rally speak of organs, or a pair (= set) of organs: that is, the word organ denotes but a single pipe. Thus Sandys: See Chappell's Pop. Mus. i. 49, &c. Father Schmidt and other famous organ-builders flourished in the latter half of the seventeenth century. The organ in the Temple Church, London, was built by Schmidt in Charles II.'s time. 33. 47. The audacity of this line may be regarded as a sign of the times, which were not reverent nor humble-minded. See Dryden's Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew, passim. Comp. Absal. and Achit. Part I. 831, of the Duke of Ormond's son: 48. Orpheus. See Shakspere's Two Gentlemen of Verona, III. ii. 78–81; Henry VIII. III. i. 3, &c.; Hor. Od. I. xii. 7-12, &c. 50. Sequacious. Comp. Sid. Carm. xvi. 3: “Quæ [chelys] saxa sequacia flectens.” Comp. Ovid's "saxa sequentia,” Met. xi. 2. 52. [What is meant by vocal breath?] 53. Comp. Alex. Feast, 170. straight. See L'Allegro, 69. 34. 55. See note on l. 1, and on Hymn Nat. 125. 60. Comp. Shakspere's Tempest, IV. i. 151–6. 63. untune destroy the harmony, i.e. the vivifying principle, of. ALEXANDER'S FEAST. SEE INTRODUCTION TO SONG FOR ST. CECILIA'S DAY." THIS song was written in 1697, in a single night, according to St. John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke. He states that Dryden said to him when he called upon him one morning: “I have been up all night: my musical friends made me promise to write them an Ode for their Feast of St. Cecilia, and I was so struck with the subject which occurred to me that I could not leave it till I had completed it; here it is, finished at one sitting." 34. 1. 'Twas at, &c. There is here a sort of rhetorical ellipse. He means, "It was at the royal feast that what follows happened," or, The scene of the subject of our Ode was the hall of the royal feast;" but he boldly omits the explanatory clause. In the well-known words, "We met, 'twas in a crowd," the explanatory clause, in fact, precedes; but it is often omitted altogether, as here, especially in the beginning of a tale or poem. Comp. Moore's "'Tis the last rose of summer." [What does for mean here? What other meanings has it?] 7. At a Greek banquet the guests were garlanded with roses and myrtle leaves. 9. Thais. See Smith's larger Biog. and Mythol. Dict. Athenæus is our chief informant about her. According to him, she was after Alexander's death married to Ptolemy Lagi. She was as famous for her wit as her beauty. "Her name is best known from the story of her having stimulated the Conqueror (Alexander), during a great festival at Persepolis, to set fire to the palace of the Persian kings; but this anecdote, immortalized as it has been by Dryden's famous Ode [see ll. 123-50], appears to rest on the sole authority of Cleitarchus, one of the east trustworthy of the historians of Alexander, and is in all probability a mere fable." 34. 11. [In what two ways may youth in this line be parsed? Which is the better?] 12. pair and peer (1. 6) are etymologically identical. 16. Timotheus. See Smith's larger Biog. and Mythol. Dict. This Timotheus is said to have been a Theban. Suidas tells us he "flourished under Alexander the Great, on whom his music made so powerful an impression that once, in the midst of a performance by Timotheus of an Orthian poem to Athena, he started from his seat and seized his arms.' The more celebrated Timotheus, "the musician and poet of the later Athenian dithyramb," a native of Miletus, died some thirty years before Alexander's conquest of Persia. 17. tuneful See St. Cecilia's Day, 6. 35. 21. began from Jove. See St. Cecilia's Day, 2. 22. seats. So, in Latin, sedes is used in the plural. In 24. [What is meant by bely'd the god? Comp. Shakspere's Richard II. II. ii. 76-7.] For this wild story see Plutarch's Alex. &c. See Paradise Lost, ix. 494-510. the medieval romances about Alexander it was not Jove, but one Nectanebus, a refugee king of Egypt, who was the father of the prince: see e. g. the fragment of Alisa under edited by Mr. Skeat for the Early English Text Society. 25. radiant spires. Comp. Milton's "circling spires." [Which is the better word with which to connect on radiant spires? What does rode mean?] 26. Her name was Olympias. See Class. Dict. 31. a present deity. Comp. Hor. Od. III. v. 2; Psalm xlvi. 1. The Latin numen means originally a nod (as in Lucret. ii. 633). 38. Bacchus. See Class. Dict. See Keats' Endymion, IV.; Catull. Ixiv. 251-64. 43. honest face = handsome face. The epithet is taken from Virgil (Georg. ii. 392): 66 Quocunque deus [Bacchus] circum caput egit honestum." Comp. Georg. iii. 81, and Æn. x. 133. Honest-like is used in Scotland for "goodly, as regarding the person." (Jamieson.) Comp. Absalom and Achit. Part I. 72: 44. hautboys "Seams of wounds dishonest to the sight." oboes (French, hautbois, that is haut-bois). 53. [What battles had he fought ?] [Is fought a "strong" pret. or a "weak"?] 56. ardent eyes. See Cicero's speech in Verr. II. iv. 66, of one Theomnastus' madness: "Nam quum spumus ageret in ore, oculis arderet, voce maxima vim me sibi adferre clamaret, copulati in jus pervenimus." [To whom does the former his refer? To whom the latter?] 36. 59. Muse. So Hor. Sat. II. vi. 16, 17: Ergo ubi me in montes et in arcem ex urbe removi, It is sometimes used for a poet. See note, Prothal. 159. 36. 61. [Was there ever any difference between sung and sang? See Latham's English Grammar.] 65. weltring. See Hymn Nat. 124. [What word is omitted here?] Comp. A. Phillips To Charlotte Pulteney Gn the Golden Treasury): &c. &c. 68. expos'd "And thou shalt in thy daughter see This picture once resembled thee." cast out. Comp. Latin exponere, Greek ÉkTilévaι. 69. Comp. Pope's Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady: With not a friend. A here has its older force; it = one, a single: see note to 6: at a birth," L'All. 14. Not a is, in fact, a stronger form of none or no. The negative in this phrase is sometimes never. [What is the force of with here ?] 