comes, the lord of Love anon Flutters his wings, and forthwith is he gone. Chaucer.—Pope. Hudibras, Part iii. Cant. i. 553: Love that's too generous to abide To be against its nature tied, Disdains against its will to stay, But struggles out and flies away.—Wakefield. Dryden's Aurengezebe: 'Tis true of marriage bands I'm weary grown, Love scorns all ties but those that are his own.—Steevens. The passage cited by Pope from Chaucer is in the Franklin's Tale. Spenser copied and altered the lines, which led Wakefield to imagine that Pope had committed the double error of falsely imputing them to Chaucer, and quoting them incorrectly. [614] Heloisa to Abelard: "It is not love but the desire of riches and honour which makes women run into the embraces of an indolent husband: ambition, not affection, forms such marriages. I believe indeed they may be followed with some honours and advantages, but I can never think that this is the way to enjoy the pleasures of an affectionate union." [615] Heloisa to Abelard: "This restless tormenting passion"—ambition —"punishes them for aiming at other advantages by love than love itself." [616] Heloisa to Abelard: "How often I have made protestations that it was infinitely preferable to me to live with Abelard as his mistress than with any other as empress of the world, and that I was more happy in obeying you than I should have been in lawfully captivating the lord of the universe." [617] Heloisa to Abelard: "Though I knew that the name of wife was honourable in the world, and holy in religion, yet the name of your mistress had greater charms because it was more free. I despised the name of wife that I might live happy with that of mistress."
- 42. [618] Heloisa to Abelard: "We are called your sisters, and if it were possible to think of any expressions which would signify a dearer relation we would use them." [619] Denham, Cooper's Hill: Happy when both to the same centre move, When kings give liberty, and subjects love.—Cunningham. [620] Heloisa to Abelard: "If there is anything which may properly be called happiness here below, I am persuaded it is in the union of two persons who love each other with perfect liberty, who are united by a secret inclination, and satisfied with each other's merit. Their hearts are full, and leave no vacancy for any other passion." [621] Heloisa to Abelard: "If I could believe you as truly persuaded of my merit as I am of yours, I might say there has been a time when we were such a pair." [622] Mrs. Rowe in her Elegy: A dying lover pale and gasping lies.— Wakefield. [623] Heloisa to Abelard: "Where was I? where was your Heloise then? What joy should I have had in defending my lover. I would have guarded you from violence, though at the expense of my life; my cries and shrieks alone would have stopped the hand." [624] For "stroke" Pope, in all editions till that of 1736, read "hand," the word in the translation. He had used "hand" in the rhyme of the previous couplet, and it was probably to avoid the repetition that he made the alteration. [625] Careless readers may misapprehend the sense. "Pain" here means punishment, pœna.—Holt White. Like a verse of Drummond's: The grief was common, common were the cries.—Wakefield. Heloisa to Abelard: "You alone expiated the crime common to us both. You only were punished though both of us were guilty." [626] Heloisa to Abelard: "Oh whither does the excess of passion hurry me! Here love is shocked, and modesty joined with despair deprive me of speech."
