“He lived a blessing, he died a benefactor, and his name will ever live an honour to Ireland.”
In the poetical works of Dr. Swift, there is not much upon which the critick can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety.
They are, for the most part, what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact. There seldom occurs a hard-laboured expression, or a redundant epithet; all his verses exemplify his own definition of a good style, they consist of “proper words in proper places.”
To divide this collection into classes, and show how some pieces are gross, and some are trifling, would be to tell the reader what he knows already, and to find faults of which the author could not be ignorant, who certainly wrote often not to his judgment, but his humour.
It was said, in a preface to one of the Irish editions, that Swift had never been known to take a single thought from any writer, ancient or modern. This is not literally true; but, perhaps, no writer can easily be found that has borrowed so little, or that, in all his excellencies and all his defects, has so well maintained his claim to be considered as original.
BROOME.
WILLIAM BROOME was born in Cheshire, as is said, of very mean parents. Of the place of his birth, or the first part of his life, I have not been able to gain any intelligence. He was educated upon the foundation at Eton, and was captain of the school a whole year, without any vacancy, by which he might have obtained a scholarship at King’s college. Being, by this delay, such as is said to have happened very rarely, superannuated, he was sent to St. John’s college, by the contributions of his friends, where he obtained a small exhibition.
At his college he lived for some time in the same chamber with the well-known Ford, by whom I have formerly heard him described as a contracted scholar and a mere versifier, unacquainted with life, and unskilful in conversation. His addiction to metre was then such, that his companions familiarly called him poet. When he had opportunities of mingling with mankind, he cleared himself, as Ford likewise owned, from great part of his scholastick rust.
He appeared early in the world as a translator of the Iliads into prose, in conjunction with Ozell and Oldisworth. How their several parts were distributed is not known. This is the translation of which Ozell boasted as superiour, in Toland’s opinion, to that of Pope: it has long since vanished, and is now in no danger from the criticks.
He was introduced to Mr. Pope, who was then visiting sir John Cotton, at Madingley, near Cambridge, and gained so much of his esteem, that he was employed, I believe, to make extracts from Eustathius for the notes to the translation of the Iliad; and, in the volumes of poetry published by Lintot, commonly called Pope’s Miscellanies, many of his early pieces were inserted.
Pope and Broome were to be yet more closely connected. When the success of the Iliad gave encouragement to a version of the Odyssey, Pope, weary of the toil, called Fenton and Broome to his assistance; and, taking only half the work upon himself, divided the other half between his partners, giving four books to Fenton, and eight to Broome. Fenton’s books I have enumerated in his life; to the lot of Broome fell the second, sixth, eighth, eleventh, twelfth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-third, together with the burden of writing all the notes.
As this translation is a very important event in poetical history, the reader has a right to know upon what grounds I establish my narration. That the version was not wholly Pope’s, was always known: he had mentioned the assistance of two friends in his proposals, and, at the end of the work, some account is given by Broome of their different parts, which, however, mentions only five books as written by the coadjutors; the fourth and twentieth by Fenton; the sixth, the eleventh, and the eighteenth, by himself; though Pope, in an advertisement prefixed afterwards to a new volume of his works, claimed only twelve. A natural curiosity after the real conduct of so great an undertaking, incited me once to inquire of Dr. Warburton, who told me, in his warm language, that he thought the relation given in the note “a lie;” but that he was not able to ascertain the several shares. The intelligence which Dr. Warburton could not afford me, I obtained from Mr. Langton, to whom Mr. Spence had imparted it.
The price at which Pope purchased this assistance was three hundred pounds paid to Fenton, and five hundred to Broome, with as many copies as he wanted for his friends, which amounted to one hundred more. The payment made to Fenton I know not but by hearsay; Broome’s is very distinctly told by Pope, in the notes to the Dunciad.
It is evident, that, according to Pope’s own estimate, Broome was unkindly treated. If four books could merit three hundred pounds, eight, and all the notes, equivalent, at least, to four, had certainly a right to more than six.
Broome probably considered himself as injured, and there was, for some time, more than coldness between him and his employer. He always spoke of Pope as too much a lover of money; and Pope pursued him with avowed hostility; for he not only named him disrespectfully in the Dunciad, but quoted him more than once in the Bathos, as a proficient in the Art of Sinking; and in his enumeration of the different kinds of poets distinguished for the profound, he reckons Broome among “the parrots who repeat another’s words in such a hoarse odd tone as makes them seem their own.” I have been told that they were afterwards reconciled; but I am afraid their peace was without friendship.
He afterwards published a Miscellany of Poems, which is inserted, with corrections, in the late compilation.
He never rose to a very high dignity in the church. He was some time rector of Sturston, in Suffolk, where he married a wealthy widow; and afterwards, when the king visited Cambridge, 1728, became doctor of laws. He was, in August, 1728, presented by the crown to the rectory of Pulham, in Norfolk, which he held with Oakley Magna, in Suffolk, given him by the lord Cornwallis, to whom he was chaplain, and who added the vicarage of Eye, in Suffolk; he then resigned Pulham, and retained the other two.
