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1709-1742.]

THE POETS.

415

oblique way," is Defoe, who tells Halifax that he "scorned to come out of Newgate at the price of betraying a dead master," but thanks him in a straightforward style for "the exceeding bounty I have now received;" and says, "I am a plain and unpolished man, and perfectly unqualified to make formal acknowledgments; and a temper soured by a series of afflictions renders me still the more awkward in the received method of common gratitude. I mean the ceremony of thanks."* The fate of Defoe was that

of the great body of the men of letters. They sometimes had a purse tossed to them for a dedication; they had small pay from the booksellers; they starved; and their poverty, more than their dulness, consigned them to the tender mercies of "The Dunciad."

The poets of the reign of Anne, and of the reign of the first George, occupy the most considerable space in the literary history of those times. One half of Johnson's "Lives" is devoted to criticism upon the works of those who flourished in this period. Of that "body of English poetry" which the booksellers had determined to publish, and for which Johnson wrote these "Lives" as a series of prefaces, how much that belongs to this Augustan age is worth looking at, except for the gratification of a literary curiosity to know what was be-praised and be-pensioned in those halcyon days? Of these thirty "heirs of fame," who occupy about seven hundred pages of Johnson's biographies,† there are only about seven whom the world has not very "willingly let die." Rowe, Prior, Congreve, Gay are still talked about. Addison and Swift are read for their prose. Pope is almost the sole name in poetry that is not partially or hermetically sealed up in "the monument of banished minds." Many of those who are rarely now "from the dust of old oblivion raked," were the lucky ones of the earth whom Halifax and Oxford were transforming from ill-paid verse-makers into flourishing commissioners, envoys, and secretaries. The ministers believed that patronage had made the poets,

"Un Auguste peut aisément faire un Virgile "—

and it was still easier to make the rhymers into sinecurists. These have left few abiding memorials of their age in their Odes and Epigrams, their Songs and Love Verses,—even in their Tales, at which court ladies smiled and blushed behind the fan. We may glean from the one great poet of the time some illustrations of the national mind and manners, that are not the less real on account of the colouring which consummate art has bestowed upon them.

The circumstances of Pope's early life were eminently favourable to the attainment of his future excellence. His father, a Roman Catholic, had retired from business with a moderate competence. The precocious boy, after the age of twelve, had to form his own mind, and work out his own aspirations, in his "paternal cell" at Binfield. In this modest dwelling the young poet wrote his "Pastorals," his "Windsor Forest," his "Temple of Fame," his "Essay on Criticism," his "Rape of the Lock." Here his mind was saturated with a love of nature and natural things, held in subjection, indeed, by the powerful acuteness of his reasoning faculties, but running

*

"Letters of Eminent Literary Men," Camden Society, pp. 321-323.
In Mr. Cunningham's edit.

416

ALEXANDER POPE.

[1709-1742. over with imagery, and often with tenderness and passion. We are told, "He set to learning Latin and Greek by himself, about twelve; and when he was about fifteen he resolved that he would go up to London and learn French and Italian." * He received the first encouragement to cultivate his poetical talents from his neighbour sir William Trumbull, who had been an ambassador and a secretary of state. At sixteen, he formed an acquaintance with Wycherley, a man of seventy. He was known at that time to Congreve. At an earlier age he had been taken to a coffee-house to see Dryden. The wonderful lad was not a moping recluse in Windsor Forest, but went into the world, and talked with famous men, who were not mere authors,-leaders in high life, qualified by their own experience to display to his eager curiosity some of the best and many of the worst aspects of that region of luxury, and wit, and profligacy in which they had lived. Pope had a very early training to afford him a far deeper insight into the realities of life, than he could have attained in the seclusion of a college or the bustle of a profession. His religious disqualification for place, and his ardent thirst for distinction, sent him to authorship as his proper work for profit and for fame; but his refined tastes, and his feeble health, saved him from the social perils that attended upon the professional writer. His small patrimony kept him from the shifts and humiliations that then, and long after, were the hard destiny of those who wrote for their daily bread. His resolute application won him higher rewards than literature had ever before won in its own open market. At the beginning of George I.'s reign, Halifax offered him a pension, saying that nothing should be demanded of him for it. The young poet had not then earned an independence by his Homer. "I wrote," he says, "to lord Halifax to thank him for his most obliging offer; saying, that I had considered the matter over fully, and that all the difference I could find in having and not having a pension, was, that if I had one I might live more at large in town, and that if I had not, I might live happily enough in the country. So the thing dropped, and I had my liberty without a coach."+

