So very reasonable, so unmoved,
As never yet to love, or to be loved.
She, while her lover pants upon her breast
Can mark the figures on an Indian chest;
And when she sees her friend in deep despair,
Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair. fine fabricsPope’s ideal woman is ‘mistress of herself, though China fall’.
She who ne’er answers till a husband cools,
Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules;
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,
Yet has her humour most when she obeys.In another epistle,Of the Use of Riches, Pope shares his ideas on landscape design
with Lord Burlington (1694–1753), the pioneer of English Palladianism. Pope
reminds landowners, who were spending fortunes on their estates, that ‘Something
there is more needful than expense, / And something previous even to taste – ’tis
sense.’ The excesses of ‘improvement’ are illustrated in Timon’s imaginary Villa:
‘Two cupids squirt before: a lake behind / Improves the keenness of the northern
wind ....’ In Timon’s fountain: ‘Unwater’d see the drooping sea-horse mourn, /
And swallows roost in Nilus’ [the River Nile’s] dusty urn’. In his chapel: ‘To rest, the
cushion and soft Dean invite, / Who never mentions Hell to ears polite.’
Pope’s last works were Imitations of Horace.The First Epistle of the Second Book
of Horace is dedicated to the Emperor Augustus (i.e. George II). Maecenas,
Augustus’s political adviser, was a patron of poets, giving Horace a small estate and
Virgil a house.Augustus had asked Horace why he had not addressed one of his
Epistles to him. But George I did not speak English, and his son’s chief Minister,
Walpole,was not inter ested in poetry. George II asked: ‘Who is this Pope that I hear
so much about? I cannot discover his merit. Why will not my subjects write in
prose?’ Pope provided neither prose nor praise, since ‘Verse, alas! your Majesty
disdains;/ And I’m not used to panegyric strains.’ The Epistlealso rev iews the liter-
ature of the kingdom. Among its memorable lines are: ‘What dear delight to Britons
farce affords!’ This Epistle should be read alongside that to Arbuthnot, a more
personal defence of Pope’s record, with its acid portrait of Addison.
In the Essay on Criticism, Horace is commended for having ‘judged with coolness,
though he sung with fire’. Pope’s Horatian satire is cool, but the fourth book ofThe
Dunciad, a satire on the inversion of civilized values, is touched with fire. The title
suggests an epic poem about a dunce or dunces. Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe gave Pope
the idea of the empire of Dullness, where now ‘Dunce the second rules like Dunce
the first.’ The Muse is asked to ‘Say how the goddess bade Britannia sleep, / And
poured her spirit o’er the land and deep.’ In the 1728 Dunciad Pope exposes the
mediocrity of those whom the Whigs had patronized: ‘While Wren with sorrow to
the grave descends, / Gay dies unpensioned with a hundred friends; / Hibernian
politics,O Swift! thy fate; / And Pope’s, ten years to comment and translate.’
But the fourth Dunciad rises above retaliation. It shows that mediocrity has
become systematic; the colonization of Westminster (the seat of government and
civility) by the City (the natural seat of dullness); the decline of education into
pedantry, and of humane learning into the collection of facts or of butterflies; the
replacement of Christian humanism by specialized research in natural philosophy;
and the final triumph of Dullness. The courtiers of Dullness range from the ferocious
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 195The Dunciad The first
Dunciad(1728) had as its
hero Lewis Theobald, a
minute critic of Pope’s edition
of Shakespeare. The Dunciad
Variorum(1729) identifies in
mock-scholarly notes the
pedants and Grub Street
hacks satirized in 1728:
‘since it is only in this
monument that they must
expect to survive’. In The New
Dunciad(1742), a fourth
book was added. In the final
1743 revision, the new Poet
Laureate, Colley Cibber,
became the hero.