Towards the close of his life he grew again poetical, and amused himself with translating Odes of Anacreon, which he published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, under the name of Chester.
He died at Bath, November 16,1745, and was buried in the abbey church.
Of Broome, though it cannot be said that he was a great poet, it would be unjust to deny that he was an excellent versifier; his lines are smooth and sonorous, and his diction is select and elegant. His rhymes are sometimes unsuitable; in his Melancholy, he makes breath rhyme to birth in one place, and to earth in another. Those faults occur but seldom; and he had such power of words and numbers as fitted him for translation; but, in his original works, recollection seems to have been his business more than invention. His imitations are so apparent, that it is part of his reader’s employment to recall the verses of some former poet. Sometimes he copies the most popular writers, for he seems scarcely to endeavour at concealment; and sometimes he picks up fragments in obscure corners. His lines to Fenton,
Serene, the sting of pain thy thoughts beguile,
And make afflictions objects of a smile,
brought to my mind some lines on the death of queen Mary, written by Barnes, of whom I should not have expected to find an imitator;
But thou, O muse! whose sweet nepenthean tongue
Can charm the pangs of death with deathless song,
Canst stinging plagues with easy thoughts beguile,
Make pains and tortures objects of a smile.
To detect his imitations were tedious and useless. What he takes he seldom makes worse; and he cannot be justly thought a mean man, whom Pope chose for an associate, and whose coöperation was considered by Pope’s enemies as so important, that he was attacked by Henley with this ludicrous distich:
Pope came off clean with Homer; but they say
Broome went before, and kindly swept the way.
POPE.
Alexander Pope was born in London, May 22, 1688, of parents whose r
ank or station was never ascertained: we are informed that they were of “gentle blood;” that his father was of a family of which the earl of Downe was the head; and that his mother was the daughter of William Turner, esquire, of York, who had, likewise, three sons, one of whom had the honour of being killed, and the other of dying, in the service of Charles the first; the third was made a general officer in Spain, from whom the sister inherited what sequestrations and forfeitures had left in the family.
This, and this only, is told by Pope; who is more willing, as I have heard observed, to show what his father was not, than what he was. It is allowed that he grew rich by trade; but whether in a shop or on the exchange was never discovered till Mr. Tyers told, on the authority of Mrs. Racket, that he was a linendraper in the Strand. Both parents were papists.
Pope was, from his birth, of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shown remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life; but the mildness of his mind, perhaps, ended with his childhood. His voice, when he was young, was so pleasing, that he was called, in fondness, “the little nightingale.”
Being not sent early to school, he was taught to read by an aunt; and when he was seven or eight years old, became a lover of books. He first learned to write by imitating printed books; a species of penmanship in which he retained great excellence through his whole life, though his ordinary hand was not elegant.
When he was about eight, he was placed in Hampshire, under Taverner, a Romish priest, who, by a method very rarely practised, taught him the Greek and Latin rudiments together. He was now first regularly initiated in poetry by the perusal of Ogilby’s Homer, and Sandys’s Ovid. Ogilby’s assistance he never repaid with any praise; but of Sandys he declared, in his notes to the Iliad, that English poetry owed much of its present beauty to his translations. Sandys very rarely attempted original composition.
From the care of Taverner, under whom his proficiency was considerable, he was removed to a school at Twyford, near Winchester, and again to another school about Hyde-park Corner; from which he used sometimes to stroll to the playhouse: and was so delighted with theatrical exhibitions, that he formed a kind of play from Ogilby’s Iliad, with some verses of his own intermixed, which he persuaded his schoolfellows to act, with the addition of his master’s gardener, who personated Ajax.
At the two last schools he used to represent himself as having lost part of what Taverner had taught him; and on his master at Twyford he had already exercised his poetry in a lampoon. Yet under those masters he translated more than a fourth part of the Metamorphoses. If he kept the same proportion in his other exercises, it cannot be thought that his loss was great.
He tells of himself, in his poems, that, “he lisp’d in numbers;” and used to say that he could not remember the time when he began to make verses. In the style of fiction it might have been said of him as of Pindar, that when he lay in his cradle, “the bees swarmed about his mouth.”
About the time of the revolution, his father, who was undoubtedly disappointed by the sudden blast of Popish prosperity, quitted his trade, and retired to Binfield, in Windsor forest, with about twenty thousand pounds; for which, being conscientiously determined not to entrust it to the government, he found no better use than that of locking it up in a chest, and taking from it what his expenses required; and his life was long enough to consume a great part of it, before his son came to the inheritance.
To Binfield Pope was called by his father, when he was about twelve years old; and there he had, for a few months, the assistance of one Deane, another priest, of whom he learned only to construe a little of Tully’s Offices. How Mr. Deane could spend, with a boy who had translated so much of Ovid, some months over a small part of Tully’s Offices, it is now vain to inquire.
Of a youth so successfully employed, and so conspicuously improved, a minute account must be naturally desired: but curiosity must be contented with confused, imperfect, and, sometimes, improbable intelligence. Pope, finding little advantage from external help, resolved, thenceforward, to direct himself, and at twelve formed a plan of study, which he completed with little other incitement than the desire of excellence.