- 43. [627] A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes Settle's Empress of Morocco: Muly Hamet.—Speak. Empress.—Let my tears and blushes speak the rest. [628] The altar of Paraclete, says Mr. Berrington, did not then exist. They were not professed at the same time or place; one was at Argenteuil, the other at St. Denys.—-Warton. [629] Abelard to Heloisa: "I accompanied you with terror to the foot of the altar, and while you stretched out your hand to touch the sacred cloth, I heard you pronounce distinctly those fatal words which for ever separated you from all men." [630] Her kissing the veil with "cold lips" strongly marks her want of that fervent zeal and devotion which should influence those votaries who renounce the world. The presages, likewise, which attended the rites are finely imagined,—the trembling of the shrines, and the pallid hue of the lamps as if they were conscious of the reluctant sacrifice she was making. —Ruffhead. [631] Prior, in Henry and Emma, has a verse of similar pauses, and similar phraseology: Thy lips all trembling, and thy cheeks all pale.—Wakefield. [632] Abelard to Heloisa: "I saw your eyes when you spoke your last farewell fixed upon the cross." Heloisa to Abelard: "It was your command only, and not a sincere vocation, as is imagined, that shut me up in these cloisters." The two passages combined suggested the line in the text. [633] Heloisa to Abelard: "You may see me, hear my sighs, and be a witness of all my sorrows, without incurring any danger, since you can only relieve me with tears and words." [634] Roscoe remarks that the lines which follow cannot be justified by anything in the letters of Eloisa. Sentiments equally gross are however expressed both in the original Latin and in the adulterated translation which was Pope's authority. [635] Concannen's Match at Football, Canto iii.: And drank in poison from her lovely eye. Creech, at the beginning of his Lucretius:
- 44. Where on thy bosom he supinely lies, And greedily drinks love at both his eyes.—Wakefield. Smith's Phædra and Hippolytus, Act i.: Drank gorging in the dear delicious poison.—Steevens. [636] "If thou canst forget me, think at least upon thy flock," says Wakefield, in explanation of the train of thought; and he adds a passage from a letter of Eloisa in which she terms the monastery Abelard's "new plantation," and assures him that frequent watering is essential to the tender plants. [637] Heloisa to Abelard: "The innocent sheep, tender as they are, would yet follow you through deserts and mountains." [638] He founded the monastery.—Pope. Heloisa to Abelard: "You only are the founder of this house. You by inhabiting here have given fame and sanctity to a place known before only for robbers and murderers." [639] So Dryden says of Absalom, And Paradise was opened in his face. The original of the image in the text is in Isaiah li. 3: He will make her wilderness like Eden, And her desert like the garden of Jehovah. Whence Milton derived it, Par. Reg. i. 7: And Eden raised in the waste wilderness.—Wakefield. [640] The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes Boileau, Le Moine: Là les salons sont peints, les meubles sont dorés Des larmes et du sang des pauvres devorés. [641] Heloisa to Abelard: "These cloisters owe nothing to public charities; our walls were not raised by the usury of publicans, nor their foundations laid on base extortion. The God whom we serve sees nothing but innocent riches, and harmless votaries whom you have placed here." [642] There were no benefactors whose praises were celebrated in the services, but the building was vocal only with the praise of the Deity. [643] Our author imitates Milton:
- 45. And storied windows richly dight Casting a dim religious light.—Wakefield. [644] Dryden had said of his Good Parson: His eyes diffused a venerable grace.—Wakefield. [645] Mrs. Rowe on the Creation: And kindling glories brighten all the skies.—Wakefield. [646] By pretending that she desires Abelard to visit the Paraclete in obedience to the call of her sister nuns. [647] Heloisa to Abelard: "But why should I entreat you in the name of your children? Is it possible I should fear obtaining anything of you when I ask in my own name? And must I use any other prayers than my own to prevail upon you?" [648] From the superscription of Heloisa's letter to Abelard: "To her lord, her father, her husband, her brother; his servant, his child, his wife, his sister, and to express all that is humble, respectful, and loving to her Abelard, Heloisa writes this." [649] Our poet is indebted to a translation of the Virgilian cento of Ausonius in Dryden's Miscellanies, vi. p. 143: My love, my life, And every tender name in one, my wife.—Wakefield. [650] Mr. Mills, a clergyman, who visited the Paraclete about the year 1765, says, "Mr. Pope's description is ideal. I saw neither rocks, nor pines, nor was it a kind of ground which ever seemed to encourage such objects." [651] Addison's translation of book iii, of the Æneis: The hollow murmurs of the winds that blow. [652] The little river Ardusson glittered along the valley of the Paraclete.— Mills. [653] Philips, in his fourth Pastoral: Nor dropping waters which from rocks distil, And welly grots with tinkling echoes fill.—Wakefield. [654] Milton's Penseroso:
- 46. When the gust hath blown his fill Ending on the rustling leaves.—Wakefield. [655] Dryden, Virg. Geo. iv. 432: When western winds on curling waters play. [656] Dryden, Virg. Æn. iii. 575: Most upbraid The madness of the visionary maid.—Wakefield. [657] Milton's Penseroso: To arched walks of twilight groves.—Wakefield. [658] Waller's version of Æneid iv.: A death-like quiet, and deep silence fell. Dryden's Astræa Redux: A dreadful quiet felt.—Wakefield. Charles Bainbrigg on the death of Edward King: Abyssum Terribilis requies et vasta silentia cingant.—Steevens. [659] Fenton in his version of Sappho to Phaon: With him the caves were cool, the grove was green, But now his absence withers all the scene.—Wakefield. [660] Dryden's Theodore and Honoria: With deeper brown the grove was overspread.—Steevens. Dryden, Æn. vii. 40: The Trojan from the main beheld a wood, Which thick with shades and a brown horror stood.—Wakefield. [661] In allusion to this sacrifice of herself at his will she says in her first letter: "You are of all mankind most abundantly indebted to me; and particularly for that proof of absolute submission to your commands in thus destroying myself at your injunction."—Wakefield. [662] Heloisa to Abelard: "Death only can make me leave the place where you have fixed me, and then too my ashes shall rest there, and wait for yours."
