The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1: Poetry - Volume 1Pope, Alexander
General
The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1: Poetry - Volume 1
Pope, Alexander
English poetry -- 18th century
He graduated M.A. April 30, 1695, and as he could hardly have been an
M.A. before he was twenty-five, he would have been forty-five at the
date of these verses. There is a rhyming "Epistle to Mr. B----, by Mr.
Fr. Knapp, of Magdalen College, in Oxford," in Tonson's Fourth
Miscellany.--CROKER.
He died in, or before 1727; for in one of Lintot's advertisements of
that year he is described as the "_late_ Rev. Mr. Francis Knapp, Dean of
Killala."]
[Footnote 10: There are several lines in this copy of verses, which
could not be endured in a common magazine. So much is the public ear,
and public taste improved.--WARTON.]
[Footnote 11: The next six lines were left out by Pope in 1736.]
[Footnote 12: Hough was chosen president of Magdalen College in April,
1687, in defiance of the mandate sent by James II. to the fellows,
requiring them to elect Farmer, a profligate and a papist. The illegal
proceedings of the king in dispossessing the protestants, and filling
the college with romanists, alarmed and enraged the country, and
contributed largely to the Revolution of 1688. In May, 1690, Hough
became Bishop of Oxford. He was translated to Lichfield and Coventry in
1699, and to Worcester in 1717, where he remained till his death in May,
1743, at the age of ninety-three.]
[Footnote 13: By far the most elegant, and best turned compliment of all
addressed to our author, happily borrowed from a fine Greek epigram, and
most gracefully applied.--WARTON.
There is little merit in borrowing a compliment from the Anthology, and
the felicity of its application in the present instance may be
questioned, notwithstanding the emphatic praise of Warton. The
mythological basis of the lines, which is appropriate in the Greek,
becomes childish when adopted by an English poet, and the point of the
piece, which turns upon the assumption that Pope's translation was
vastly superior to the original, is too extravagant to be pleasing.
Fenton was a scholar, and could not have thought what he said.]
[Footnote 14: "I would add," says Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Parnell,
"that the description of barrenness in his verses to Pope was borrowed
from Secundus, but lately searching for the passage, which I had
formerly read, I could not find it." The borrowed description is the
only tolerable part of the poem, which is in a clumsy strain, unlike the
usual easy style of Parnell.]
[Footnote 15: He was only son to the Lord Chancellor Harcourt, and died
in 1720.--ROSCOE.]
[Footnote 16: It was paying pitiful homage to rank to call an
indifferent versifier, like the Duke of Buckingham, "great Sheffield,"
and pretend that he was the instructor and model of Pope.]
[Footnote 17: The comparison of the three Graces, admiring the
reflection of themselves in Pope's works, to Narcissus enamoured of his
own face in the stream, is a ludicrous conceit, and the execution is on
a par with the idea.]
[Footnote 18: This paragraph refers to Pope's Temple of Fame.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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