virgil made english

www.ebook3000.com

http://www.ebook3000.org

Virgil Made English

9780230606760ts01.indd i9780230606760ts01.indd i 8/1/2008 6:11:46 PM8/1/2008 6:11:46 PM

www.ebook3000.com


This page intentionally left blank

www.ebook3000.com


Virgil Made EnglishThe Decline of Classical Authority

Tanya M. Caldwell

9780230606760ts01.indd iii9780230606760ts01.indd iii 8/1/2008 6:11:46 PM8/1/2008 6:11:46 PM

www.ebook3000.com


VIRGIL MADE ENGLISH

Copyright © Tanya M. Caldwell, 2008.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2008 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®in the US—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60676–0ISBN-10: 0–230–60676–8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Caldwell, Tanya, 1969– Virgil made English : the decline of classical authority / by Tanya M.

Caldwell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–230–60676–8 (alk. paper) 1. Virgil—Influence. 2. Virgil—Appreciation—England.

3. English literature—Classical influences. 4. Literature, Comparative—English and classical. 5. Literature, Comparative—Classical and English. 6. Classicism—England—History—17th century. 7. Classicism—Great Britain. I. Title.

PA6825.C348 2008873�.01—dc22 2008008190

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: December 2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

9780230606760ts01.indd iv9780230606760ts01.indd iv 8/1/2008 6:11:47 PM8/1/2008 6:11:47 PM

www.ebook3000.com


For Nan and Bill Caldwell

9780230606760ts01.indd v9780230606760ts01.indd v 8/1/2008 6:11:47 PM8/1/2008 6:11:47 PM

www.ebook3000.com



www.ebook3000.com


CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Virgil in the 1650s and 1660s: Dismantling Augustanism 25

2 Virgil in the 1670s and 1680s: The Emperor’s New Clothes 63

3 Virgil, 1688–1700: A Watershed of English Literature 97

4 Virgil, 1700–1760: Redefining Neoclassicism 137

5 The Legacy: Tradition Metamorphosed 189

Notes 219

Works Consulted 233

Index 247

9780230606760ts01.indd vii9780230606760ts01.indd vii 8/1/2008 6:11:47 PM8/1/2008 6:11:47 PM

www.ebook3000.com



www.ebook3000.com


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A two-month Mellon Fellowship from the Huntington Library facilitated my research on this book and made working on it a true pleasure. The Georgia State English Department

awarded me a research semester and a summer grant to help complete the manuscript.

Several friends and colleagues offered valuable advice and encour-agement at various stages of my research and writing; in particular, I would like to thank Brian Corman, Howard Weinbrot, Stuart Curran, Robert Markley, Anne Barbeau Gardiner, Allan Ingram, Greg Clingham, Malinda Snow, and, especially, Marilyn Gaull, Christine Gallant, and Reiner Smolinski. My biggest debt is to my daughters, Hannah and Madeleine, who shared far too much of their mother time with this project.

Part of chapter 2 appeared as an essay entitled “Restoration Parodies of Virgil and English Literary Values” in Huntington Library Quarterly 69.3 (2006): 383–403.

9780230606760ts01.indd ix9780230606760ts01.indd ix 8/1/2008 6:11:47 PM8/1/2008 6:11:47 PM

INTRODUCTION

In Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce (1730), the scribbler, Scarecrow, arrives at the printer Bookweight’s shop, proffering three texts. The first two, an attack on and defense of the

“Ministry” respectively, Bookweight rejects, informing the audience in an aside that he already has such works in press. Scarecrow consequently hinges his hopes on his third effort:

SCARECROW: I have a Translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, with Notes on it.BOOKWEIGHT: That, Sir, is what I do not care to venture on. You may

try by SUBSCRIPTION, if you please, but I wou’d not advise you: for that Bubble is almost down: People begin to be afraid of Authors, since they have writ and acted like Stock-Jobbers. So to oblige a young Beginner, I don’t care if I Print it at my own Expence.

SCARECROW: But pray, Sir, at whose Expence shall I eat? (1: 249; 2.6)

This brief exchange reveals much about what was marketable to readers in the mid-eighteenth century. Desperate to earn some kind of living by the pen, Scarecrow first tries contemporary political polemic, usually a sure bet as Bookweight’s self-interested aside reveals. By offering Virgil in translation, when his pamphlets are rejected, Scarecrow falls back on what he sees as a staple of English literary consumption. Bookweight’s response confirms his instincts, by claiming that while subscription publication of epic translation (which had floated Dryden’s 1697 Aeneis and was the source of Alexander Pope’s financial success) is now declining, he is ready to take a gamble and print the translation “at my own Expence.” In an age where, the play makes clear, party politics hold sway and wit is lost on audiences, Scarecrow’s and Bookweight’s assumption that Virgil will provide some kind of dependable income begs the question, why? The answer has to do with the length of the shadow cast by the Ancient over English letters, a shadow that reached back beyond the seventeenth century and lingered still, as Fielding recognizes in his play, in the eighteenth century.

Virgil’s prominence in English culture was twofold. First, epic maintained its reputation, as Dryden put it in 1697 of the “heroick

9780230606760ts02.indd 19780230606760ts02.indd 1 8/4/2008 2:56:44 PM8/4/2008 2:56:44 PM

2 Virgil Made English

Poem,” as “undoubedly [sic] the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform,” and Virgil, in the judgment of the most influ-ential seventeenth-century theorists, had produced the noblest epic poem (Works 5: 267).1 Second, Virgil’s fable, which told of the Trojan Aeneas’s departure from Troy and settlement on the site of future Rome was intimately yoked to mythology encompassing British history and employed by such notable eighteenth-century writers as Alexander Pope. The persistence of the Trojan-British link and its perennial relevance to writers was facilitated by the centrality to British letters of allegory, which had long intertwined native history with figures and events from ancient Roman, Greek, and British mythology.

Indeed, in the Humanist critical tradition by which Virgil found his way from the continental Renaissance to its English counterpart, the poet’s significance lay in his allegory. According to Cristoforo Landino, whose Disputationes Camaldulenses and other works marked the “zenith” of Virgil criticism for the Italian Renaissance, the “deepest secrets of philosophy” lay in Virgil’s “mysteries concern-ing the wanderings of Aeneas and the departure of that man to Italy” (Kallendorf 519, 523–34).2 Landino draws attention, as Craig Kallendorf observes, to the moral philosophy of Virgil’s universally applicable poem, so that the Aeneid is a complete source of ethical precepts for all men and women: “Virgil’s poem,” Landino says, “por-trays every kind of human life, so that there is no class, age, sex, or, finally, no condition which could not learn from it the entirety of its duties. With what keenness, I ask you, with what flood of words does he rail at fear, cowardice, prodigality, incontinence, impiety, treach-ery, and every kind of injustice along with the remaining vices?” (525–26). Virgil’s virtuous hero moves from the active to the con-templative life as he comes to understand the nature of the summum bonum, which makes sense, finally, in a wholly Christian paradigm (520, 543). Equally for the earliest English commentators, Virgil’s sacred moral lessons lay couched in his allegory. Notably, the English scholastic philosopher, John of Salisbury, viewed the Aeneid as a repository of moral exempla and wisdom. Its philosophical and sacred truths were veiled in allegory so as to protect them from the vulgar (Lerer 31). Of particular interest to John of Salisbury were Virgil’s gates of sleep in Aeneid VI, which he examined “as physical and psy-chological allegory of the human inability to distinguish true from false” in light of the Dream of Scipio, filtered through Macrobius (27). Such Platonism was derived from Chartres, where John studied,


Introduction 3

along with his famous contemporary Bernardus Silvestris. Both men viewed Aeneas, whom they believed embodied Virgil’s infallibility, as a prototype of a Christian Everyman, and both associated him with St Peter (Lerer 38; Scott 59–63).

The political dimension of Virgilian allegory came to England via Servius, a fourth-century grammarian and author of a famous com-mentary on Virgil. For Servius, as Richard Thomas explains, the imperial nature of the poem is its raison d’être and its “political out-look” is “clear and univocal—to praise Augustus through his ances-tors.” Thomas notes further that this is “an easy message for Servius to infer, living and writing as he did after centuries of increasingly autocratic rule, with the divinity of the emperor an absolute given” (93). The imperatives of this political Virgil meet those of his moral and ethical identities in what was for the English Renaissance the pinnacle of Virgilian allegory: Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

As commentators on that poem remark as a matter of course, the Ancient was an obvious choice as both model and forebear for the Englishman’s own mythmaking.3 Spenser’s fervently nationalistic poem entwines English history in the Servian Virgil’s Augustan poli-tics, as well as drawing directly from the allegorical tradition in offer-ing ethical and moral guidance to its gentlemanly and gentlewomanly audience. The poet’s aim was to glorify his nation’s history through heroes who set virtuous examples for the poet’s contemporary and future countrymen. Crucial to Spenser’s task was a sense of the sacred purpose of history. Accordingly, just as Virgil has his Aeneas visit the underworld to view the future heroes of Rome before he enters Latium and takes action for the destined empire, so Spenser recounts the line of British monarchs to Elizabeth descended from Brute the grandson of Aeneas. In this way the translatio imperii of Rome to Britain is given historical authenticity as it is set within the epic framework. As Edwin Greenlaw comments, Spenser’s “praise of the Tudor house . . . was the expression of a philosophy of history, of a conception of British destiny. He did not invent it, but found it ready to his hand in a score of places. He glorified it, so that it became part of the structure itself of the greatest work of the imagination produced during the Elizabethan period” (2).4 What facilitated this sanctification of British history through romantic fictions and so established The Faerie Queene as a national monument to the glory of that history was absolute conviction in the divinity of the epic poet’s allegorical mysteries, particularly those of Virgil.5 The Renaissance commentator, Julius Caesar Scaliger, felt that the ancient poet



surpassed nature itself: “We could not take from any one work of nature herself the examples which we have borrowed from one work of Vergil” (Weinberg 349).6 In theory at least, as Virgil Made English will later demonstrate, the “divinity” of the epic poet’s allegory and morals was still undiminished by the end of the seventeenth century, when the highly influential René Le Bossu claimed that “Poets play the Moral Philosophers, yet still they are no less Divines. The Morality they deal withal, does indispensably oblige them to have a Vein of Divinity run thro all their Works: Because the Knowledge, the Fear, and the Love of God; in a Word, Piety and Religion, are the chief and solidest Foundations of other Vertues, and of all Morality” (4).

As an epic poet in his own right, Spenser was imitating not the Aeneid per se, but Virgil’s methodology: the fusion, as Wm. Stanford Webb puts it of the Aeneid, of “legendary, historical, and contempo-rary persons into an epic of Rome’s greatness” (72–73). Virgil’s hero was particularly well suited to the allegorical and didactic empha-ses of Spenser and his contemporaries. Noting first how the “lan-guage used in the Renaissance to describe the character of the epic hero also overlaps with the literary Platonism of the period,” James Nohrnberg discusses how the “Aeneid was generally regarded by the Renaissance as representation of the whole man in all his parts” (28–29). William Sessions’s study of Spenser’s “plural legends” in The Faerie Queene takes into account Virgil’s Georgics as well, as he inves-tigates this Renaissance notion from the viewpoint of Virgil’s plu-ral labors. “Primarily,” he argues, “Spenser views Aeneas not as an abstract moral paradigm but, in a tradition from the earliest Vergil commentators, as an exemplification of virtues. This method of a plural Aeneas Spenser employs for his contemporary generation of courtiers; it will offer young men (and women) new possibilities for human nature, actively ethical (virum) and political (arma)” (202). Indeed, when Scaliger argued for the emphasis of character over action, which Aristotle had privileged in tragedy, he saw as offering the best examples of poetic achievement “Vergil from whose divine poem we shall establish the various kinds of persons” (Weinberg 348). Viewed ethically or politically, the Aeneid was a storehouse of history and civic example for Renaissance England.