- 47. [663] Abelard to Heloisa: "I hope you will be contented when you have finished this mortal life to be buried near me. Your cold ashes need then fear nothing." [664] Heloisa to Abelard: "Among those who are wedded to God I serve a man. What a prodigy am I! Enlighten me, O Lord! Does thy grace or my despair draw these words from me?" [665] Heloisa to Abelard: "I am sensible I am in the temple of chastity only with the ashes of that fire which has consumed us." [666] This couplet, and its wretched rhymes, seem derived from an elegy of Walsh in Dryden's Miscellanies: I know I ought to hate you for the fault; But oh! I cannot do the thing I ought.—Wakefield. [667] Heloisa to Abelard: "I am here a sinner, but one, who far from weeping for her sins, weeps only for her lover; far from abhorring her crimes endeavours only to add to them, and then who pleases herself continually with the remembrance of past actions when it is impossible to renew them." And again: "I, who have experienced so many pleasures in loving you feel, in spite of myself, that I cannot repent of them, nor forbear enjoying them over again as much as is possible by recollecting them in my memory." Abelard, in the translation of the letters, expresses the same sentiment: "Love still preserves its dominion in my fancy, and entertains itself with past pleasures." [668] Abelard to Heloisa: "To forget in the case of love is the most necessary penitence, and the most difficult." [669] Dryden's Cymon and Iphigenia: Then impotent of mind, with altered sense She hugged th' offender, and forgave th' offence.—Wakefield. [670] Abelard to Heloisa: "How can I separate from the person I love the passion I must detest? Will the tears I shed be sufficient to render it odious to me? It is difficult in our sorrow to distinguish penitence from love." [671] Heloisa to Abelard: "A heart which has been so sensibly affected as mine cannot soon be indifferent. We fluctuate long between love and hatred before we can arrive at a happy tranquillity." Abelard to Heloisa: "In such different disquietudes I contradict myself; I hate you; I love you."
- 48. [672] Heloisa to Abelard: "God has a peculiar right over the hearts of great men. When he pleases to touch them he ravishes them, and lets them not speak nor breathe but for his glory." [673] Heloisa to Abelard: "Yes, Abelard, I conjure you teach me the maxims of divine love. Oh! for pity's sake help a wretch to renounce her desires, herself, and, if it be possible, even to renounce you." [674] Heloisa to Abelard: "When I shall have told you what rival hath ravished my heart from you, you will praise my inconstancy, and will pray this rival to fix it. By this you may judge that it is God alone that takes Heloise from you. What other rival could take me from you? Could you think me guilty of sacrificing the virtuous and learned Abelard to any other but God?" [675] Horace, Epist. Lib. i. xi. 9: Oblitusque meorum, obliviscendus et illis. My friends forgetting, by my friends forgot.—Wakefield. [676] Taken from Crashaw.—Pope. Wakefield gives the complete couplet from Crashaw's Description of a religious House: A hasty portion of prescribed sleep; Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep. [677] The idea of the "wings of seraphs shedding perfumes" is from Milton, Par. Lost, v. 286, where Raphael "shakes heavenly fragrance" from "his plumes," and Dryden in his Tyrannic Love, Act v., mentions the perfumes, the spousals, and the celestial music as accompaniments of the death of St. Catherine: Æthereal music did her death prepare, Like joyful sounds of spousals in the air; A radiant light did her crowned temple gild, And all the place with fragrant scents was filled; Of charming notes we heard the last rebounds, And music dying in remoter sounds. [678] Adapted from Dryden's Britannia Redivivus: As star-light is dissolved away And melts into the brightness of the day. [679] Dryden's Cinyras and Myrrha, translated from Ovid:
- 49. For guilty pleasure gives a double gust. [680] Heloisa to Abelard: "I will own to you what makes the greatest pleasure I have in my retirement. After having passed the day in thinking of you, full of the dear idea I give myself up at night to sleep. Then it is that Heloise, who dares not without trembling think of you by day, resigns herself entirely to the pleasure of hearing you, and speaking to you. I see you Abelard, and glut my eyes with the sight. Sometimes forgetting the perpetual obstacles to our desires, you press me to make you happy, and I easily yield to your transports. Sleep gives me what your enemies' rage has deprived you of, and our souls, animated with the same passion, are sensible of the same pleasure. But, oh, you delightful illusions, soft errors, how soon do you vanish away! At my awaking I open my eyes, and see no Abelard; I stretch out my arms to take hold of him, but he is not there; I call upon him, he hears me not." [681] Dryden, Æneis, iv. 677, supplied the idea: She seems, alone, To wander in her sleep through ways unknown, Guideless and dark; or in a desert plain To seek her subjects, and to seek in vain. [682] The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine quotes the same expression from Steele's Miscellanies: No more severely kind affect to put That lovely anger on. [683] Heloisa to Abelard: "You are happy, Abelard, and your misfortunes have been the occasion of your finding rest. The punishment of your body has cured the deadly wounds of your soul. I am a thousand times more to be lamented than you; I must resist those fires which love kindles in a young heart." [684] Dryden's Ovid, Met. i.: Then, with a breath, he gave the winds to blow, And bade the congregated waters flow.—Wakefield. [685] Sir William Davenant's Address to the Queen: Smooth as the face of waters first appeared, Ere tides began to strive, or winds were heard; Kind as the willing saints, and calmer far Than in their sleeps forgiven hermits are.—Wakefield.
- 50. [686] Heloisa to Abelard: "When we love pleasures we love the living and not the dead." In all editions till that of 1736 this couplet followed: Cut from the root my perished joys I see, And love's warm tide for ever stopped in thee. [687] Hudibras, Part ii. Canto i. 309: Love in your heart as idly burns As fire in antique Roman urns To warm the dead, and vainly light Those only that see nothing by 't.—Wakefield. [688] Heloisa to Abelard: "Whatever endeavours I use, on whatever side I turn me, the sweet idea still pursues me, and every object brings to my mind what I ought to forget. Even into holy places before the altar, I carry with me the memory of our guilty loves. They are my whole business." [689] Abelard to Heloisa: "In spite of severe fasts your image appears to me, and confounds all my resolutions." [690] Sedley's verses on Don Alonzo: The gentle nymph, Drops tears with every bead.—Wakefield. The force of the line is, however, in the phrase "too soft" which Pope has added. "With every bead I drop a tear of tender love instead of a tear of bitter repentance." [691] Smith's Phædra and Hippolytus, Act i.: All the idle pomp, Priests, altars, victims swam before my sight.—Steevens. [692] How finely does this glowing imagery introduce the transition, While prostrate here, &c.—Bowles. [693] The whole of this paragraph is from Abelard's letter to Heloisa: "I am a miserable sinner prostrate before my judge, and with my face pressed to the earth I mix my tears and sighs in the dust when the beams of grace and reason enlighten me. Come, see me in this posture and solicit me to love you! Come, if you think fit, and in your holy habit thrust yourself between God and me, and be a wall of separation! Come and force from me those sighs, thoughts, and vows which I owe to him only!
