No More Learning

'441 Sentences:'

the reference is to a mediaeval treatise on Theology, by Peter Lombard,
called the 'Book of Sentences'. It was long used as a university
text-book.


'444 Scotists and Thomists:'

mediaeval scholars, followers respectively of Duns Scotus and Thomas
Aquinas. A long dispute raged between their disciples. In this couplet
Pope points out that the dispute is now forgotten, and the books of the
old disputants lie covered with cobwebs in Duck-lane, a street in London
where second-hand books were sold in Pope's day. He calls the cobwebs
"kindred," because the arguments of Thomists and Scotists were as fine
spun as a spider's web.


'449'

"The latest fashionable folly is the test, or the proof, of a quick,
up-to-date wit. " In other words, to be generally accepted an author must
accept the current fashion, foolish though it may be.


'457'

This was especially true in Pope's day when literature was so closely
connected with politics that an author's work was praised or blamed not
upon its merits, but according to his, and the critic's, politics.


'459 Parsons, Critics, Beaus':

Dryden, the head of English letters in the generation before Pope, had
been bitterly assailed on various charges by parsons, like Jeremy
Collier, critics like Milbourn, and fine gentlemen like the Duke of
Buckingham. But his works remained when the jests that were made against
them were forgotten.


'463'

Sir Richard Blackmore, a famous doctor in Dryden's day, was also a very
dull and voluminous writer. He attacked Dryden in a poem called 'A
Satire against Wit'. Luke Milbourn was a clergyman of the same period,
who abused Dryden's translation of Virgil.


'465 Zoilus':

a Greek critic who attacked Homer.
'481'

The English language and the public taste had changed very rapidly
during the century preceding Pope. He imagined that these changes would
continue so that no poet's reputation would last longer than a man's
life, "bare threescore," and Dryden's poetry would come to be as hard to
understand and as little read as Chaucer's at that time. It is worth
noting that both Dryden and Pope rewrote parts of Chaucer in modern
English.


'506-507'

Explain why "wit" is feared by wicked men and shunned by the virtuous,
hated by fools, and "undone" or ruined by knaves.


'521 sacred':

accursed, like the Latin 'sacer'.


'527 spleen':

bad temper.


'534 the fat age':

the reign of Charles II, as ll. 536-537 show, when literature became
notoriously licentious.


'538 Jilts . . . statesmen':

loose women like Lady Castlemaine and the Duchess of Portsmouth had
great influence on the politics of Charles II's time, and statesmen of
that day like Buckingham and Etheredge wrote comedies.


'541 Mask':

it was not uncommon in Restoration times for ladies to wear a mask in
public, especially at the theater. Here the word is used to denote the
woman who wore a mask.


'544 a Foreign reign':

the reign of William III, a Dutchman. Pope, as a Tory and a Catholic,
hated the memory of William, and here asserts, rather unfairly, that his
age was marked by an increase of heresy and infidelity.