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Female Politicians-Female Employments-Dress-The Hoop-Petticoat-Literary estimate of the Female Character-The Stage estimate-Congreve-Swift's Polite Conversation-PopeThe Rape of the Lock-Prude and Coquette-Puppet Plays-The Opera-The Masquerade -Young-Fashionable Vices-Drinking-Extravagant dinners-Duelling-The Club Life of London-Gaming-The Bear-garden-Popular Superstitions-Witchcraft-Ignorance of the Lower Classes-Sports-National taste for Music gone out-The Small-Coal Man.

THE "Tatler" and "Spectator" were issued at a time when the ladies of England were amongst the keenest and noisiest of politicians. One object of the essayists was to lead the fair ones into calmer and pleasanter regions; and we therefore find little notice in their non-political writings of the vagaries which the female mind exhibited about the Church and the Protestant Succession. In the "Freeholder" Addison has several pleasant papers, in which we see the temper that filled many a household with the strifes of unreasoning Tories in hooped petticoats. "Women of this turn," he says, "are so earnest in contending for hereditary right, that they wholly neglect the education of their own sons and heirs; and are so taken up with their zeal for the Church, that they cannot find time to teach their children the Catechism. Such is our misfortune that we sometimes see a pair of stays ready to burst with sedition; and hear the most masculine passions expressed in the sweetest voices."* In another "As our paper he says, English ladies are at present the greatest stateswomen in Europe, they will be in danger of making themselves the most unamiable part of their sex, if they continue to give a loose to intemperate language, and to a low kind of

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* "Freeholder," No. 26.

VOL. V.

EE

418

FEMALE EMPLOYMENTS DRESS.

[1709-1742. ribaldry, which is not used among the women of fashion in any other country." We must ascribe a great deal of this disposition to engage in party conflicts to the absence of occupations of an intellectual character, which might engage the women of the beginning of the eighteenth century. In condemning their political extravagances, the "Freeholder" does not attempt to address them as persons qualified to estimate the relative merits of opposite opinions. When he points out to the fair enemies of the Protestant Succession what they sacrifice by their disloyalty to the House of Brunswick, he tells them that they cannot go to court; that they forego the advantage of birthday suits; that they are forced to live in the country, and feed their chickens. "The women of England should be on the side of the Freeholder, and enemies to the person who would bring in arbitrary government and popery," because, "as there are several of our ladies who amuse themselves in the reading of travels, they cannot but take notice what uncomfortable lives those of their own sex lead, where passive obedience is professed and practised in the utmost perfection." Arbitrary power spoils the shape of the foot in China; hurries the Indian widow to her husband's funeral pile; makes the daughters of Eve in Persia mere chattels; gives a woman the twelfth share of a husband in the dominions of the Grand Turk; and renders them the slaves of duennas and gouvernantes in Spain and Italy. The ladies of England ought not to encourage the Roman Catholic religion, because a fish diet spoils the complexion; and a "whole Lent would give such a sallowness to the celebrated beauties of this island, as would scarce make them distinguishable from those of France."+ Much of this, no doubt, is the banter of the great humorist; but the ladies deserved it, who set a mark upon their faces to proclaim their politics, the fair Tories being "obliged by their principles to stick a patch on the most unbecoming side of their foreheads." They could scarcely be addressed in any other style, when the whole time of the greater number was engrossed by idle visiting and ridiculous amusements. "I think," says Steele, " most of the misfortunes in families arise from the trifling way the women have in spending their time, and gratifying only their eyes and ears, instead of their reason and understanding." It must be remembered that the domestic accomplishments of the English lady were then almost unknown. Not one house in ten thousand contained a harpsichord, whilst in our days a pianoforte is as common as a sofa. Pope had borrowed, or hired, a harpsichord; and during a temporary absence from his house at Twickenham, his fashionable neighbour, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, desired a loan from him of the same cumbrous box of wires, which request the poet was unable to grant. Of the arts of design the best educated female had no conception. The greater number of fashionable women "spend their hours in an indolent state of body and mind, without either recreations or reflections." Stimulants, if we may believe the censor, were sometimes resorted to: "Palestris, in her drawing-room, is supported by spirits, to keep off the return of spleen and melancholy, before she can get over half of the day, for want of something to do; while the wench in the kitchen sings and scours from morning to night."§ We can scarcely impute the extravagances of female dress in Anne's reign to the defects of education;