- 51. Assist the evil spirits and be the instrument of their malice! But rather withdraw yourself and contribute to my salvation." [694] Abelard to Heloisa: "Let me remove far from you, and obey the apostle who hath said, fly." [695] Wakefield quotes the lines of Hopkins to a lady, where, speaking of her beauties, he entreats that she will Drive 'em somewhere, as far as pole from pole; Let winds between us rage, and waters roll. [696] Abelard to Heloisa: "It will always be the highest love to show none: I here release you of all your oaths and engagements to me." [697] The combination "heavenly-fair" is also found in Sandys, Congreve, and Tickell.—Wakefield. [698] "Low-thoughted care" is from Milton's Comus.—Warton. [699] This resembles a passage in Crashaw: Fair hope! our earlier heaven.—Wakefield. [700] "It should," says Mr. Mills, "be near her cell. The doors of all cells open into the common cloister. In that cloister are often tombs." Steevens adds the frivolous objection that the "Paraclete had been too recently founded for monuments of the dead to be expected there." Heloisa had been five years abbess when she wrote her first letter to Abelard, and it is certainly not an extravagant supposition that a death might have occurred among the nuns in that space of time. [701] Dryden's Palamon and Arcite: And issuing sighs that smoked along the wall.—Wakefield. Addison's translation of a passage from Claudian: Oft in the winds is heard a plaintive sound Of melancholy ghosts that hover round. [702] Fenton's translation of Sappho to Phaon: Here, while by sorrow lulled to sleep I lay, Thus said the guardian nymph, or seemed to say.—Wakefield. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act iv. Sc. 4: Hark! you are called: some say, the Genius so Cries, "Come!" to him that instantly must die.
- 52. [703] Pope owes much throughout this poem to the character of Dido as drawn by Virgil, and this passage seems directly formed upon one in Dryden, Æn. iv. 667: Oft when she visited this lonely dome Strange voices issued from her husband's tomb: She thought she heard him summon her away, Invite her to his grave, and chide her stay. The imitation of the passage in Ovid, Epist. vii. 101, similar to this from Virgil, is still more palpable: Hinc ego me sensi noto quater ore citari: Ipse sono tenui dixit, "Elissa, veni!" Nulla mora est; venio; venio, tibi debita conjux.—Wakefield. [704] It is well contrived that this invisible speaker should be a person that had been under the very same kind of misfortunes with Eloisa.— Warton. [705] Dryden's version of the latter part of the third book of Lucretius: But all is there serene in that eternal sleep.—Wakefield. [706] In the first edition: I come ye ghosts.—Wakefield. [707] Ogilby, Virg. Æn. xi.: And to the dead our last sad duties pay. Dryden, Æn. xi. 322: Perform the last sad office to the slain.—Wakefield. [708] Dryden's Aurengezebe at the commencement of Act iv.: I thought before you drew your latest breath, To sooth your passage, and to soften death. [709] Oldham's translation of Bion on the death of Adonis: Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll, Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul. Dryden's Virg. Æn. iv. 984: While I in death Lay close my lips to hers, and catch the flying breath.
- 53. And in his Cleomenes, the end of Act iv.: ———sucking in each other's latest breath.—Wakefield. [710] Rowe's ode to Delia: When e'er it comes, may'st thou be by, Support my sinking frame, and teach me how to die.—Wakefield. [711] Dryden Æn., xi. 1194: And from her cheeks the rosy colour flies. [712] Abelard to Heloisa: "You shall see me to strengthen your piety by the horror of this carcase, and my death, then more eloquent than I can be, will tell you what you love when you love a man." [713] Spenser, Faerie Queen, i. 4, 45: Cause of my new grief, cause of new joy.—Wakefield. [714] Abelard and Eloisa were interred in the same grave, or in monuments adjoining, in the monastery of the Paraclete. He died in the year 1142, she in 1163 [4].—Pope. Abelard and Heloisa are said to have been both sixty-three when they died. They were buried in the same crypt, but it was not till 1630, or near five hundred years after the death of Heloisa, that their remains were consigned to the same grave. Then their bones are reported to have been put into a double coffin, divided by a partition of lead. They subsequently underwent various disinterments and removals, till in 1817 the alleged relics were transferred to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, at Paris, and have not since been disturbed. [715] Dryden, in his translation of Canace to Macareus: I restrained my cries And drunk the tears that trickled from my eyes.—Wakefield. [716] Milton, Il Penseroso: There let the pealing organ blow To the full-voiced choir below. [717] "Dreadful sacrifice" is the ritual term. So in the History of Loretto, 1608, ch. 20, p. 278, "The priest, as the use is, assisted the cardinal in the time of the dreadful sacrifice."—Steevens.