His primary and principal purpose was to be a poet, with which his father accidentally concurred, by proposing subjects, and obliging him to correct his performances by many revisals; after which the old gentleman, when he was satisfied, would say, “these are good rhymes.”
In his perusal of the English poets he soon distinguished the versification of Dryden, which he considered as the model to be studied, and was impressed with such veneration for his instructor, that he persuaded some friends to take him to the coffee-house which Dryden frequented, and pleased himself with having seen him.
Dryden died May 1, 1701, some days before Pope was twelve; so early must he, therefore, have felt the power of harmony, and the zeal of genius. Who does not wish that Dryden could have known the value of the homage that was paid him, and foreseen the greatness of his young admirer?
The earliest of Pope’s productions is his Ode on Solitude, written before he was twelve, in which there is nothing more than other forward boys have attained, and which is not equal to Cowley’s performances at the same age.
His time was now wholly spent in reading and writing. As he read the classicks, he amused himself with translating them; and, at fourteen, made a version of the first book of the Thebais, which, with some revision, he afterwards published. He must have been, at this time, if he had no help, a considerable proficient in the Latin tongue.
By Dryden’s Fables, which had then been not long published, and were much in the hands of poetical readers, he was tempted to try his own skill in giving Chaucer a more fashionable appearance, and put January and May, and the Prologue of the Wife of Bath, into modern English. He translated, likewise, the epistle of Sappho to Phaon, from Ovid, to complete the version which was before imperfect; and wrote some other small pieces, which he afterwards printed.
He sometimes imitated the English poets, and professed to have written at fourteen, his poem upon Silence, after Rochester’s Nothing. He had now formed his versification, and in the smoothness of his numbers surpassed the original: but this is a small part of his praise; he discovers such acquaintance both with human life and publick affairs, as is not easily conceived to have been attainable by a boy of fourteen in Windsor forest.
Next year he was desirous of opening to himself new sources of knowledge, by making himself acquainted with modern languages; and removed, for a time, to London, that he might study French and Italian, which, as he desired nothing more than to read them, were, by diligent application, soon despatched. Of Italian learning he does not appear to have ever made much use in his subsequent studies.
He then returned to Binfield, and delighted himself with his own poetry. He tried all styles, and many subjects. He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, an epick poem, with panegyricks on all the princes of Europe; and, as he confesses, “thought himself the greatest genius that ever was.” Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings. He, indeed, who forms his opinion of himself in solitude, without knowing the powers of other men, is very liable to errour; but it was the felicity of Pope to rate himself at his real value.
Most of his puerile productions were, by his maturer judgment, afterwards destroyed; Alcander, the epick poem, was burnt by the persuasion of Atterbury. The tragedy was founded on the legend of St. Genevieve. Of the comedy there is no account.
Concerning his studies it is related, that he translated Tully on Old Age; and that, besides his books of poetry and criticism, he read Temple’s Essays and Locke on Human Understanding. His reading, though his favourite authors are not known, appears to have been sufficiently extensive and multifarious; for his early pieces show, with sufficient evidence, his knowledge of books.
He that is pleased with himself easily imagines that he shall please others. Sir William Trumbull, who had been ambassador a
t Constantinople, and secretary of state, when he retired from business, fixed his residence in the neighbourhood of Binfield. Pope, not yet sixteen, was introduced to the statesman of sixty, and so distinguished himself, that their interviews ended in friendship and correspondence. Pope was, through his whole life, ambitious of splendid acquaintance; and he seems to have wanted neither diligence nor success in attracting the notice of the great; for, from his first entrance into the world, and his entrance was very early, he was admitted to familiarity with those whose rank or station made them most conspicuous.
From the age of sixteen the life of Pope, as an author, may be properly computed. He now wrote his Pastorals, which were shown to the poets and criticks of that time; as they well deserved, they were read with admiration, and many praises were bestowed upon them and upon the preface, which is both elegant and learned in a high degree: they were, however, not published till five years afterwards.
Cowley, Milton, and Pope, are distinguished among the English poets by the early exertion of their powers; but the works of Cowley alone were published in his childhood, and, therefore, of him only can it be certain that his puerile performances received no improvement from his maturer studies.
At this time began his acquaintance with Wycherley, a man who seems to have had among his contemporaries his full share of reputation, to have been esteemed without virtue, and caressed without good-humour. Pope was proud of his notice; Wycherley wrote verses in his praise, which he was charged by Dennis with writing to himself, and they agreed for awhile to flatter one another. It is pleasant to remark how soon Pope learned the cant of an author, and began to treat criticks with contempt, though he had yet suffered nothing from them.
But the fondness of Wycherley was too violent to last. His esteem of Pope was such, that he submitted some poems to his revision; and when Pope, perhaps proud of such confidence, was sufficiently bold in his criticisms, and liberal in his alterations, the old scribbler was angry to see his pages defaced, and felt more pain from the detection than content from the amendment of his faults. They parted; but Pope always considered him with kindness, and visited him a little time before he died.
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 487