Like the belief in the divinity of epic that Le Bossu could espouse unabashedly in 1675, Spenser’s practical use of the sanctifying pow-ers of epic to bolster English history had a far-reaching legacy. Almost three-quarters of a century after the Faerie Queene appeared, Servian Augustan ideals with their accompanying vision of sacred


Introduction 5

imperial history were once more drawn into active duty as writers contemplated the Restoration settlement after two decades full of civil war, the execution of a king, and rule by parliament. Twenty-first-century historians emphasize the uncertainty surrounding the recall of the prince in exile. Citing the well-known passage in John Evelyn’s diary where he wonders that Charles’s return was achieved “without one drop of bloud, & by that very Army which rebell’d against him: but it was the Lords doing,” N. H. Keeble comments that no one “who had lived through the unprecedented turmoil of the previous twenty years, and particularly through the bewildering eighteenth months since Cromwell’s death, had any reason to be con-fident that this settlement in the affairs of the state would prove to be more durable than the succession of constitutional contrivances which had succeeded each other with increasing rapidity” (Evelyn 246; Keeble 2). Since the Restoration was “as startling to its beneficia-ries as to its victims,” that is, the prevailing sentiments even amidst the rejoicing over the king’s return were “disorientation and appre-hension.” The situation was such, Keeble ventures, that “neither tra-dition nor history offered any guidance” (2). Yet his opening remarks about the tactics of “panegyrists anxious to recommend themselves to the new regime or to secure a patron” indicate where consolation for recent history really lay: in “speaking of a new dawn, a new age, akin to the settling of Rome by Augustus after its civil wars, if not to the universal peace promised by the birth of Christ.” The many responses to Charles’s return that fell back upon the Augustan vision of imperial history and lessons in civic virtue suggest that a shared public desire for stability rather than self-serving panegyrists fueled the epic impulses.

The best-known now of what Keeble calls those “splendid pub-lic affirmations of security and stability, of right order restored on the ruins of the past” are Dryden’s Augustan poems, which present Charles II sometimes as a struggling Aeneas, sometimes as a bedev-iled King David (1). Like their less skillful but plentiful counterparts and like the triumphant arches built for the king’s coronation and celebrated in John Ogilby’s The Relation of His Majesties Entertainment Passing through the City of London, to His Coronation (all discussed below), Dryden’s poems rely upon Virgil to offer the finality that recent history cannot by promising the return of Justice and dem-onstrating the continuation, after disruption, of sacred history. The typological underpinnings of these works facilitate the assurance they offer, as Keeble recognizes when he conflates Dryden’s Astraea



Redux and Charles II’s proof of his own sanctity by touching victims of scrofula; both effectively constituted “conventions of representa-tion” that “served both to reawaken a traditional sense of the maj-esty of kingship, to justify Charles I and the Stuarts, to explain the Restoration and reassure disillusioned subjects that this time there was a revolution in national affairs that was divinely managed” (39). The typology in turn, however, derived its credibility from the divin-ity of epic, and epic was associated through the Servian Virgil with imperial victory and through the Spenser’s mythmaking efforts with British imperial destiny. David Quint puts his finger on the force of epic endeavor when he says that epic “draws an equation between power and narrative. It tells of a power able to end the indetermi-nacy of war and to emerge victorious, showing that the struggle had all along been leading up to its victory and thus imposing upon it a narrative teleology—the teleology that epic identifies with the very idea of narrative” (45). What Dryden, say, shared equally with Spenser and with Virgil (according to Servius), was a sense that “nar-rative, like ideology, is itself empowering. The epic victors both project their present power prophetically into the future and trace its legitimating origins back into the past” (Quint 45). Even Milton, who rejected earthly monarchy and its claims on history, turned to epic to produce a poem that is “emphatically,” says Keeble, “of and for its age,” but which, as Quint notes, “reclaims the Virgilian typol-ogy for God alone, the only true bestower of an intelligible histori-cal narrative, a narrative whose final shape is promised but not yet revealed” (Keeble 133; Quint 45). For Spenser in the Renaissance, as for seventeenth-century Royalists, the linking of glorious past, cha-otic present, and glorious future was facilitated by the tradition that yoked Trojan, Roman, and English genealogy.

So deeply engrained in English culture was this genealogical tradition and so forceful the Virgilian epic impulse that they were embraced by supporters of William III’s dubious regime as well as prominent writers in the eighteenth century. Those whose goal was to support a Stuart had an easier task. In celebrating Queen Anne and victories of the War of the Spanish Succession, Matthew Prior, for example, claimed to be writing “in Imitation of Spenser’s Stile” as he shaped “An Ode, Humbly Inscrib’d to the Queen: On the Glorious Success of Her Majesty’s Arms, 1706.” Prior’s “Preface” refers the poem to the tale of British descent from the Romans: “I have turn’d to the Honor of the BRITISH Nation, descended from


Introduction 7

BRUTE, likewise a TROJAN. That this BRUTE, Fourth or Fifth from ÆNEAS, settled in ENGLAND, and built LONDON, which he call’d Troja Nova, or Troynovante.” Prior attributes the story to the historians: “if not to GEOFFREY of Monmouth, at least to the Monkish Writers.” While he acknowledges its dubiousness, he points skeptical readers to Virgil’s poetic authority: the genealogical story “carries a Poetical Authority, which is sufficient for our Purpose. It is as certain that BRUTE came into ENGLAND, as that ÆNEAS went into ITALY; and upon the Supposition of these Facts, VIRGIL wrote the best Poem that the World ever read, and SPENSER paid Queen ELIZABETH the greatest Compliment” (Works 230–31). More famously, Pope, in his “Windsor Forest,” celebrates the return of a Stuart to the throne and the peace of Utrecht by employing the Virgilian typological paradigm of historical progress. Like Dryden in his Astraea Redux (1660), Pope surveys the ruins of recent history: “A dreadful Series of Intestine Wars, / Inglorious Triumphs, and dishonest Scars” (1: 180; 325–26). Also like Dryden, however, he then offers consolation through a vision of the rolling years ushering in a new Golden Age under a divinely anointed monarch:

At length great ANNA said—Let Discord cease!She said, the World obey’d, and all was Peace!In that blest Moment, from his Oozy BedOld Father Thames advanc’d his rev’rend Head.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The figur’d Streams in Waves of Silver roll’d,And on their Banks Augusta rose in Gold. (1: 181–82; 327–36)

Strongly reminiscent of the climactic moment in Annus Mirabilis (1667) where King David (Charles II) creates harmony from the chaos of war, plague, and fire, Pope’s lines insist on the mythology that Spenser and his contemporaries had perpetuated. A similar cast of Roman deities and familiar imagery of a “vext World” finding “repose at last” in “Augustus Arms” help celebrate William III in an anonymous poem entitled “An Heroic Poem upon his Majesties Most Gratious Releasing the Chimney-Money” (1689). Like his Stuart pre-decessors, this “Great MONARCH has our Fears releas’t,” yet his link to them is forced, his “Extraction,” vaguely, “from an Ancient Line.” Typically of attempts to force Augustan principles onto a history that had outgrown them, this poem lacks the typological element: divine allegory has dwindled to analogy.



Further reinforcing the ostensible lack of change in the Augustan tenor of English literature from the Renaissance through the mid-eighteenth century is the ubiquity of neoclassical theory founded on Aristotelian principles. In 1672 appeared René Rapin’s Observations on the Poems of Homer and Virgil: A Discourse Representing the Excellencies of Those Works; and the Perfections in General of All Heroick Actions. Out of the French by John Davies of Kidwelly. The work was prevalent well into the eighteenth century, becoming part of the English Whole Critical Works of Monr. Rapin that was printed at least three times by 1731.7 The title of Rapin’s Observations establishes the still exalted sta-tus of the heroic and its two greatest poets, while the discourse opens by emphasizing the traditional historical and national functions of epic. Rapin quickly assures seventeenth and eighteenth-century readers that history is divinely controlled and that Aeneas is the perfect hero because of his civic devotion: “The Gods, moved with that Piety of his, concern themselves to establish him in the noblest Country in the world; and he becomes the Founder of the most flour-ishing Empire that ever was.” Just as he did for Spenser’s tale of many labors, “Virgil makes a conjunction of all the virtues to frame his [hero]” (Observations 10–11, 22). For Rapin, values remain absolute, and the old vision of historical progress through empire and national virtues persists.

Rapin’s convictions find parallels in Abbé Le Bossu’s Traité du poème épique, published in France in 1675. As Stuart Curran remarks, its “influence was instantaneous and far-reaching.” Curran notes its many continental publications as he points out that it was “popu-larized in England through the translation of ‘Mr. W. J.,’ issued in 1695 and republished in two volumes in 1719” (Le Bossu vii). The treatise was also disseminated widely in the eighteenth century, as parts of it were included in “innumerable editions of Pope’s trans-lations of Homer published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (vii). Bossu agrees with Rapin that epic poetry is, as his translator puts it, “the Principal and most sublime part of all Poesie” (Preface). He also defines its primary function in moral terms: “The Epopea is a Discourse invented by Art, to form the Manners by such Instructions as are disguis’d under the Allegories of some one important Action, which is related in Verse, after a probable, divert-ing, and surprizing Manner” (6). Still, Bossu’s emphasis is on rules and the civic and historical function of epic as he presents what his translator sees as “the strongest Arguments to perswade Men to be Vertuous” (Preface).


Introduction 9

Ostensibly, that is, Virgilian Augustanism was unassailable—a cultural constant that helped English writers and audiences to endure, even make sense of, the blows of history. What the examples just outlined do not reveal, however, is the deep-seated skepticism working against this neoclassicism, probably even before the 1650s, but certainly from the Interregnum onward. Even the Faerie Queene destabilized epic wholeness through its mode (it is a series of tales) and generic uncertainty (Romance? epic?), features that have more in common with the fragmented Virgilian efforts of seventeenth- century writers examined here than with Virgil’s epic. Undermining the celebrated values of epic and its sacred history as well as epic writ-ers and their intents, this skepticism took many forms: notably, new literary modes; manipulation of classical figures, precepts, and works to promote contemporary seventeenth-century interests; mockery of epic; and shifts in notions of the function of poetry. Theorists too were challenged, if less obviously. While eighteenth-century editions of Rapin and Bossu continued to exalt Homer’s and Virgil’s divin-ity and their civic lessons, for example, Voltaire simultaneously asks who really enjoys Homer and what he has to offer eighteenth-century audiences.8 Similarly, while Pope insists on the divine elements of epic, he shifts attention from the genre’s civic and moral usefulness to its poetic splendors to satisfy the tastes of his time. Virgil Made English will show how Voltaire’s practicality and Pope’s insistence on the poetic represent imperatives that can be traced back to Dryden’s fragmented but lovely translation of Virgil in the 1690s and beyond that to Virgil translations of the 1650s and 1660s. Accordingly, in shaping actual uses of the Classics, these forces affect and reflect general literary endeavor.

Many critics have noted the challenges to the Augustan neoclas-sicism just outlined that occur in various works in the Restoration and eighteenth century. Howard Weinbrot, for example, highlights the poet’s skepticism of the very traditions he draws upon in Windsor Forest, concluding of that poem and the Rape of the Lock that they “are, in part, products of British campaigns against Greece, Rome, and France” (Britannia’s Issue 275). Weinbrot also dispelled the notion of “Augustanism” in his revolutionary book, Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (1978). This study is devoted, however, to shattering the “omnibus belief that during the reign of Augustus Caesar the throne was the center of value” and that the “exalted character of the monarch induced stable government, the arts of peace, protection by heaven, refinement of literary style,



and patronage of great authors” (5). Necessarily Weinbrot focuses on depictions of Augustus and their use in eighteenth-century politics and literature.

