The fine gentlemen in wigs and laced
coats amused themselves by writing about nymphs and "conscious swains,"
by way of asserting their claims to elegance of taste. Pope, as a boy,
took the matter seriously, and always retained a natural fondness for a
juvenile performance upon which he had expended great labour, and which
was the chief proof of his extreme precocity. He invites attention to
his own merits, and claims especially the virtue of propriety. He does
not, he tells us, like some other people, make his roses and daffodils
bloom in the same season, and cause his nightingales to sing in
November; and he takes particular credit for having remembered that
there were no wolves in England, and having accordingly excised a
passage in which Alexis prophesied that those animals would grow milder
as they listened to the strains of his favourite nymph. When a man has
got so far as to bring to England all the pagan deities, and rival
shepherds contending for bowls and lambs in alternate strophes, these
niceties seem a little out of place. After swallowing such a camel of an
anachronism as is contained in the following lines, it is ridiculous to
pride oneself upon straining at a gnat:--
Inspire me, says Strephon,
Inspire me, Phoebus, in my Delia's praise
With Waller's strains or Granville's moving lays.
A milkwhite bull shall at your altars stand,
That threats a fight, and spurns the rising sand.
Granville would certainly not have felt more surprised at meeting a
wolf, than at seeing a milk-white bull sacrificed to Phoebus on the
banks of the Thames.
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