If, where the rules not far enough extend, (Since rules were made but to promote their end,) The intent proposed, that license is a rule. May boldly deviate from the common track." "In lazy apathy let stoics boast -Essay on Criticism. Their virtue fix'd; 'tis fixed as in a frost; He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind." 13. Contempt for Womanhood.-"It is painful to follow a man of genius through a succession of inanities descending into absolute nonsense and of vulgar fictions sometimes terminating in brutalities. These are harsh words, but not harsh enough by half as applied to Pope's gallery of female portraits. The describer knows, as well as any of us the spectators know, that he is romancing, and we cannot submit to be detained by a picture which, according to the shifting humor of the poet, angry or laughing, is a lie where it is not a jest, is an affront to the truth of nature where it is not confessedly an extravagance of drollery. In a playful fiction we can submit with pleasure to the most enormous exaggerations; but then they must be offered as such. These of Pope's are not so offered but as serious portraits; and in that character they affect us as odious and malignant libels.. There is no truth in Pope's satiric sketches of women-not even colorable truth; but if there were, how frivolous, how hollow, to erect into solemn, monumental protestations against the whole female sex what, if examined, turn out to be pure casual eccentricities or else personal idiosyncrasies or else foibles shockingly caricatured, but above all to be such foibles as could not have connected themselves with sincere feelings of indignation in any rational mind. . . . Pope's pretended portraitures of women the more they ought to have been true, as professing to be studies from life, the more atrociously they are false, and false in the transcendent sense of being impossible. Heaps of contradiction or of revolting extravagance do not verify themselves to our loathing incredulity because the artist chooses to come forward with his arms akimbo, saying angrily, But I tell you, sir, these are not fancy pieces! These ladies whom I have here lampooned are familiarly known to me; they are my particular friends.'"-De Quincey. "In his epistle on the character of women, no one who has ever known a noble woman, nay, I should almost say no one who has ever had a mother or a sister, will find much to please him. The climax of his praise rather degrades than elevates. His nature delighted more in detecting the blemish than in enjoying the charm."-Lowell. "Contempt veiled under the show of deference, a mockery of chivalry, its form without its spirit-this is the attitude assumed towards women by the poet in this piece [' Rape of the Lock']. This feeling towards woman is not the poet's idiosyncrasy; here he is but the representative of his age."Mark Pattison. ILLUSTRATIONS. "There Affectation, with a sickly mien, Wrapt in a gown, for sickness and for show. When each new night-dress gives a new disease." -The Rape of the Lock. "She [Queen Caroline] wears no colours (sign of grace) On any part except her face; All white and black beside : Dauntless her look, her gesture proud, Her voice theatrically loud, And masculine her stride. So have I seen in black and white A stately worthless animal, That plies the tongue and wags the tail, "Ladies, like variegated tulips, show; 'Tis to their changes half their charms we owe; Their happy spots the nice admirer take. As when she touched the brink of all we hate." -Epistle to a Lady. BURNS, 1759–1796 Biographical Outline.-Robert Burns, born at Alloway, Scotland, January 25, 1759; his father, a nursery gardener, spelled his name Burness or Burnes; Burns attends a school at Alloway Mill in his sixth year, and soon afterward enters a private school set up by his father and four neighbors; in 1766 his father takes a poor farm at Mount Oliphant, two miles away, and the school attendance of Burns and his brother Gilbert becomes irregular; they are taught thereafter chiefly by their father; in 1772 Robert attends a school at Dalrymple; he improves his writing, and is in a school at Ayr for three weeks during the summer of 1773, where he learns a bit of French; at thirteen he is threshing corn, and at fifteen is his father's chief laborer; he learns many popular legends from an old woman neighbor, and borrows and reads several biographical and theological books; he reads also the Spectator, Pope's translation of the "Iliad," and some of the works of Smollett, Ramsay, and Fergusson; he picks up French readily, reads "Télémaque," and tries Latin, though with little success; his literary talents attract the attention of the neighbors, and his father prophesies that Robert will do some. thing extraordinary; his first poem, "Handsome Nell," is composed in the autumn of 1775, and was addressed to a fellow-laborer in the fields. In 1777 his father removes to a larger farm at Lochlea, Tarbolton, while Robert goes to live with an uncle at Ballochneil, where he studies surveying at a school in the neighboring village of Kirkeswold; here he meets certain jovial smugglers, learns to "fill his glass," falls in love with "a charming fillette," scribbles verses and defeats his school-master in a debate when rashly challenged by the latter; on his return to the farm at Lochlea he reads Thompson, Shenstone, Sterne, and Ossian; while at Lochlea he writes "Winter," "The Death of Poor Maillie," "John Barleycorn," and other songs; in 1780 he joins a "Bachelor's Club" at Tarbolton, where he debates on love, friendship, etc.; he falls in love with Ellison Begbie, daughter of a neighboring farmer, who is the "Mary Morison" of his poems, but he is rejected by her on his departure for Irvine, whither he goes in the summer of 1781 to enter a flax-dressing business with a relative of his mother's. At Irvine he forms a friendship with Richard Brown, a sailor, who encourages him to "endeavor at the character of a poet," but also leads him into vice; while he is carousing, on January 1, 1782, the flax-dressing shop takes fire and is destroyed; Burns thereupon returns to Lochlea, and lives for awhile frugally and temperately; in April, 1783, he begins a commonplace book, which he continues at intervals through many years; in 1781 he had joined a Masonic lodge at Tarbolton and he remained an enthusiastic Mason during life; Burns's father, a devout Presbyterian and the author of a little "Manual of Religious Belief," died February 13, 1784; with his brother Gilbert, Burns saves enough by litigation over his father's lease to start a farm of one hundred and eighteen acres at Mossgiel, near Mauchline, where they settle in 1784 as subtenants of the writer Gavin Hamilton, who becomes a warm friend of Burns; Burns becomes known to the educated men of Mauchline and Kilmarnock, writes more verses, is severely ill, and writes several lines expressive of penitence, but soon becomes the father of an illegitimate child; his brother Gilbert suggests that the "Epistle to Davie," written in January, 1785, will "bear printing ;" he writes the two epistles to John Lapraik in April, 1785, and "Death and Dr. Hornbrook" about the same time; Dr. Hornbrook is John Wilson, then a village apothecary. |