creation of the divine machinery (especially in the beautiful
description of the sylphs at canto II, 55ff) and in the judicious
intermixture of the machinery with the action. These delicate
and insubstantial beings reflect perfectly the character of the
world over which they preside; in them the divine machinery
of epic is delightfully miniaturized in order portentously to
magnify the trivial characters and events of the poem.
The early allusion to Virgil’s fourth Georgic, the most
notable example of the mock-heroic surviving from antiquity,
in a direct quotation from Dryden’s translation, ‘slight is the
subject’ (Georgics, IV, 8), is a signal that he approaches his
own subject in a similar spirit of light-hearted regard, for
Virgil’s elevated language has the dual effect of raising a
slight subject in the imagination (he delights in his bees) and
through the witty juxtaposition of the human and the insect
worlds of deflating the heroic pretensions of men. In The
Rape of the Lock two worlds that are both familiar but
normally distinct, the polite and the heroic, are united in
Pope’s imagination so that they are both made new and seen
in a new perspective. This ingenious, subtle, and sometimes
paradoxical effect is of a radically different order from simple
epic travesty:
I sing the man (read it who list)
A Trojan true as ever pist.^23In Belinda’s exclamation
Happy! ah ten times happy had I been,
If Hampton Court these eyes had never seen!
(canto IV, 149–50)if we catch the allusion to the famous last words of Dido,
‘Happy ah too happy had I been, if only the Trojan ships had
not touched our shores’ (Aeneid, IV, 657–8), it is not Dido
and Virgil who are mocked. It is not necessary to recognize
the allusion to appreciate the sense of the lines where the
irony lies in the truth of the exclamation beyond the
exclaimer’s perception, but when recognized it serves, like the
epic magnification in general, to put Belinda’s distress into its
proper perspective by juxtaposing the trivial and the truly
serious, in this case the tragic. At the same time Pope’s playful