Rome, only produced under the direct influence of Greek literature. Collins' theory, therefore, hardly derives support from the history of Rome. But it is true that poetry rapidly declined after the Augustan age, and that under Augustus it was inspired by the best features of his monarchy-his efforts to restore the Roman morality and religion, to revive Italian country life, and to give peace and rest after the exhaustion of civil war. [Mr. F. T. Palgrave's note, "stayed her song when Imperial tyranny was established at Rome," implies a somewhat different interpretation of Collins' words. I prefer my own interpretation, which is certainly more in accordance with historic fact, and is supported by the 'Observations' on this poem of Langhorne, himself a poet and a contemporary of Collins.]

37. "Stanza 7 refers to the Italian amourist poetry of the Renaissance. In Collins' day, Dante was almost unknown in England" (F. T. P.). Coleridge writes of the Italian poets of the 15th and 16th centuries (Biographia Literaria, ch. 16): "The imagery is almost always general; sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels cruel as fair, nymphs, naiads, and goddesses, are the materials which are common to all, and which each shaped and arranged according to his judgment or fancy, little solicitous to add or to particularise.”

་

bower. The word first means 'dwelling' (O.E.); (2) 'a vague poetic word for an idealized abode, not realized in any actual dwelling: cp. Milton, The bower of earthly bliss; (3) an inner apartment, especially a lady's private apartment boudoir; (4) a place closed in with trees, a leafy court, arbour. Here it is used in sense (3).

or

48. meeting soul, "which moves sympathetically_towards Simplicity as she comes to inspire the poet " (F. T. P.). The phrase is from Milton, L'Allegro (G. T. CXLIV. 138).

49. Of these, Taste and Genius.

51-4. There may be here a reminiscence of Virgil, Eclogue x., especially of lines 31-6 and 42-3.

3. Happy the man, whose wish and care

"THIS was a very early production of our author, written at about twelve years old" (Pope's Note). It is curious that the first of his preserved juvenile pieces should be the only poem by ALEXANDER POPE that has found a place in The Golden Treasury: but though Pope was a great poet, he is not distinguished in lyric poetry. We must also remember what Dr. A. W. Ward calls "the extraordinary and perhaps unparalleled fact" that "there is little vital difference, so far as form is concerned, between some

of the earliest and some of the latest of Pope's productions. His early pieces lack the vigour of wit and the brilliancy of antithesis of his later works, but they have the same felicity of expression and the same easy flow of versification." Some of the couplets in an epic poem that he began soon after his twelfth birthday were afterwards inserted by him, without alteration, in the Essay on Criticism and in the Dunciad.

An English reader, unfamiliar with Latin, could hardly gain a better idea of Horace's quieter lyrics than he will receive from this little Ode. The sentiment is Horatian; sincere but not too deeply felt; the praise of the country by a youthful poet whose strongest inclinations were to draw him, as they had drawn Horace, to the town and fashionable life. The style is Horatian; the diction simple, but, even at this early age, with the epigrammatic simplicity of conscious art, not the diffuse simplicity of nature. Finally, the rhythm is Horatian also; not an attempt at an English poem in Latin metre, such as Canning produced in his humorous Sapphics on 'The Needy Knife-grinder,' or Tennyson in his Alcaics on Milton, but a happy reproduction in a thoroughly English metre of the most characteristic effect of the Sapphic stanza-the brief fourth line that brings to a sudden check the short "swallow-flight of song" which is all that the stanza permits.

Pope had doubtless read Horace's description of his farm in Satires, II. vi., or Epistles, 1. xvi. 1-16, or the praise of a farmer's life in Odes, III. xvi. 29-32. Probably he had also read Claudian's Felix qui patriis aevum transegit in agris and Virgil's O fortunatos nimium. With the "sound sleep" of 1. 13 we may compare Horace, Odes, 111. i. 21, somnus agrestium lenis virorum, and with the " unseen, unknown" of 1. 17, Ovid's Bene qui latuit, bene vixit (Tristia, III. iv. 25) and Horace's Nec vixit male, qui natus moriensque fefellit (Epistles, 1. xvii. 10). But there is no end to the parallels; and Dr. Johnson would remind us that "Criticism disdains to chase a school-boy '—even such a school-boy as Pope -"to his common-places."

0

4. O say what is that thing call'd Light

COLLEY CIBBER (1671-1757) was an actor, a dramatist of some skill, and a great critic of acting. He was unfortunate enough to quarrel with Pope, who revenged himself by making Cibber the hero of his Dunciad. In its simple pathos, "The Blind Boy" is almost worthy of Blake or Wordsworth.

19. Compare Sir E. Dyer's well-known poem, "My mind to me a kingdom is," especially the second stanza:

"Content I live, this is my stay;

I seek no more than may suffice;

I press to bear no haughty sway;
Look, what I lack my mind supplies.

Lo! thus I triumph like a king,

Content with what my mind doth bring."

5. 'Twas on a lofty vase's side

THE cat belonged to Gray's friend, Horace Walpole. Gray sent the Ode in a letter to Walpole, March 1, 1747: "As one ought to be particularly careful to avoid blunders in a compliment of condolence, it would be a sensible satisfaction to me (before I testify my sorrow, and the sincere part I take in your misfortune) to know for certain, who it is I lament. I knew Zara and Selima (Selima, was it? or Fatima), or rather I knew them both together; for I cannot justly say which was which. Then as to your handsome cat, the name you distinguish her by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowing one's handsome cat is always the cat one likes best; or if one be alive and the other dead, it is usually the latter that is the handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the survivor: oh no! I would rather seem to mistake, and imagine to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this sad accident. Till this affair is a little better determined, you will excuse me if I do not begin to cry. Tempus inane peto, requiem, spatiumque doloris."