- 54. [718] Warton says that the eight concluding lines of the Epistle "are rather flat and languid." It is indeed an absurd supposition that a woman who had been speaking the fervid language of christianity should imagine that her state in the world beyond the grave would be that of a "pensive ghost," and that her consolation would consist in having her woes "well- sung" on earth. And it is in the tremendous conflict between piety and passion, while divine and human love are contending fiercely for the mastery, that she finds relief in this unsubstantial idea that some future lover would make her the subject of a poem. [719] The last line is imitated from Addison's Campaign. Marlb'rough's exploits appear divinely bright— Raised of themselves their genuine charms they boast, And those who paint them truest, praise them most. This Pope had in his thoughts; but not knowing how to use what was not his own, he spoiled the thought when he had borrowed it. Martial exploits may be painted; perhaps woes may be painted; but they are surely not painted by being well sung: it is not easy to paint in song, or to sing in colours.—Johnson. [720] Roscoe supposes Richardson to have asserted that there was an "entire discrepancy between the Essay on Man as published, and the original manuscripts," and to have implied that the change was from "infidelity" to its opposite. This is not the statement of Richardson. He says, on the contrary, that when the "exceptionable passages" were pointed out Pope "did not think of altering them," and "never dreamed of adopting" a more orthodox "scheme" for his Essay till after "its fatalism and deistical tendency" had excited that "general alarm" which could not precede the publication of the poem, and which only, in fact, commenced some three years later. Richardson is enforcing his charge against Warburton of inventing forced meanings, and the instance would contradict the accusation if Pope had altered his language from deism to orthodoxy before he printed the work. The commentary would then have expressed the natural sense of the text. The change of which Richardson speaks was not in the Essay itself, but in the interpretation Pope put upon it. While he was composing the poem he accepted the deistical construction of the Richardsons; and when he was terrified at the "general alarm" he endorsed the christian construction of Warburton. [721] Dr. Desaguliers, the son of a French refugee, was born at Rochelle in 1683, and died, Feb. 29, 1744, at the Bedford Coffee-house, Covent Garden. He was a clergyman of the church of England, a great lover of science, and a friend of Newton. He delivered lectures for many years on
- 55. Experimental Philosophy, and published an excellent work on the subject in 2 vols. 4to. He does not appear to have shown any turn for poetry, and those who ascribed to him the Essay on Man may have had no better ground for their opinion than that the poem treated of one kind of philosophy, and Desaguliers was learned in another. [722] Thomas Catesby, Lord Paget, son of the Earl of Uxbridge, died before his father in Jan. 1742. He published in 1734, a poem called An Essay on Human Life; and in 1737 An Epistle to Mr. Pope, in Anti-heroics. "The former," says Horace Walpole, "is written in imitation of Pope's ethic epistles, and has good lines, but not much poetry." [723] In the Life of Pope by the pretended Squire Ayre, it is said that "a certain gentleman," meaning Mallet, was at Pope's house shortly after the first Epistle was published, and in answer to the question "What new pieces were brought to light?" replied, "That there was a thing come out called an Essay on Man, and it was a most abominable piece of stuff; shocking poetry, insufferable philosophy, no coherence, no connection at all." Pope confessed he was the author, which, says Ayre, "was like a clap of thunder to the mistaken bard; with a blush and a bow he took his leave of Pope, and never ventured to show his unlucky face there again." The final statement is contradicted by the letters of Pope and Mallet, which prove that they carried on a cordial intercourse to the last. The rest of the story is improbable, for it is not likely that Pope, who was bent at this early period upon keeping the authorship a secret, would have unmasked himself in a manner to preclude confidence, and provoke Mallet to divulge the truth to the world. Ayre's authority is good for nothing, and Ruffhead only copied Ayre, but his repetition of the anecdote gave it currency, and it has ever since passed unquestioned from writer to writer. [724] Warburton. "Your Travels I hear much of," says Pope in the letter to Swift; "my own I promise you shall never more be in a strange land, but a diligent, I hope, useful investigation of my own territories. I mean no more translations, but something domestic, fit for my own country, and my own time." The allusion is obscure, and it may be doubted whether Pope referred to his ethical scheme, which he did not commence till four years later. [725] Bolingbroke. [726] The authority was Lord Bathurst. Dr. Hugh Blair dined with him in 1763, and says in a letter to Boswell, that "the conversation turning on Mr. Pope, Lord Bathurst told us that the Essay on Man was originally composed by Lord Bolingbroke in prose, and that Mr. Pope did no more than put it into verse: that he had read Lord Bolingbroke's manuscript in
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