Despite revisionist scrutiny of individual neoclassical texts and the impact of a work like Weinbrot’s Britannia’s Issue demonstrating the progressive eclipse of ancient and foreign values by native British ones, and despite continual observations that this age produced no actual epic except Milton’s emphatically non-Augustan anomaly, how-ever, key critics still assume the persistence of traditional Augustan principles and politics. In 1999, for example, the meticulous histo-rian Joseph Levine published a discussion of the Ancients/Moderns debate, which takes Dryden’s Augustan comments in the Dedication of his 1697 translation at face value, and so sees the translation and its politics wholly in the Renaissance sense. For Levine, Dryden’s reflections on Virgil’s predicament concur with traditional English Augustanism: “Virgil’s poem was meant to teach Augustus how to gov-ern well and with the affection of his subjects, to become, as it were, a new father of the country on the model of his ancient predecessor, Aeneas” (107). Accordingly, Levine presents contemporary literature as impeded in its development by the Ancients’ rules and authority: “despite decades of sporadic pleading, the moderns had made very little headway in claiming poetry and literature for their side” (98). In his 2001 book, Richard Thomas argues that the ubiquitous “Augustan reader” of Virgil persists from Horace, Virgil’s contemporary, through at least twentieth-century fascist Europe. He defines this reader as seeing in Virgil’s works “endorsements of the aims and achievements of Imperator Caesar Divi filius Augustus (as he would eventually be called), endorsements generated either by Virgil’s own political and ideological conviction or by the application of external suggestion” (xii). Like Levine, Thomas sees Dryden as a key figure in perpetuat-ing the Servian Virgil in the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, Robin Sowerby, in a 2001 essay, hinges his argument on an Augustan “aes-thetic,” a “refinement” that is “achieved by the systematic application of artistic principles and techniques supremely embodied in the poetry of Virgil.” Consciously disregarding any “political associations,” he demonstrates this Augustan refinement “by juxtaposing the mature Dryden with the early Augustan Denham” (“Augustan Dryden” 53). Yet his argument about the stability of the Augustan aesthetic pays no heed to the resistance to it—to the deliberately unrefined lan-guage employed in well-received drama and poetry by Dryden and his contemporaries, including the 1697 Virgil.


Introduction 11

Virgil Made English tracks the development of attitudes toward and uses of literary codes, cultural values, and texts originating from notions of epic supremacy and from Servian Augustan politics. It does so by showing how Virgil fared after the Interregnum, how his reputation changed, and what his Aeneid, in particular, looked like in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and afterward. Where previous studies have noted subversive elements in recogniz-ably “Augustan” works, this one tests the actual strength of ancient authority at different points in neoclassical England by examin-ing texts that owe their existence or much of their content to the Ancient whose authority was greatest at the start of the period under question. Indeed, Virgil Made English undertakes the work begun by Weinbrot’s chapter in Augustus Caesar on Virgil in the early to mid-eighteenth century. There he points to two excellent articles that, as he says, deserve more attention. T.W. Harrison’s “English Vergil: The Aeneid in the XVIII Century” shows “how Virgil and his epic lost esteem and influence because of their association with Augustus: as seventeenth-century royalism waned, so did admiration for the royalist poem” (Augustus Caesar 128). The other essay, however, poses the real issue. “Where,” Malcolm Kelsall asks, “is one to look for the successful positive recreation in English neoclassical literature of the great tradition in morals, arts, and government which the Aeneid both embodies and recreates?” (Kelsall 360; Augustus Caesar 128). The answer “nowhere” and its multiple implications for English literature after 1650 provide a starting point here. Of primary con-cern is the massive discrepancy between the neoclassical theories promulgated throughout the period by such authorities as Rapin and Le Bossu and the actual place of those theories in new literary works that ultimately reject their precepts. Simultaneously arises a dialec-tic between the authority of the past and the imperatives of contem-porary history and readership—competing forces seen as central to the emergence of the eighteenth-century novel but already present in efforts to employ Virgil in the mid-seventeenth century.

Crucial to the cultural metamorphoses of the seventeenth century and to the ways in which English denizens of the eighteenth century conceived their literary heritage is Dryden, who consequently plays a starring role in this book. The key work in his presentation of the clas-sics to eighteenth-century England is his fin de siècle Virgil. Fielding’s Scarecrow suggests as much when he subsequently confesses, in the scene described above, that he understands “no Language but my own”: as for his “translation” of Virgil, “Alas, Sir, I translated him



out of Dryden” (1: 250; 2.6). The importance of Dryden’s later works, especially his Virgil, as a watershed of literary change rather than a continuation of earlier literary practices, however, is still not fully recognized. Accordingly, Virgil Made English highlights the differ-ences between early and late Dryden, as well as the inconsistencies between Dryden’s neoclassical proclamations in his last decade and the profound skepticism underlying the Servian principles exhibited in his Virgil. The aim here, however, is to show that his attitudes toward and uses of classical literature in building a modern English heritage are typical of the century from the Interregnum through the mid-eighteenth century, and that the “modernity” of eighteenth-century literary characteristics originate in mid-seventeenth-century rejection of classical norms. The point that Virgil Made English will write large is apparent in Swift’s 1731 jeu d’esprit, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” as it is juxtaposed to a 1650s counterpart.

While Swift’s woeful description of the prostitute Corinna and her prosthetic and cosmetic aids has invited highly sophisticated criticism including misogynistic, medical, and psychoanalytical readings, the poem is, in the final analysis, a rejection of a revered classical genre (the pastoral) and its idealizing codes.9 The comedy, which, as Peter Schakel observes, bears a conscious kinship to Ovid’s “comic seriousness,” derives from the discrepancy between the borrowed “high” generic form of the poem and its lowly subject matter—a prostitute from the grimy streets of eighteenth-century London (137–40). This discrepancy provides a comment on the utility of a classical poetic form that exalts humanity and its pas-sions but is so easily punctured by the reality of bodily functions and human inconstancy. Swift’s impatience with the glossiness of classical forms is hinted in his choice of epigraph that, as Schakel notes, links his poem with a passage in Ovid’s Remedia Amoris that reflects how “We are won by dress; all is concealed by gems and gold; a woman is the least part of herself” (141). The dirt, the fleshiness, the problems that lie beneath the glossy surfaces of soci-ety and literature—these interest Swift. Yet, eighty years earlier, rejection of classical gems and gold marked the beginnings of a vogue that injected contemporary reality into even Ovid’s habitu-ally comic and ironic ancient stories. The title of James Smith’s 1653 self-proclaimed “mock poem” points directly to its function and its audience: “The Loves of Hero and Leander: A Mock Poem: with Marginall Notes, and other Choice Pieces of Drollery. Got by Heart, and often Repeated by Divers Witty Gentlemen and Ladies,


Introduction 13

that use to Walke in the New Exchange, and at their Recreations in Hide-Park.” The epigraph reads “Ut Nectar Ingenium” (wit is like nectar). The major purpose here is to entertain through witty inter-pretation of a classic. Like Swift in his poem, only consciously, this poet creates a common ground for a wider audience through his ver-nacular rendition of a story that now both “Gentlemen and Ladies” can tell to amuse each other in their daily social exercises. The poet quickly recognizes that he must reject the heroic in favor of everyday characters and events: moments into the story the hero, who has set out as his ancient forbears used to, “When Phoebus rose,” finds—as they never did—that “gravel got into his shooe” (2). Equally unlike her counterparts in the Latin, the heroine of this story comes across her future lover as she is “out walking with her Maid, / To doe the thing cannot be staid” (2).

Over three-quarters of a century of revolutionary political and cultural change separates these poems, yet inherent in both are fea-tures now recognized as typical of eighteenth-century literature. First, whether they do so consciously or not, both poets address an audience that is not confined to men educated in the Classics. Second, the humor that is central to both destabilizes the author-ity of the Ancients, as the poets irreverently mock their heroes and heroic codes. Swift may well exalt ancient authority in his Battle of the Books, belittling even Dryden’s efforts to emulate Virgil, but, as his own “Nymph” poem demonstrates, he and his contemporaries were in practice dispensing with the old modes and expectations. What is remarkable, however, is that the impulses of Swift’s poem have precedents in the 1650s. Nor is the “Hero and Leander” poem an iso-lated case. As Virgil Made English will demonstrate, major changes in notions of genre, of the social function of literature, and—as the dis-cussion here will soon make clear—of the relationship of literature to history evolve from the 1650s and consolidate in the new liter-ary forms and modes of the eighteenth century. A crucible moment (the subject of chapter 3) is the 1690s. Again Dryden plays a key role because his Augustan intentions, as they are mapped out in the Dedication of his Aeneis, are out of sync with what actually happens in his epic translation, which ultimately has much in common with the two poems just considered. Yet, the goal here is to demonstrate not just that Dryden’s late-career un-Virgilian Virgilian enterprises are typical of his time, but that they are the culmination of forces begun half a century earlier and that they anchor literary activity usually associated with the next century.



Accordingly, one major aim of Virgil Made English is to show how responses to the Classics, particularly to traditional Virgilian Augustanism, are intimately involved with and so shed further light on the transformation of literary endeavor and emergence of eighteenth-century “novelties,” a subject of great critical interest since the publication of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957). A focal point is the novel, as culmination and expression of the combined literary and social change. Michael McKeon, accordingly, stresses the importance of investigating the novel as a historical phenomenon when he points out that, as a genre, it has a “temporal and spatial existence” that constitutes its identity. Like other genres, the novel is a formal structure that “come[s] into being, flourish[es], and decay[s], waxing and waning in complex relationship to other historical phe-nomena” (“Genre Theory” 1). The historical phenomena that crit-ics concentrate on as major players in generic change and the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century are the Protestant Reformation, scientific revolutions, the proliferation of the printing press, the growing influence of a swelling mercantile class, and an interest on the part of readers in the present moment and national issues. Because most of these cultural changes occurred predominantly after 1700, discussion of the novel and generic change generally begin with the eighteenth century.

J. Paul Hunter is typical in placing the most important of what he sees as two waves of “novelty in the literary world” in the 1740s. The earlier one “dates from the 1690s”; it receives little more than a mention, however, on the grounds that it “had less literary respect-ability” (Before Novels 11).10 Precisely because Brean Hammond turns attention to literary responses to the Classics, and especially to the heroic, he can stake a greater claim for the importance of the 1690s as a watershed in literary change by mapping what he calls the “mock-heroic moment.” Arguing that this decade saw the appear-ance of “the first proper mock-heroic poem in English,” Hammond demonstrates that crises over genre and lack of confidence in the values manifested in those most esteemed genres, epic and trag-edy, culminated in a flood of mock-heroic in the 1690s (Professional Imaginative Writing 105). These poems arose “out of the same ide-ological matrix” as the novel, for, in the language of Bakhtin, they destabilized venerated genres by injecting the “dialogic and polyglos-sic” (those fundamental characteristics of the novel) into the “mono-logic and monoglossic” (the certainties of ancient epic). The upshot, as Hammond points out, was an abundance in literature throughout


Introduction 15

this decade of what would come to be seen as novelistic features: “expressive emotionalism,” characters that overreach the plots they inhabit, challenging of generic norms, and the emergence of, at this stage, new modes (Professional Imaginative Writing 126, 107–8).