* "Freeholder," No. 23. Ibid., No. 40.

Ibid., No. 26. § "Tatler," No. 248.

1700-1742.] LITERARY ESTIMATE OF THE FEMALE CHARACTER.

419

for in our age, when reading is universal, and every woman, not wholly condemned to be a domestic drudge, has other salutary modes of occupation always at hand, the absurdities at which the satirists unceasingly laughed a hundred and fifty years ago have again come round. Is it Mr. Bickerstaff, or is it Mr. Punch, who published "The humble petition of William Jingle, coachmaker," showing that the petticoats of ladies being too wide to enter into any coach in use before their invention, he has contrived "a coach for the reception of one lady only, who is to be let in at the top?" Is it in 1709, or in 1859, that the prevailing fashion is thus described? "The design of our great-grandmothers in this petticoat was to appear much bigger than the life, for which reason they had false shoulder-blades like wings, and the ruff, to make the upper and lower parts of their bodies appear proportionable; whereas the figure of a woman in the present dress bears the figure of a cone, which is the same with that of an extinguisher, with a little knob at the upper end, and widening downward till it ends in a basis of most enormous circumference."* There must be something of innate virtue in the hooped petticoat, now called by the pretty name of crinoline. It lasted in various forms through the reigns of the first and second Georges; kept its place, to the amusement of the profane vulgar, on court days, till a very recent period; and has now started up, to the terror of all those of the male creation who cannot afford "a coach for the reception of one lady only."

In the period from the Restoration to the middle of the eighteenth century, there was unquestionably a very low estimate of the female character. In theatrical representations of life there was scarcely an attempt to exhibit a woman of sense and modesty. The high ideal of female excellence which we find in Shakspere, and which to a certain extent he must have derived from the realities of the age of Elizabeth, could scarcely be expected from the Drydens and Farquhars and Wycherleys and Congreves of the age of the Revolution. We can scarcely look to the stage of their time for Perditas and Violas, and Imogens. If some of its women had the wit and address of Beatrice and Rosalind, they had the profligacy and cunning which made their cleverness hateful. Congreve, who did as much as any dramatist to render the female character odious, has a somewhat remarkable paper in the "Tatler," in which he says, "It is not to be supposed that it was a poverty of genius in Shakspere, that his women made so small a figure in his dialogues." How diligently must Congreve have studied Shakspere to have made this discovery! He goes on to say, "But it certainly is, that he drew women as they were then in life; for that sex had not in those days that freedom of conversation; and their characters were only, that they were mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives." Was it really true of the age of the author of the "Old Bachelor," "Double Dealer," "Love for Love," and "Way of the World," that, as he and others have shown, the mothers were careless of their children, that the sisters were plotting against each other, that the daughters were undutiful, that the wives were adulteresses? As an essayist he then draws the character of "the divine Aspasia," whose "countenance is the lively image of her mind, which is the seat of honour, truth, compassion, knowledge, and innocence; "-a lady who "adds to the severity and privacy of the last

"Tatler," Nos. 113, 118.

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