71. revolveing = Latin revolvens; as in Ov. Fast. iv. 667: "Excutitur terrore quies; Numa visa revolvit." 73. a sigh he stole = he sighed privily, or it may be silently. See Shakspere's Taming of the Shrew, III. ii. 142: ""Twere good, methinks, to steal our marriage." Comp. the phrase "to steal a march." So in Greek, KλéжTev to do anything in a thievish, a secret, an underhand manner; see Sophocles' Ajax, 189: “ εἰ δ ̓ ὑποβαλλόμενο κλέπτουσι μύθους οἱ μεγάλοι βασιλῆς," κ.τ.λ. El. 37: dóλoli kλévai opayás, &c. Comp. Cymb. I. v. 66: "He furnaces The thick sighs from him ;" which is explained by "the lover sighing like furnace" in As You Like It, II. vii. 143. 77. 'Twas, &c. See above, 1. 1. [What does but mean here? What other meanings has it?] to move. Comp. Virg. Æn. x. 163, "Cantusque movete." Strictly, the verb applies to the striking or stirring of the strings. Comp. song in Cowley's Davideis: "Hark! how the strings awake! And though the moving hand approach not near," &c. 79. [What does sweet here qualify?] Lydian measures. See L'Allegro, 136. Conversely, love melts the soul to pity, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, IV. iv. 101. 82. See Falstaff's catechism, 1 Henry IV. V. i. 83. [What is it that is never ending, &c.? What fighting still, &c. ?] 85. worth winning. So "worth nothing," "worth ambition," "worth thy sight," "worth inquiry," "worth while." (With "worthy" the preposition is generally inserted, but in Shakspere, Coriol. III. i. 299, we have "worthy death.") This construction may be explained in this way: the Ang.-Sax. inflection which marked the word governed by weorth fell out of use, and its omission was not compensated for by the introduction of the preposition. 36. 88. the good. Comp. Will. of Palerne, 5075: "And eche day was gret good give all aboute." Nowadays we use only the plural form. So we use now only "wages." 89. the many oi πoλλoi. 96. [What is the force of at once here? What does it qualify?] 37. 98. [Why does he say again ?] 100. bands of sleep. Comp. "bands of death," "the bands of those sins" (Collect for the 24th Sunday after Trinity), &c. The notes that rouse him are to be very different from those which are to make Orpheus "heave his head" in L'Allegro. 108. see the snakes that they rear, &c. In En. vi. 571-3, Tisiphone's left hand is filled 122. flambeau. French words were much affected by the English in the latter part o the seventeenth century. See Butler: "For though to smatter words of Greek And Latin be the rhetorique Of pedants counted and vainglorious, To smatter French is meritorious." See Macaulay's History of England, I. chap. iii. 125. [How far does this parallel between Thais and Helen hold good?) 128. organs. See note on St. Cæc. 44. 129. [What is the force of to here ?] 133. the vocal frame = the speaking structure. 38. 137. [What is the force of with here?] POPE. THE details of Pope's life are involved in much obscurity. The part of London in which he was born, his birthday, the circumstances under which several of his works were published, his share in the Odyssey, his rupture with Addison, his relation to various notable persons of his time, are all matters of yet unsolved controversy. Some at least of these difficulties result from a certain want of ingenuousness, or, to speak positively, a certain love of petty diplomacy and intrigue which marked his character. (1) Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. In his Prologue to the Satires he says: "Of gentle blood (part shed in honour's cause, While yet in Britain honour had applause) Elsewhere (in his Letter to a Noble Lord) he says, his father "was no mechanic, neither a hatter nor a cobbler, but in truth of a very honourable family; and my mother of an ancient one." His father, at the time of the future poet's birth, was a wholesale linen-merchant in London. As he was a Roman Catholic, he was debarred from giving his son the best educational advantages the country had to offer. What he could do, he did. Alexander was instructed in the rudiments of Latin and Greek by a Roman Catholic priest, then sent to "a Catholic seminary" at Twyford, near Winchester, then to another in London. When he quitted this last school he was not quite twelve years old. "This," he said to Spence, "was all the teaching I ever had, and God knows it extended a very little way. When I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry; and in a few years I had dipped into a very great number of the English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets," &c. His father had retired from business, and settled first at Kensington, and then at Binfield, near Windsor Forest. To Binfield Pope went when his school-days were ended, and there he mainly resided, making occasional visits to London and other places both near and some distance off, till 1716. At an early age he began to write verses; he he translated; he imitated. At last in 1709 he commenced his career of fame by publishing his Pastorals. Presently (in 1711) followed his Essay on Criticism; then the Rape of the Lock, in two Cantos, afterwards increased to four. Pope at once took the first place amongst the poets of the day. This rapid success is to be accounted for not only by the excellence of what he produced (in the eyes of his age that excellence was of the highest order), but by "the plentiful lack" of writers worthy in any sense of the title of poets which then prevailed. The throne of poetry was in fact empty; it could scarcely be said that there was any one standing even on the steps of it. Pope had no rivals; he was crowned as soon as he appeared. "Well-natur'd Garth inflam'd with early praise, And Congreve loved, and Swift endur'd my lays. |