The problems of seeing epic (and its heroic codes) as a monologic relic of a simpler world have been well documented and are con-fronted by Hammond. The importance of his argument lies in the attention it draws to the ways in which inherently “modern” literary activity founds itself upon the modes and codes of the venerated Ancients while simultaneously effacing ancient authority. How far back into the seventeenth century this “modernist” activity reaches and the extent of its impact on the role played by the Classics over the century in question can be seen by tracking the translations and uses of Virgil. What quickly becomes evident is how discourse with the past rapidly placed the Moderns on equal footing with the Ancients, then saw them eclipse and even dismiss their once vener-ated forebears, as ethics shifted from the realm of epic sanctity and became universally applicable moralizing. As with the gap between neoclassical theory and the actual practice of writers, with which Virgil Made English is concerned, appearances are deceiving. A glance at the sheer number of eighteenth-century translations and adapta-tions of Horace, for example, would suggest that ancient authority still reigned supreme. Horace offered, however, as Virgil did not, precedents that actually allowed eighteenth-century writers the flexibility to foreground their own imperatives, while claiming kin-ship with the past. Even the staunchly neoclassical Pope favored as a medium not the heroic, but the openness of the Horatian epistolary form. Critical discussions of Pope and Horace, moreover, inevitably demonstrate how Pope’s intent is different from that of his predeces-sor. In an article that is, in large part, about Horatian authority, for example, Sowerby observes that “in writing ‘in the Horatian way,’ ” a poet “using his own medium . . . could appropriate the Horatian and make it his own, integrating past and present to create something new”—and so establish his own authority as separate from that of his predecessor (“Pope and Horace” 166). As Pope’s preference for a clas-sical mode that allows him to assert himself indicates, what opened the way for Modern supremacy was the overturning of the tradi-tional hierarchy of genres that Bossu and Rapin were still touting in the eighteenth-century editions of their works.

The processes just outlined begin with the discrediting of the heroic that, in turn begins, Virgil Made English will argue, with the



failure to find contemporary vernacular equivalents for Virgil’s heroic codes and his politics. Because Virgil and his Augustan mytho-history had been so central to English notions of poetic excellence and national history, writers turned to Virgil’s vision of sacred his-tory and his presentation of a hero embodying national ideals as they responded to the unprecedented historical events that resulted in the Interregnum and the confusion of the Restoration settlement. Yet they became skeptical of his view of history and his ethics, for which there seemed no longer any contemporary equivalents. Instead, the Ancient’s translators and adapters began to incorporate into their works realistic elements and heroes who were flawed. In render-ing the heroic unconvincing, the translators in particular reveal its redundancy and the need for new modes of literature that address national issues. They also lay the foundations for these new modes by exhibiting characteristics that were to become features of the novel. Long before the prose fictions of Behn or Swift or Fielding, for example, translators of Virgil place unheroic characters and moments against an epic backdrop. The inability of seventeenth-century writ-ers to assume a sacred purpose or even to create a unity of history or action for an audience inhabiting a world that seemed impossi-bly ununified, furthermore, resulted in a series of translation frag-ments and episodic translations that have more in common with the eighteenth-century novel than with Spenser’s series of tales that knit together pieces of a divine British history. By the eighteenth century, the Servian Augustan Virgil has been erased except in embarrassed apologies, and with the retreat of the political goes Virgil’s moral usefulness. In the shadow of his lingering reputation, imitators and commentators work to find examples of the sublime in the ancient poet, but find that Milton’s authority surpasses Virgil’s.

The eroding of Virgil’s authority, then, was a profoundly dialogic process. Even as writers employed the new modes that emerged from conflict with the old codes, they placed Virgil at or near the center of their own creations. Most prolific were the collections and miscellanies that used the Aeneid as a focal point, encircling fragments of translation from it with an array of verse both seri-ous and light. Whether supporting a political agenda or aiming for aesthetic creativity, these collections all juxtapose the venera-ble Ancient with pieces that are unabashedly contemporary yet do not ultimately sit in Virgil’s shadow. Like Swift’s “Nymph” poem and the 1650s “Hero and Leander”, the content itself of these mis-cellanies reveals an intended audience much broader than the one


Introduction 17

neoclassical endeavors traditionally target. Equally conscious of an audience of both sexes, the highly educated and the less literate, a few plays dramatize elements of Virgil’s heroic for audiences while recognizing the necessity of a palpably modern frame of reference for it; in the process, rather than drawing judgment on modern inter-ests, the plays’ ancient content is manipulated to comply with them. The few poems that attempt to present an aspect of the Aeneid to late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century readers are also more committed to the dictates of the present rather than the past. By the eighteenth century, what the present dictates is aesthetic concerns over the political, and, again, this undermines Virgil’s utility even as homage continues to be paid to him. Pope’s proclamations about epic’s divinity, for example, and Trapp’s and Warton’s epic transla-tions of Virgil outwardly suggest little change in approaches to the Classics, yet Pope’s Homer, like the Trapp-Warton Virgil, ultimately exalts those qualities that are seen as strongest in English poetic achievement including translations of ancient works rather than the originals themselves.

Finally, there are the many parodies and mock-heroic treatments of Virgil that lay bare new approaches toward literature and, as Brean Hammond’s work on the 1690s suggests, provide a bridge between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Far from offering just lightweight entertainment, as critical neglect of them suggests, these jeux d’esprit offer, from the 1660s on, a body of important critical material. Conscious of their self-appointed task in probing the heroic, the parodists aimed their versions of Virgil at more worldly readers, who are themselves part of the inherently carnivalesque character of England’s post–civil war society. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have highlighted the way the court of Charles II “made a farce of the chivalric and classical icons of aristocratic and regal identity.” As they observe, the “defiant, transgressive devilry of the Restoration court seemed to betoken a crisis of nobility after the civil wars despite the control and political influence which it had maintained” (100–101). With the destabilization of aristocratic mythology and its attendant paradigms of divinely controlled English history, the literature that reflected (and propped) that mythology was equally undermined. The natural response was that offered by the parodies, a genre essentially “demystificatory” of what R. Stamm sees as tar-gets of the carnivalesque: “Class hierarchy, political manipulation, sexual repression, dogmatism, and paranoia.” In other words, the parodies are, to quote Stamm further, “carnival” in their “attitude



of creative disrespect, [their] radical opposition to the illegitimately powerful, to the morose and monological” (Stamm 55; Stallybrass and White 19). Through their impatience with heroic values that have no contemporary counterparts, the parodists also contribute to the undermining of the Ancients by questioning outright the accuracy of Virgil’s stories and expressing weariness with worn-out subject matter.

At the heart of these literary evolutions are rapidly changing notions of the past and, consequently, of the relationship of literature to history, changes that, in turn, affect the use of literary allegory. A major factor in the new outlooks on the nature of the historical past and its role in literary endeavor is writers’ abandonment of the typol-ogy Spenser relied on in his Faerie Queene. For Renaissance poets and critics like Spenser and Sidney, history was contained in heroic poetry so the physical and ethical prowess of epic heroes both traced and foreshadowed the divine path of history. Because true poets had access to divine truths, the political and moral instructions necessary for Spenser’s generation to guide history on its empire-bound course were merely an extension of those embedded in Virgil’s Aeneid. So central to his purpose was the epic poet’s civic function that despite poetical flourishes and romantic interludes, the historical authen-ticity of his sacred story was unassailable. Or, as Webb sums up the Renaissance conception of history and its relation to poetry, “epic poets get their arguments from history, variously altered or touched up, but fundamentally historical; in other words, ‘historical fact idealized’ ” (70).

In the eighteenth century, despite the lingering mythical geneal-ogy that traced England’s imperial mission back through Rome and Troy, history was no longer considered sacred. The utterly practical approach to the past that became typical is embodied, for example, in Abbé Banier’s 1739 Mythology and Fables, Explain’d by History, which begins by pointing out the superfluity of mythology in an age of rea-son: “The Knowledge of Mythology is not, to be sure, so necessary at present, as it appear’d to the primitive Fathers of the Church, whose Design was to establish Christianity upon the ruin of Idolatry, or by learned Apologies to vindicate their Religion from the Calumnies publish’d against it.” For Banier, “Knowledge of Mythology” is now useful not because it is inseparable from history, but because it “is a Part of the Belles-Lettres, and is of infinite use to our understand-ing of the Poets, and some of the Historians, who recite the ancient Fables, or make frequent Allusions to them” (1–2). This relegation


Introduction 19

of mythology to the realm of Belles-Lettres was common practice in the eighteenth century, and it had a profound impact on notions of typological prophecy or prefiguration that became more and more discounted, as Thomas Preston shows. By 1741 David Hartley could state that a “type is indeed nothing but an analogy” (Preston 188). Preston argues therefore that eighteenth-century historical nar-rative must be viewed in the same way as the novels and biblical criticism of the period: human action should be scrutinized on the grounds of reason and probable human behavior, not from within a divine historical scheme (184). Martine Brownley succinctly sums up both the historical interests of the century and the rejection of ancient mystique when she cites Edward Gibbon’s damnation of the Neoplatonists who “contributed less to improve than to corrupt the human understanding” as they “exhausted their strength in the ver-bal disputes of metaphysics, attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato . . . .” As historian, she says, Gibbon “reflected his century’s interest that the proper study of mankind is man” (176).

Yet, already in the 1690s, this interest in humankind, ultimately, rather than the divine path of history lies at the center of the histori-cal methodology of Dryden and his contemporaries; and the uses of Virgil in the last half of the seventeenth century illustrate the his-torical shifts and their effect on literary endeavor. Royalists in the Interregnum and early Restoration, such as Dryden in his public poems from Astraea Redux through Absalom and Achitophel, yearn for the kind of typology Spenser relied on but they lack conviction in it, as chapter 1 will demonstrate. The problem was twofold: there was too great a gap between historical reality and the poets’ idealized history; and, consequently, the heroic faltered as its codes, based on national ideals, became implausible. Even after Charles II’s restora-tion, the political and moral climate of England remained too unsta-ble (as the iconoclastic comedies of the 1670s bear witness) for an easy application of Virgilian ethics and historical promise. The real turning point, however, came with the Glorious Revolution, and the dilemma of Dryden’s Aeneis illustrates the force of the old typological patterns working against historical realities. While his Dedication and some key parts of his translation hark back to Virgilian prom-ises of historical purpose, Dryden finds himself ultimately unable to fit William III’s England into an Augustan epic scheme. Just as he always has, he draws analogies between Roman and English figures as he translates, but he now refuses to map English antitypes onto



Virgilian and biblical types. Instead, he employs the examples Virgil offers as he contemplates but remains inconclusive about the pres-ent. In so doing, he treats Virgil as eighteenth-century historians and writers like Swift would treat the Ancients: as a source of examples of kingship and human behavior, not as a sourcebook of divine history and ethical blueprints.11 The ancient past had always been a source of useful examples; what was lost was the sense of its sanctity. Nor was Dryden alone in the 1690s in exercising the new secular relation-ship between history and literature that resulted from the retreat of typology. Even Sir Richard Blackmore, who outlines a heroic geneal-ogy from King Arthur to William III in hopes of tracing the unbro-ken progression of history, flounders, as Dryden does, in his use of typology. Like Dryden, he manages effective moral use of allegory, but, not realizing the loss of the typological, he becomes exasperated with allegory, floundering and ultimately denouncing it in a passage that has drawn derisive critical comment. For the Blackmores, then, just as much as, finally, for Dryden in both his Aeneis and his Fables—a consciously modern epic—mythology was a feature of Belles-Lettres, not a key to history.

By the 1690s, that is, neither history nor literature allows for the “monumental historian” as John E. Curran calls those charged “with glorifying the history of their people and with conveying the memory of all their deeds to posterity so that the great may live forever”—those who “cannot admit to a forgotten past” (500). Instead the antiquarian impulse—though not yet recognized as such—actively shapes the pre-sentation of the past. In the face of critical approaches that focused on the differences between past and present, not on the continuities, the authority of Virgil and his fellow Ancients diminished considerably, despite the persistence of theories exalting them. Nor did translators and adapters any longer seek to invoke the spirit of the original in updated material; rather, they became interpreters, trying to discover the cultural and historical significance of the original in order to com-pare and contrast past and present. By the eighteenth century, this insistence on the pastness of the past had affected Virgil to the extent that Christopher Pitt had to airbrush his examples to make them use-ful. Antiquarian concern with the tangible also resulted in numerous Keys, which strove to provide historical insight into Virgil’s allego-ries. These works, like the enormous annotated scholarly translations of Virgil and the first prose translations of heroic poetry, took on an essentially modern form as they sought rather to demystify him than to pay homage to a “divine” voice.


