No More Learning

"I learned versification wholly from Dryden's
works," he once said. Pope's admiration for Dryden dated from early
youth, and while still a boy he induced a friend to take him to see the
old poet in his favorite coffee-house.


'391' admire:

not used in our modern sense, but in its original meaning, "to wonder
at. " According to Pope, it is only fools who are lost in wonder at the
beauties of a poem; wise men "approve," 'i. e. ' test and pronounce them
good.


'396-397'

Pope acknowledged that in these lines he was alluding to the
uncharitable belief of his fellow-Catholics that all outside the fold of
the Catholic church were sure to be damned.


'400 sublimes:'

purifies.


'404 each:'

each age.


'415 joins with Quality:'

takes sides with "the quality," 'i. e. ' people of rank.


'429'

Are so clever that they refuse to accept the common and true belief, and
so forfeit their salvation.


'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.