66

In 1. 4 the cat is described as demurest of the tabby-kind"; in 1. 10 we hear of her "coat that with the tortoise vies." We must remember that Gray did not know which cat had died, and was also determined to ingratiate himself with the survivor. If the two cats were respectively tabby and tortoise-shell, we may suppose that the survivor (a) if tortoise-shell, would take 'tabbykind' as a general name for cats and would understand 1. 10 in its more obvious sense, (b) if a tabby, would appropriate 1. 4 and understand 1. 10 to mean "beautiful as any tortoise shell cat. This is the interpretation of Gray's letter and poem advocated by Mr. Tovey, and it seems the best, as it is certainly the most ingenious.

"The mishap occurred at Walpole's house in Arlington Street, not long before Walpole purchased the little house at Twickenham which he converted into the famous Strawberry Hill. To Strawberry Hill the vase was ultimately transferred; Walpole wrote to Mason, July 29, 1773, 'I have a pedestal making for the tub in which my cat was drowned; the first stanza of the Ode is to be written on it, beginning thus: 'Twas on this lofty vase's side, etc.' The tub was sold at the Strawberry Hill sale in 1842 for £42, and is now at Knowsley, the seat of the Earl of Derby." (Tovey).

Johnson's criticism of the poem (Life of Gray) is as follows:

"The poem "On the Cat' was doubtless by its author considered as a trifle; but it is not a happy trifle. In the first stanza, 'the azure flowers that blow' show resolutely a rhyme is sometimes made when it cannot easily be found. Selima, the cat, is called a nymph, with some violence both to language and sense; but there is no good use made of it when it is done; for of the two lines What female heart can gold despise,

What cat's averse to fish?

the first relates merely to the nymph, and the second only to the cat. The sixth stanza contains a melancholy truth, that a favourite has no friend'; but the last ends in a pointed sentence of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned.'

Modern criticism has not confirmed Dr. Johnson's verdict on this 'trifle.' It is a question whether 'that blow' is redundant, whether it does not rather help us to see the painted flowers 'in blow'; but even if it is redundant, such redundancy is in keeping with the mock-heroic style. To that style belongs the description of the cat as 'nymph,' and of the water as 'lake' and tide.' The sudden bathos of 'What cat's averse to fish?', far from being a blemish, is a literary triumph. It is essential to the success of a mock-heroic poem that the reader should realise that the poet is laughing, not seriously giving to the catastrophe a dignity it does not deserve. Yet even mock-heroics cannot be good unless they half-deceive us into accepting them for real. Gray is just on the point of so deceiving us, and merrily enlightens us by what the Greeks called a Tapà Tроσdokiav, an unexpected turn of phrase. Dr. Johnson's censure of the last stanza is conceived in a spirit that would be fatal to most poetry. In the poetic, if not in the literal sense, the cat had found that "All that glisters is not gold."

3. azure, i.e. the vase was a China one with the flowers

painted in blue. Cp. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Town Eclogues:

"Where the tall jar erects its stately pride
With antic shapes in China's azure dyed."

4. tabby kind, of the tabby species of cats. "A tabby cat is one whose coat is brindled, black and grey, like the waves of watered silk. Tabby is from Fr. tabis, watered silk, from Arabic attabi, a part of Bagdad, where it was made " (Bradshaw). 5. reclined, participle.

7. conscious tail, i.e. the tail shows by its movements that it shares the feelings of the cat.

10. tortoise. "A cat whose coat is of a dark ground striped with yellow is called a tortoise-shell cat" (Bradshaw).

14. angel, of angelic beauty.

"The

15. Genii, guardian deities, Latin plural of Genius. Italian peoples regarded the Genius as a higher power which creates and maintains life, assists at the begetting and birth of every individual man, determines his character, tries to influence his destiny for good, accompanies him through life as his tutelary spirit, and lives on after his death" (Seyffert, Dict. of Classical Antiquities). Places had their Genius as well as persons. Cp. Milton, Lycidas (G.T., LXXXIX. 183), "Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore."

16. Tyrian, so-called because the best purple known to the ancients was prepared at Tyre from the secretions of the murex, a shellfish.

18. betrayed, showed underneath. Cp. Virgil, Georgics, iv. 274:

Aureus ipse, sed in foliis quae plurima circum
Funduntur violae sublucet purpura nigrae.

"Golden is the flower, but on the petals that cluster thick round it purple gleams under dark violet."

31. Eight times. "A cat has nine lives, as everybody knows" (Phelps).

34. Dolphin. A dolphin in the classical legend had saved Arion from drowning. Nereid, sea-nymph, daughter of Nereus, the old man of the sea.

35. The commentators have not ascertained whether Walpole actually had two servants called 'Tom' and 'Susan' or whether Gray merely used the two names as typical.

39. with caution bold. Cp. the Latin proverb, Festina lente. 42. Cp. Chaucer, Yeman's Tale, "But all which shineth as the gold Ne is no gold, as I have been told"; Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, II. vii. 65, “All that glisters is not gold."

6. Timely blossom, Infant fair

AMBROSE PHILIPS (1671-1749) wrote several poems to children, some Pastorals, and an Epistle to the Earl of Dorset which Goldsmith declared to be 'incomparably fine.' Like Cibber, he had a quarrel with Pope, and was satirised by that irascible poet. Charlotte Pulteney, the subject of this ode, was one of the daughters of Daniel Pulteney, a politician of some distinction in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. She and her sister Margaret, to whom also Philips addressed an ode, died in childhood. Philips was ridiculed by his contemporaries for apostro