Introduction 21

Virgil Made English is arranged chronologically to present a history of Virgil’s English life after 1650 and so to trace the decline both of ancient authority and the pertinence of the Classics in an age labeled neoclassical for its supposed homage to the ancient world. This history also reveals that eighteenth-century literary forms and characteristics can be traced back through mid-seventeenth-century turmoil and the reassessment of literary values that accompanied it. Despite what the theorists proclaimed, furthermore, the Moderns were never truly impeded by ancient rules and authority. Even during those decades of the seventeenth century when attempts to resurrect the divinity of English monarchy called upon the vision of the English Renaissance Virgil, attention to contemporary imperatives ensured a steady movement away from time-honored literary forms and values. Yet the activity outlined here took place in genres generally deemed trivial—indeed undeserving of the status of a genre—and therefore unworthy of critical attention: translation, adaptation, and parody. Another purpose of this book, accordingly, is to draw attention to the importance of these genres not just as homes for the Classics but as active participants in the evolution of English literature.

The first two chapters look at Interregnum and Restoration uses of Virgil to address the political confusion that followed the civil war and efforts to resurrect Charles II’s authority as monarch. During the early part of this period, Royalist translators and poets employ Virgil to offer consolation for historical chaos. Despite their conviction still in the authority of the epic, however, their works are unable to make Virgil’s heroic work for post–civil war audiences. The fragments of translation reflect the fragmentation of a once-sacred history, while the poetic collections of Sir Robert Howard and John Denham are unable to maintain their heroic ambitions. In this early period, too, appeared John Ogilby’s Royalist translation of Virgil in two differ-ent versions. Ogilby also employed Virgil in his Entertainments, which glorified Charles II as an English Augustus. In both cases, however, Ogilby’s biggest concerns are his own prowess as author and book production as an art; consequently he produces a Royalist poetic that, in the end, has little to do with Virgil. In his scholarly pedantry, moreover, he exhibits an antiquarian interest in the pastness of the past rather than in its present relevance. His translation, as a result, looks like those that eighteenth-century writers will produce.

Between 1670 and 1680, as chapter 2 demonstrates, there was a resurgence of neoclassical theory, reiterating Aristotelian procla-mations about the exalted status of the epic and the importance of



its civic function. There were in Restoration England, however, no original works produced to support the theory. Indeed, the later part of Charles II’s reign saw a loss of confidence in Virgil as a political or historical advisor. Instead, the revered Ancient found himself popu-larized in the ubiquitous miscellanies—a mode that by its very nature broke down the old hierarchies of literature and appealed to the prev-alent taste for novelty. Prolific parodies of the heroic in general and Virgil in particular were also popular in this period. Chapter 2 ends by examining these as a body of literary criticism that questioned ancient values and expressed a need for new subject matter.

The watershed of change that took place in the 1690s is the subject of chapter 3. Dryden and his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid dominate this discussion of how writers hearkened nostalgically to a venerable English past while (in some cases) flamboyantly rejecting its values and experimenting with new forms. Reflecting on the confusion of a decade reeling with unprecedented political change, Dryden in his famous Preface of the Aeneis concedes the theoretical authority of the heroic but is unable to supply a contemporary foundation for it. The translation itself, meanwhile, not only develops the work of the Restoration parodies in questioning the usefulness of ancient dictates, but also confronts head-on the dilemma of a national his-tory that no longer seemed continuous and the concomitant ethical upheaval. The result is an “epic” that exhibits an eighteenth-century notion of history and an equally eighteenth-century ambiguity about heroism. Nor was Dryden alone in his struggle with the paradoxes of a moment that fiercely clung to old values while readily reject-ing them. Richard Blackmore’s epic Prince Arthur and Thomas Fletcher’s poetic collection both attempt to bolster William III’s reign by employing Virgilian mythology and heroic codes. In neither case, however, do the ancient paradigms ring true as they are made to accommodate new political realities; instead, just as Dryden does, both poets reveal the arbitrary universe and questionable heroism of the next century. The chapter ends with a discussion of efforts toward a new kind of epic by looking at John Lewkenor’s and John Crowne’s mock-heroic attempts as well as Dryden’s self-consciously modern Fables.

Chapter 4 addresses the varied treatments of Virgil from the first decade of the eighteenth century through Joseph Warton’s 1763 Works of Virgil. By the eighteenth century, the decline of classical author-ity was readily apparent, and critics offer competing theories as to why this is the case. Yet Virgil’s presence, if not ubiquitous, was still


Introduction 23

widely felt. The purpose here, accordingly, is to examine what role the Ancient did play at a time when interest in contemporary authors and modern notions of true poetry unequivocally trumped ancient authority. For a start, the Ancient’s earlier seventeenth-century political significance is gone completely. Those who acknowledge the Augustan political element of the Aeneid follow Dryden in focus-ing instead on the examples of good and bad governance the poem offers. The Renaissance sense of a divinely controlled mythical his-tory is altogether absent from Virgil commentaries, and a whole mode of writing, the Keys and Key-like commentaries, seeks to rationalize Virgil’s mysticism by tracing the historical situations and figures that the poet represented in allegorical form. What these dealings with Virgil all underscore is a sense of the otherness of the past that contrasts starkly with the seventeenth-century sense of the presence of history. The final part of chapter 4 examines the ways in which early eighteenth-century writers and poets employ Virgil. Here the common element is an unapologetic manipula-tion of his poetry, whether it is the subject of the work or lies in the background. Fielding, for example, alludes constantly to the mighty Ancient in his popular novels, yet ultimately he dismisses epic val-ues rather than paying them homage. Likewise, the most notable translators of the age—Joseph Trapp, Christopher Pitt, and Joseph Warton—ensure that ultimately Virgil’s ancient notions of heroism conform to those of the eighteenth century, while contemporary ideas of the sublime and beautiful displace classical literary impera-tives. The discussion here of Pitt and Warton’s massive production, in particular, compares their poetic techniques and hero to those of Dryden in order to underline an abiding concern of Virgil Made English: the seventeenth-century roots of literary characteristics deemed eighteenth century in nature.

The continuity beyond the mid-eighteenth century of the literary processes outlined here is underscored in chapter 5, which provides an overview of attitudes toward Virgil and his fellow Ancients in Britain’s Romantic and Victorian eras as well as in colonial America. This chapter is concerned with the appropriation and metamor-phosis of classical traditions by writers, who lived in a time when it was fashionable to deride epic and ignore the Romans. To be sure, curricula in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British universi-ties and public schools as well as in the earliest American institu-tions were built upon drills in Latin language. Usually, however, these served further to alienate the Classics from those they were



inflicted upon—which was a very small portion of the population. The inspiration of ancient Greece, in particular, helped to keep the Western classical world alive in Britain after the mid-eighteenth century in Britain, just as the examples of Republican Rome encour-aged colonial Americans. For, in creative atmospheres where origi-nality was celebrated and imitation abhorred, some key writers and thinkers found the classical tradition and its authority irresistible. To be useful, however, that tradition must be made vibrant in the present, and works as different as Wordsworth’s aborted translation of the Aeneid and Byron’s Don Juan illustrate the pull of the past on writers committed to the “truth” of the present. For women, in par-ticular, unspoiled, as Isobel Hurst points out, by those enthusiasm-killing Latin drills, the Classics became an authoritative source of material for distinctly new works. In colonial America, the impor-tance of truly new beginnings with foundations deep in the past meant the constant invocation of classical ideals and writers in the formation of the new Republic. Yet, as Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight recognize in their major American poems, The Colombiad and Greenfield Hill respectively, anything appropriated from the clas-sical world had to be thoroughly transformed to meet the needs of a present that was related to but distinct from the past.


CHAPTER 1

VIRGIL IN THE 1650S AND 1660S: DISMANTLING AUGUSTANISM

Prologue

The most remarkable aspect of the Restoration of the exiled Prince Charles to the throne of England in 1660, historians now stress, was its complete unexpectedness.

As Keeble comments, citing John Evelyn’s “representative” incre-dulity at events that were “past all humane policy,” the Restoration “appeared” to occur “not simply without human agency, but contrary to human contrivance, rendering impotent political and military power, as the very Army which had warred on Charles I, defeated and executed him, and abolished monarchy, effected the return of his son to the throne” (32).1 Even for those contemporary witnesses most intricately involved, Keeble adds, recording their remarks, this latest political revolution was “miraculous.” No less a figure than General Monck, who had been a major source of anxiety following the death of Cromwell and who was even rumored to desire supreme power for himself, declared: “It was not I that did this; you know the Jealousies that were had of me, and the oppositions against me; It was God alone who did it” (19, 33). So wondrous was the Restoration settlement that it promoted, as Tim Harris ventures, “widespread belief” that “the old order could be successfully restored—witness gestures such as tearing the pages out of council minute books for the intervening period, as if destroying the record of the past would be enough to effectively eradicate it” (Restoration 6). In the efforts to secure stability at last, Charles II’s Act of Oblivion, to which Harris refers, and the glori-ous public celebrations of the restored king’s power were crucial; so too was the turn to tradition that Ogilby’s representations of the king (demonstrated below) epitomized. In the fullest sense, the supporters of the Restoration—or even those simply relieved by it—were inhabit-ants of an epic moment. The impulse of those striving to anchor the



Restoration settlement was to present the “epic victors” (in this case, the king and Royalists) in such a way, as David Quint explains epic’s power in the West, as to “project their present power prophetically into the future and trace its legitimating origins back into the past” (45).

Naturally, many Royalists turned to Virgil, portraying Charles II as a new Augustus laying to rest the threats of civil war. The crucial element of tradition that Virgil offered lay too in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1138), where Monmouth claimed that the legendary founder of Britain, Brut, was the great-grandson of Aeneas. He also located Arthur in the line of British kings. As Joseph Levine accounts for the turn to classical author-ity, the “Restoration was both tired and frightened of political and religious innovation and warmly welcomed a return to the classical paideia with its promise of political stability—a stability based (as in ancient Rome) on deference to an aristocratic governing class that had once been and could now be again, especially trained for its voca-tion” (38). The English Servian Virgil tradition, upon which Spenser had drawn, moreover, was perfect for a culture in which, as Steven Zwicker argues, the “distinction between politics and aesthetics” had, in the wake of 1649, been erased, so that “all the work of the literary imagination is embedded in polemic and contest” (Lines of Authority 1–2). To engage in literary activity was necessarily to engage in politics, and, as William Frost notes, “at least a dozen Virgilians” in the period before and after the Restoration “found themselves, at one time or another, either in hot water or in close proximity to it” (“Translating Virgil” 273). William Davenant, in the Preface to his Gondibert (1650), assumes that literature and politics belong still to a small group of elite, and that the chief function of the heroic was civic: “Nor is it needfull,” he remarks, “that Heroique Poesy should be levell’d to the reach of Common men; for if the examples it pres-ents prevaile upon their Chiefs, the delight of Imitation (which wee hope wee have prov’d to be as effectuall to good as to evill) will rec-tify by the rules, which those Chiefs establish of their owne lives, the lives of all that behold them” (13). He then addresses himself “To Leaders of Armies, as to very necessary Men (whose office requires the uttermost aides of art, and Nature and rescues the sword of Justice),” reflecting “How much their [leaders of armies] Mighty Predecessors were anciently oblig’d to Poets; whose Songs (recording the praises of Conduct and Valoor) were esteem’d the cheefest rewards of Victory” (31). Davenant links the glory of the past to that of the present and places (epic) poets at the center of national victory.


Virgil in the 1650s and 1660s 27

Yet, the English tradition of secular typology on which Spenser, for example, relied is missing from Davenant’s epic theory. His approach to the poet’s duty is very practical as he reflects that poets “with wise diligence study the People, and have in all ages, by an insensible influ-ence govern’d their manners” (32). Even during the epic momentum of the 1660s a decade later, poets lacked conviction in a typological his-tory. Despite the miraculous event of the Restoration and the heroic aura, which at first engulfed it, the first decade of Charles II’s reign was mired in insecurity. Keeble maps out the prevailing uncertainty over monarchy itself, as well as the impact on the national psyche of numerous factors ranging from the devastating series of Dutch wars to the plague and fire to Charles’s irresponsible handling of fiscal matters and his mistresses, and his failure sufficiently to reward his Interregnum supporters (51, 60–61, 82–83). Examining the responses of Bunyan and Milton to contemporary Royalist propaganda, Keeble points out that as much as it was an era of Augustan promise, the “Restoration world” is “Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, the Fair of the Prince of Vanity, an idolatrous Philistia devoted to Dagon, the king-dom of Beelzebub, the domain of the Great Whore” (137). Milton, as Quint puts it, “reclaimed the Virgilian typology for God alone, the only true bestower of an intelligible historical narrative, a narrative whose final shape is promised but not yet revealed” (45). Others too refused to deify an earthly monarchy. In one of the numerous con-gratulatory poems to Charles II, entitled “The Restauration: Or, a Poem on the Return of the Most Mighty and ever Glorious Prince, Charles the II to His Kingdoms,” the Oxford scholar, Arthur Brett, responds in a genuinely heartfelt manner, calling the king “Royal Father, Royal Heir” and claiming “I know not how to vent my joy” [1]. As he reflects on the outpouring of verse, he ponders how to broach so “rich a Subject” and immediately rejects “False-Latin Heraldry” [2]. While he goes on to wish for “a Fancy as Divine / As Virgils, and as smooth and fit / As Ovids, when of love he writ,” he insists that “The Story I must now rehearse, / Deserves a more than common Verse” [3]. For Brett, “more than common” means honest, for instead of lauding Restoration events with heroic embellishments, he draws attention to the “Stratagems, those lawful Cheats” and the suspicious nature of events leading to peace. Impatient with the untruths of the heroic, he calls for a realistic confrontation with history.

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how writers contin-ued to employ Virgil in the Augustan mode and reverted to ancient authority in this period of renascent Royalism even as they recognized



the inadequacies of traditional literary and historical modes. As a result, they created essentially modern forms of literary expression well before the eighteenth century, and classical authority began the decline that Virgil Made English traces. Dryden’s two most Augustan public poems of the 1660s embody these tensions, providing a good starting point for a discussion of Restoration “Augustanism.” The title of Dryden’s inaugural Restoration poem, Astraea Redux or “Justice Returned,” evokes Virgil’s “Augustan” era as well as the English tradition of divine monarchy. As Dryden’s California edi-tors remark, “From Virgil through Manilius and Dante [Astraea] had been associated with imperial authority as well as justice; and in the reign of Elizabeth English poets over and over again identified the monarch with the virgin Astraea, the symbol of justice combined with imperial, secular power” (Works 1: 213). The main purpose of the panegyric is epitomized in the last lines, which echo Jupiter’s prom-ise of Roman “imperium” in the first Aeneid as the poet prophesies English empire without bounds under Charles II:

And now Times whiter Series is begunWhich in soft Centuries shall smoothly run;. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Abroad your Empire shall no Limits know,But like the Sea in boundless Circles flow. (1: 30; 292–99)

Dryden’s “translation” of Virgil, transfers Virgil’s imperial promise to the new English monarchy. Yet, false notes ring throughout as the poet admits his own profound doubt: “What King, what Crown from Treasons reach is free,” he asks, “If Jove and Heaven can violated be?” (1: 23; 39–40). He also destabilizes his heroic with bitter satire: “Thus banish’d David spent abroad his time, / When to be Gods Anointed was his Crime” (1: 24; 79–80). Most telling is the fragmentary nature of the poem: an epic vision accounting for years of historical disaster does not fit into three hundred lines.

The same ambition and the same problems shape Annus Mirabilis (1667), Dryden’s most conscious attempt at the heroic. In the prefa-tory “An account of the ensuing Poem,” he claims to “have cho-sen the most heroick Subject which any Poet could desire.” Yet, he decides to call the poem “Historical, not Epick, though both the Actions and Actors are as much Heroick, as any Poem can contain. But since the Action is not properly one, nor that accomplish’d in the last successes, I have judg’d it too bold a Title for a few Stanza’s,



which are little more in number then a single Iliad, or the longest of the Æneids” (1: 50). The subject matter was unable to sustain heroic treatment because it was inherently unheroic: the (Anglo-Dutch) war Dryden calls “most just and necessary” was certainly not viewed that way by his contemporaries; Charles II was known less for his “care, management and prudence” than for his fiscal and moral care-lessness; and “the Fire” of 1666 was certainly not, as Dryden claims, “the greatest Argument” of England’s epic status (1: 50). The plague and the fire simply deepened the already widespread disillusionment with Charles’ regime: “events of 1665–6,” Keeble comments, “were a shock to the nation, but it is not the immediacy of their horror alone which explains the reaction to these catastrophes. They derived their significance for contemporaries from their intensification of a sense of unease and disillusionment which had been steadily deepening since the first two or three heady years following the Restoration” (164). In the poem, Dryden undoes his own heroic endeavor as he almost mocks the heroic. The battles, for instance, become comic as the Dutch “fight like Husbands” and the English “like Lovers.” The “political and social tumult” confronted is linked, as Zwicker notes, with the king’s sexual excess. In images that reflect literary portrayals of Charles II in the 1660s, the winds that spread the dev-astating fire are described as “crafty Courtezans” while the fire itself “leaps up at [its prey] with inrag’d desire” (1: 93; 881). In allowing a national problem (the king’s voracious sexual appetite) persistently to surface, the poet subconsciously despairs over England’s prob-lems even as he attempts to spirit them away with an assurance of Charles’s “Piety and Fatherly Affection” as national savior (1: 50). Equally detrimental to the Virgilian promise of historical disaster thwarted by divine intervention is what Zwicker calls “the elaborate and self-conscious literary machinery of Annus Mirabilis” (Lines of Authority 201). Dryden’s contrived substitutes for Virgil’s heroes and interfering gods bespeak his skepticism at the notion of a universe in which Providence ensures that national suffering will have its reward at some ever-distant future point.2

The tensions of Astraea Redux and Annus Mirabilis are those of the “Virgils” discussed here, which are those of their time. Poets’ lack of faith in Virgilian promises about history and national hero-ism characterizes the translations (in all their forms) of the 1650s and 1660s, even as the adapters of Virgil exhibit an ardent desire for the authority of tradition. Even John Ogilby’s Virgil, the first full translation of Virgil since 1632, marks a distinct shift away from the



Renaissance Servian Virgil. Having first published his translation in 1649, then reworked and republished it in 1654, and reprinted it in the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s, Ogilby capitalized upon the moment to ensure his success as author. His greater interest in the burgeoning book industry than in the classical past led him to produce a transla-tion that is a forerunner to the popularizations of Virgil that began in the 1670s and flourished by the end of the seventeenth century. This change in status of the “Prince of Poets” following 1649 had reverberations for the place of the Classics in England. In part, this had to do with an acknowledgment by those reworking the Classics that they must be made more accessible to a growing public audi-ence. Harris remarks that by the Restoration the written word was available to a broader audience than has been previously supposed. Printed materials, “especially the shorter pamphlets, news-sheets and broadsides” enjoyed “a wide circulation, often being deposited in coffee houses and other public places so that they could be read by those who could not afford to buy their own copy” (Restoration 18). Extant literacy records, moreover, are not reliable. As Harris points out, people learned to read before they learned to write so that many more people doubtlessly could read than the “signature” tests indi-cate. This was especially true for women, “since females tended to be educated up until the point where they could read, but to leave school before they learned to write” (18). Certainly, the poet of the “Hero and Leander” discussed above takes for granted that men and women equally were conversant in the ancient story he retells. The fragments and miscellanies examined here also cater to a greater variety of tastes and education levels—and sometimes abandon the authority of tradition.

The FragmentsBetween 1616 and 1658 there appeared at least seven editions of the Latin works of Virgil (Publii Virgilii Maronis opera): proof that the Ancient was alive and well among scholars and aristocrats. From 1600 to 1632 there were, by contrast, only two translations of the complete works. The first by Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne went through three editions; the second by John Vicars exists only in the 1632 printing. After 1632, there is no (recorded) publication of a translation of Virgil’s works until John Ogilby’s 1649 translation. In the first half of the seventeenth century, that is, very few readers, who were not proficient in Latin, experienced Virgil in his epic entirety. If



Ogilby’s unremarkable translation (discussed below) is disregarded, there was no wholly epic Virgil between 1632 and 1697 when Dryden completed his much-awaited translation. Yet, there were countless fragments of translation of an author whose reputation still eclipsed all others’. Ironically, however, their chosen modes worked against those Royalist translators like Dryden and those described below, who strove to apply the Virgilian myth of translatio imperii (empire transferred) to contemporary English history: if Virgil works only in fragments then the wholeness of sacred history (which he promises in the Servian tradition) is itself a myth.

In the 1650s it was simply too dangerous for Royalists to employ Virgil, the established poet of imperial power, even in a translation with disguised commentary on contemporary problems. There were only two Virgil translations during this decade, both fragments and both ultimately hamstringed in offering traditional Virgilian conso-lation. The most overtly Royalist dress Virgil wore is that of Edmund Waller and Sidney Godolphin’s translation, The Passion of Dido for Aeneas: As It Is Incomparably Exprest in the Fourth Book of Virgil (1658). The names of both poets appear on the cover and both were con-spicuous Stuart supporters, Godolphin having died in action soon after the war broke out, and Waller having written many panegyrics in Royalist mode. Presented as a noble love poem, this rendition of Aeneid Book IV expresses its political intent through the cavalier mode it signals, its title and authors evoking a Caroline world of love and authority. Furthermore, as Graham Parry suggests of Richard Fanshawe’s inclusion of Aeneid Book IV in his 1648 Poems dedicated to Prince Charles, such a timely translation of the Dido episode “sounds the theme that destruction is a prelude to reconstruction,” for a “city or a state may be devastated, but a greater one awaits its creation” and the “prince, as fugitive hero, must not yield to the ener-vating temptations of love and ease” (Parry 43).3 Certainly, as Waller and Godolphin’s Dido praises her hero’s “high Heroick deeds,” reflecting that “this brave Prince his equall mind doth beare / Above all Chance,” the translators present a Caroline cavalier living the vita activa for the sake of his country.4 The political significance of the translation, however, is limited to Caroline codes, and for whatever reason, the customary dedicatory material is absent.5 Ultimately, the love poem is detached from greater context; it is an isolated fragment of Virgil, a remnant of a lost Arcadia.

In the following year, 1659, James Harrington’s Virgil’s Æneis: The Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Books appeared and simultaneously



undermined Virgil’s poetic and political bedrock. The books chosen for translation by a devotee of Charles I during the Interregnum are natural enough: those that tell of Aeneas’s wanderings and concerted efforts to reestablish a homeland.6 Harrington’s Royalist gestures too are obvious. Introducing himself “To the Reader,” he makes the aristocratic claim that the “translation of Virgil hath not been my Work, but my Play” (Virgil A3). Continuing in this Royalist mode, he addresses Virgil in his note from “The Translator to the Author” as “my Soveraign in Poetry” (A3). His Royalist stance is most obvious in the opening of the translation. Harrington begins “The Third Book” in terms that ring with contemporary application:

The Gods thus pleas’d to over-turn the ThroneOf Priam, with his guiltless race, to oneNeptunian Troy, now no where to be found,But all in Embers smoaking on the ground;By Oracles dispers’d, and forc’d intoExile, for wasts, or unknown worlds we go:The Woods of Ida, fram’d into a Fleet,Afford us wastage, launching at her feet;We gather men, embarque, uncertain whereWe shall be landed by the Fates to steer. . . . (1)

From the translation of “res Asiae Priamique . . . gentem” (the Asian kingdom and Priam’s nation) as “the Throne / Of Priam, with his guiltless race” to the dependence on iconography linking the Stuart monarchs to “Neptunian” naval power and the uncertainty “where / We shall be landed by the Fates to steer,” the “Exile” and “wasts” and “unknown worlds” through which the reader here enters the trans-lation are as much those of Harrington’s England as of Virgil’s epic.

Just as readily as he draws upon the monarchist Virgilian tradi-tion, however, Harrington topples its poetic and political authority by puncturing the mysticism and allegory on which that authority depends. First, he makes the—at this date—outrageous sugges-tion that Virgil can be rendered redundant. While granting that “Virgil’s poetry is the best in Latine; and he who can bring it to the best in English . . . shall be his truest translator,” Harrington sees translation—or English literary efforts—as possibly replacing the originals: “the English Reader may sufficiently judge of like trans-lations, without referring himself unto the Originals” (A4). This affront to ancient supremacy becomes more specific as the address from “The Translator to the Author” shifts from homage to critique.



Harrington is eager to assure his “Soveraign in Poetry” that he refuses to “be injurious to thy name.” Yet, he objects, “we, / What’s possible, and what is not, may see.” He now lays out his objections:

Thou never shalt perswade me to informOur Age, (a) Æneas in thy greatest stormCould raise both palmes , though to the Gods; one handAt least had hold, or there he could not stand.(b) Nor is it in a Picture to deviseHow Hector round his Troy should be dragg’d thrice:Thou shalt not make me say, (c) A Fleet could glideWithout a Wind or Oare, a Stream or Tide. (A5)

A handful of similar objections follow, most of which stem from Harrington’s refusal to follow Virgil in showing the “overt passion” of Dido. The relevant lines of Latin are cited in footnotes under the complaints, and the translator accordingly ignores Virgil’s offending lines.

Harrington insists on the literal rather than allegorical signifi-cance of Virgil’s poem. What he rejects is Virgilian Platonism, or a wholesale acceptance of the prototype pious prince and his divinely guided voyage to absolute power.7 Most immediately, this rejection dissipates the divine aura embracing Virgil’s poetry. The poet also questions the traditional English Virgil’s usefulness to an increasingly complex and nonmystical world. The Royalist Harrington’s progres-sive views are most succinctly expressed in the second of his Aphorisms Political published the same year as the Virgil.8 Here he stresses the need for change when change is demanded: “When the Foundation of a Government cometh to be changed, and the Governours change not the Superstructures accordingly, the people become miserable” (Political Works 762). In his 1650 Preface to Gondibert, Davenant had similarly recognized the need to adapt even the most sacred insti-tutions as he noted, “Lawes, if very ancient, grow as doubtfull and difficult as Letters on bury’d Marble, which only Antiquaries read” (33). For adherents to the (divinely anointed) king’s supremacy, such a statement was unthinkable, yet Harrington, like Davenant before him, realized the need to relinquish the past for the past’s sake and to move into a future where circumstance dictated the shape of monarchy.9 In such a world, the old Virgilian paradigms were too rigid, Virgil’s poetry and his politics too limited. Not until the 1690s, however, would a major poet struggle with this problem—still rather



apprehending than comprehending Virgil’s decreasing usefulness to a culture that for so long had embraced him.

Certainly, with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Royalists turned to Virgil and to translation, the act itself, even broadly defined as in the case of Astraea Redux, promising, in the Royalist tradition, a “transcendence, the healing wholeness that removes controversy and contradiction rather than using it as a basis for construction.”10 John Boys, in his two translations of 1661, most obviously maps Virgil’s Rome onto Charles II’s London, yet embedded in even Boys’s ardent Royalism is an uneasiness that signals the beginning of Virgil’s decline as prophet. Boys translated the two books of the Aeneid that allowed him best to work in the Medieval and Renaissance tradi-tions of Virgilian allegory and to advance the Spenserian concept of Virgilian investment in the present for the national glory of the future. At the end of his Æneas His Errours, Or His Voyage from Troy into Italy: An Essay upon the Third Book of Virgils Æneis, he extrapo-lates, in “Some few hasty Reflections upon the precedent Poem,” on the paradigm that Virgil’s age offers his own. He first claims that his “ultimate end” here was not “barely to deliver the story of Æneas his Errours or Peregrination from Troy into Italy” but rather to give “the full prospect of a well-order’d Commonwealth, with all the integral parts thereof” (52). Accordingly, he asks the reader to “behold first in the grosse or general, our supposed Commonwealth, to wit, a ship, or Fleet at Sea, between both which the Allegory or Comparison is as nat-ural, as it is familiar” (53). Central to this allegory is “the accomplish’d Æneas, the Prince or supream Magistrate, as the principal member, or rather head of our Common-wealth” (53). Like Aeneas, Boys’s English prince embodies key national virtues: “First, in his Piety; secondly in his Wisdome; & thirdly in his Valour” (Æneas His Errours 54). The parallel between the English and Roman divinely guided historical moments is underscored as Boys reflects that “now at last, after all those strang and multiplied revolutions, we to our ineffable joy, see your sacred Majesty, (like another Æneas in his promis’d Italie) by the undeniable conduct of the divine providence seated and firmly fix’d in your paternal Throne, never thence to be remov’d, till such time as you shall be translated from earth to heaven” (Æneas His Errours 60). Despite such beatitude, Boys does not forget the requirement that the epic poet—or at least those working in epic mode— instruct, to employ Rapin’s phrase from the next decade, “Princes and Grandees” (Observations 8). Disguising his advice as praise of Charles, he urges a balance between the king’s power and parliament’s: “we require



in our Prince, and finde it in our Æneas, a readiness in taking, and an ability in giving good Councel, the first your Majesty hath suf-ficiently demonstrated as well in the choice of your Councell, and Correspondence all along with your Parliament, as you have the latter in your management of affairs, of which we all see the happy effects, and taste the blessed fruits” (Æneas His Errours 59).

While Boys pulls all the clichés of Royalist Augustanism, a hesita-tion about both English politics and his chosen mode seeps through his confident optimism. He ends his “Hasty Reflections” not with celebration but with recognition of a pressing problem. “[W]hereas our Author, in the whole, exposeth his Æneas to many difficulties, during his Navigation,” he warns, there are many “impediments & dif-ficulties that every kind of Regiment is subject unto, which . . . in publick proceedings are innumerable and inevitable . . . therefore the people ought not to fall out with their Governours, or cavil at the Government, upon every petty miscarriage” (65). Herein lies the rub: how can Virgil instruct a volatile people, who have already been proven more than capable of overthrowing a divinely anointed king? Similar doubt about the actual effectiveness of Virgilian Augustanism underscores his dedicatory epistle to Lord Viscount Cornbury, eldest son of the Lord High Chancellor of England. To be sure, Boys hails his patron as “so great a Mecenas,” but he feels obliged to discount his fragment of translation as “no more than a Pamphlet, and, by consequence, very much beneath [such] Patronage” (italics reversed). This modesty is typ-ical of translators, yet Boys’s choice of the word “pamphlet” is telling, for in the 1660s, it was doubtless synonymous with the self- serving and ephemeral propaganda of 1650s literary warfare. He presses the issue, moreover, seeking (almost apologetically) justification for his translation:

Great wits have not blush’d to undertake and publish one single piece of this excellent Author, of whom every book indeed is of it self a compleat Poem: Hence we have Mr. Sandys his Essay upon the first; Sir John Denhams upon the second, and the united studies of Mr. Waller and Mr. Godolphin upon the fourth of the Æneis: I aspire not to the unequalld Excellencies, and deserved fame of those worthy Gentlemen. . . .

There is no mention here of Ogilby’s complete translation; from Boys’s standpoint, Virgil lives on in England only in fragments, his own efforts weighing in as pamphlets.



The same concern plagues his second translation: Æneas His Descent into Hell: As It Is Inimitably Described by the Prince of Poets in the Sixth of His Aeneis. Boys’s dedication this time is to the father of his previ-ous patron, Sir Edward Hide, Lord High Chancellor of England, and he signals right away through his flattery of Hide his continuation of the allegory of Æneas His Errors: “How happy then is the Prince where so prudent and trusty a Minister hath the chief management of affairs? and how secure the People where so experienc’d and watch-full a Pilot sits at the helm?” In the Preface to the Reader, he likewise begins by hailing Virgil “the undoubted Prince of all Heroick Writers, whether Greek or Latine” and immediately outlines the Roman poet’s allegorical designs “to represent heroical virtue in the person of his most accomplish’d Æneas” and “to celebrate the Name and Family of the Emperor Augustus, in extolling his Æneas, from whom that Cæsar, by the Mothers side, deduced his Pedegree” (italics reversed). Again, however, Boys notes the relative neglect of the “Prince of Poets.” Reflecting that “the second, fourth, and sixth books of his Æneas are by the learned preferred to the rest of his elaborate productions,” Boys continues,

The first of these (which contains the destruction of Troy) hath been so happy as to fall into the hands of a Translator [Denham] inferiour only to the Author himself; I need not add the Gentlemans name, his own worth rendring him sufficiently conspicuous. The fourth (whose subject is the passion of Dido for Æneas) hath been equally blest, as having been made speak English by the united Studies of two Gentlemen no less eminent then the former. I wish that the whole Æneis had learn’d our modern dialect from such excellent Masters. But since the long and pertinacious silence of those Gentlemen, is a sufficient assurance to me, that they intend to wade no further in their begun undertaking, I have (as ill-fitted as I am) ventur’d upon the traduction of the sixth of the Æneis. . . .

The question that clearly plagues Boys is this: why if the age is so ripe for Virgil, so in need of hearing him speak in “modern dialect”—why the silence from those clearly capable of making him speak? Why, in short, is there no Virgil in this Virgilian age? Again conspicuous is the fact that the many editions of Ogilby’s Virgil do not count.

Nonetheless, Boys ploughs on in full Royalist mode. In Æneas His Errours, he had evoked the Renaissance adoption of Virgil’s toils in historical time for the fulfillment of imperial destiny by quoting,



in his “Hasty Reflections,” one of the few actual occurrences of the word “labor” in Virgil’s corpus: “Quæ regio in terris vestri non plena laboris?” (What place on earth is not talking about with your toils? [Loeb 1: 272; 1.460]). The line supports Boys’s praise of Charles II’s “Valour, both Active and Passive,” the effects of which “ring” in “England, Scotland, France, Flanders,” and the point culmi-nates in prophecy of Charles’s apotheosis (Æneas His Errours 59–60). This Renaissance emphasis on Aeneas’s labors on behalf of national glory was doubtless the reason Boys chose to translate Virgil’s sixth book.11 Here, with the help of the Cumaean Sybil, Aeneas descends to the underworld where he is permitted a vision of Rome’s future and receives instructions from the ghost of his father, Anchises, about the labors he has yet to undertake. Virgil’s sixth book ends with emphasis on these labors: Anchises is depicted “firing” Aeneas’s mind with “love of the glory that is to come” (Incenditque animum famae venientis amore) and advising him “which toils he is to under-take and which to avoid” (Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem) (Loeb 1: 570; 6.892).

When Boys translates this final passage, however, the practicality of Anchises’s speech is overshadowed, the word “labor” gone. The Father, Boys says,

his sonnes minde with the heroick thoughtOf future fame inflamed, him hee taughtWhat warres hee was to wage, with whom to fight,Latinus strength, and did at large reciteHow he should or incounter, or declineAll hazards waiting on his vast designe. (Æneas His Descent 32–33)

The substitution of “hazards” for “laborem” (work, toils) per-haps alludes to Charles II’s hazardous toiling for his homeland, yet alongside Boys’s interpolated “heroick thought” and “vast designe” it gives Anchises’s words a vague, idealistic quality. The key to the translator’s barely perceptible misgiving is in the “Certain Pieces Relating to the Publick, Penned by the Author” that Boys appends to his translation. The first of these political bulletins dated 1659 and 1660 is “The Declaration of the Nobility, Gentry, Ministry and Commonalty of the County of Kent; together with the City and County of Canterbury, the City of Rochester, and the Ports within the said County: Penned and presented by the Author to the Mayor at the Town Hall of Canterbury, Jan 24, 1659.” Boys begins by “weigh[ing]



the multiplied calamities wherein we are at present involved, how friendless we are Abroad, and how divided at Home . . . the total decay and subversion of Trade, together with the forfeiture and loss of the honour and reputation of the Nation, and . . . the apparent hazard of the Gospel, through the prodigious growth of Blasphemies, Heresies and Schism” (Æneas His Descent 218). He concludes, “That our desires are for a Full and Free Parliament, as the only probable means under God to lead us out of that Maze and Labyrinth of confusions wherein we are at present engaged” (219). Boys’s solution here accords with his warning to Charles II to maintain a balance of power with par-liament, but it emphatically does not accord with his epic impulse. The purpose of epic, as Davenant had reiterated in 1650 and as Rapin would in the 1670s, was to instruct those “Princes and Grandees” who embodied the virtues of a nation—not to instruct free parliaments founded on ever- proliferating interests and values. Admittedly, Boys’s pamphlet constitutes a 1659 viewpoint: agitation for a new parliament, Royalists believed, was likely to lead to the restoration of monarchy. Yet, in juxtaposing this 1659 argument with his 1661 Virgilian efforts, Boys highlights the gulf between Virgil’s heroic codes and the realities of contemporary England where the power of the people had become an imperative. The form of Boys’s Æneas His Descent into Hell further undercuts the author’s heroic aspirations. By printing with his trans-lation a series of occasional political documents, Boys in effect pres-ents his fragmented Virgil as part of the propaganda of an inherently unstable age, unworthy of myth. Moreover the lengthy “Annotations upon the Sixth Book” that replace the “Hasty Reflections” of Boys’s third book almost entirely ignore Virgil’s allegorical significance, so that Boys’s work becomes a scholarly inquiry into a romantic (thus dubiously historical) ancient past.

These discrepancies between ideal and real, between an author’s epic desires and his packaging are more emphatic in Sir Robert Howard’s thwarted use of Virgil to present the 1660s as a heroic age in his miscellaneous collection Poems (1660).12 Dryden was to immor-talize his brother-in-law, Howard, as Crites, the advocate of ancient supremacy, in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667), and his character-ization there is validated by Howard’s Poems as well as by his family convictions. In 1669, Robert Howard’s brother, Edward, would dedi-cate to his sibling The Brittish Princes: An Heroick Poem, seizing the opportunity to celebrate the old heroism intrinsic in birth and mani-fest in action as he commends his brother for being “justly rendred no less great in Heroick Examples, than you are Illustrious by Birth”



(A3). In his Preface, he again expresses confidence in “Heroick Poesie” and its continued pertinence to civic life. Acknowledging that the reputation of the Ancients is such that “it is hard for a Modern Poem of this [heroic] kind to find a Reception in the World,” he hints that “Homer and Virgil” eclipse modern efforts in any case, for they “erected their own Monuments to be everlasting with their Heroes, for whom they raised their glorious Principalities, with sublime instructions of humane life, that by them, the Prince is taught Greatness, the Statesmen Prudence, the Politician Craft, the Souldier Stratagem, the Philosopher Ethicks (with other high reflec-tions on that excellent Science), the Lover Nobleness of Passion . . . .” As he considers his own creation, Edward Howard puts himself firmly in the place of the heroic poet, drawing not upon history but inspired by the divine vision that shapes it: “The Reader must be so ingenious, as not to look upon my Poem as a History, but rather hold himself obliged to my Muse, that has provided Heroes and Princes, who, for ought he know, had then a being” (A4). He begins his poem by considering “Mighty Arthur’s Name; / Whose Noble Deeds, to Wonder did Compleat / All Virtues, which in Best of Princes meet” (1). He traces the fates of British monarchs through a sacred geneal-ogy until “great Second Charles, this Isle restores, / Too sadly griev’d, by Tyrant Subjects Powers” (194).

The same conviction in the contemporary relevance of heroic endeavors and the Augustan vision of history is at the heart of Robert Howard’s 1660 Poems. As his brother would later in the decade, Howard launches his address “To the Reader” in the exalted language of epic as he sings “praises of our Prince” (A3). Claiming that “man’s largest invention has been excell’d by His [Charles II] actions, there being nothing capable to make him appear more excellent than himself,” Howard sees England’s destiny as one with its national hero: “We are now presented that in him, which this world sparingly produces; in one composure, and object for our Consciences and Interest, in whose preservation, our Temporall and Eternall states have equall shares” (A4). The prefatory address in this way anticipates the first poem in the collection, a “Panegyrick to the King.” Formulaic in every way, this poem draws the obligatory comparison between Charles II’s and Aeneas’s struggles on behalf of national glory:

Once for your Kingdome’s sake you durst opposeYour Laurel’d Enemies with your conquer’d foes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



The bold Æneas so, having left TroyIn its own funeral flames, scorn’d to enjoySafety alone; but led by Vertues greatAs were the Dangers he was to repeat,Return’d among his ruin’d Friends and State,To bring them safety, or to fetch their fate. (7–8)

Clearly Howard’s design is a literary collection that embodies the glory of an age as crucial to the procession of divinely guided his-tory as Virgil’s Rome was. Dryden’s commendatory poem prefaced to the collection, “To my Honored Friend, Sr Robert Howard, On his Excellent Poems,” makes explicit Howard’s reliance on ancient authority: “To Charls your Muse first pays her dutious love, / As still the Antients did begin from Jove.” As Dryden also observes, Howard clinches his heroic framework as he closes with “A Panegyrick to Generall Monck.” That poem itself ends on a triumphant couplet praising Monck for his heroic assistance: “You that a KING a Scepter gave to sway, / And taught rebellious Subjects to obey” (285).

Yet precisely this couplet with its profound irony signals the fal-sity (though not the insincerity) of the premises of the collection. Howard here stretches the truth as blatantly as Dryden was to do in the prefatory material of Annus Mirabilis. Monck may have been at the forefront of Charles II’s restoration, but he was also, unforget-tably, at the forefront of the rebellion against Charles I; to onlook-ers and participants in the Restoration alike, he was “so dark a man, no perspective can looke through him” (Keeble 19).13 Howard’s own heroic is in this way revealed as mere rhetoric; given the characters and events of the 1660s, ancient epic and its heroes can no longer supply patterns that make sense of contemporary history. The same discrepancy between true heroic and the needs of Howard’s readers is evident in the mixed nature of the collection.

Virgil’s authority is invoked again in the translation at the center of the collection: “The Fourth Book of Virgill: Of the Loves of Dido and Æneas.” Howard strives to make Aeneas appear spotless as his Dido paints the hero much more generously than Virgil’s Dido does:

Much on his person, and his generous kindShe thought, much on the virtues of his mind.His charming Image fixes in her breast. (141–42)

She then asks her sister, Anna, “How noble is his Soul? How brave in Arms?” and concludes, “I think (nor vainly) he’s of heavenly



kind” (142). As Dryden points out, however, Howard’s efforts to “improve” on Virgil’s hero backfire as the epic struggles of the lov-ers become eloquent contemporary debate. The translation is fur-thest from the original, Dryden notes, near the climax of the poem when Dido curses Aeneas: “Elisa’s griefs, are so exprest by you, / They are too eloquent to have been true. / Had she spoke, Æneas had obey’d / What Dido rather than what Jove had said.”

Howard’s efforts to render the heroic into Restoration terms, that is, unwittingly subvert it. Yet, his familiarization of Virgil and consequent reduction of the Ancient’s status are part of the fab-ric of the collection, for he equates Virgil’s poetry and much lesser works. Even those readers inclined to view the minor poems and play as lightweight “extras” are directed by Dryden’s prefatory poem to see the work as a whole. Calling the collection “a piece too fair / To be the child of Chance, and not of Care,” he argues that “no Atoms casually together hurl’d / Could e’re produce so beautifull a world.” This description of a literary “world” places on a balance with the epic weight of Virgil, the “Panegyricks” to Charles II and Monck, the translation of Statius’ Achilleis, and the “Songs and Sonnets” that appear early in the collection—poems with as little as four lines and titles like “To Celia: Who desired to have Verses, that were writ-ten on Her in a glasse Window, to be given Her in a sheet of Paper.” At the center of this world, Howard juxtaposes his Virgil fragment with a play that embodies the wannabe nature of Restoration heroic poets.

Calling it “A Comedy,” Howard sets up The Blind Lady as a heroic play. The main plot focuses on the rivalry between the noble Phylanter and Mironault over a princess, who, like Dido, is an avid hunter living in land exceptionally vulnerable, it seems, to invading armies. Like Aeneas and other traditional heroes, both suitors are victims, as Phylanter admits in the play’s second line, of “Love and Ambition, Sir, those two great injuries / Of mens seduced minds . . . ” (29). The truly perfect prince in the play is the wise and pious father of the princess, Sigismond of Poland, whose kingship is epitomized when his general praises him for weighing “Things in so just and seri-ous a scale, / That whilst thus evenly you preserve your mind, / You’ll need no other Oracle . . .” (68). Hand in glove with this heroic tenor, major themes of the play are love’s power and its civilizing quality. When the king warns, for example, against “foul play” in Mironault’s plottings, the father of the rival prince himself concedes Mironault’s sincerity on the grounds that “Love, Sir, can alter all” (51). In the



Platonic mode of Cavalier poetics, ennobling love does alter all, rescuing the play from chaos. Mironault gets his princess, and his virtuous sister, Amione, tames his warmongering rival.

Yet, with the tastes of a contemporary audience in mind, Howard spoofs the heroic even as he employs it. Toward the end of Act Two, gratuitously for the plot, he introduces the namesake of his play: an ancient Blind Lady and her two dubious servants. With them they bring farcical action, low language, and a foil to the concept of noble love. Inexplicably, the Blind Lady bewitches Mironault’s cynical friend Pysander, ultimately gaining him as her seventh husband. From the start, Pysander comments darkly on the love that uplifts others: “For the kind constitution / Of a decaying Lover,” he advises Mironault in the second scene, “this is the short Receipt. In the first place, make your self—very—drunck” (35). Then as the subplot progresses, Pysander finds himself betrothed to and in love with a woman who has lived through “six King’s Reigns” (82). He anticipates marriage with her as “lying / With Bulrushes or penny Faggots; she’s mortality / Beyond a Death’s head and Memento” (92). The almost demonic quality of this relationship casts a long shadow over the otherwise Cavalier heroic lovers in the play.

Equally detrimental to heroic ideals are Sigismond’s long laments over his “glorious and frail Bark of Majesty” (67). Though he possesses all the requirements that Rapin prescribes for a hero, Sigismond protests his condition too much:

How much unknown is reall happinesse?And all are cheated with the name of things?Or we are all deceiv’d, or else the joyGrows poor by the enjoyment, to meA Crown’s a glorious misery,Suspition waits on all our appetites,And sleep not pleases but affrights.Kings have hard ways for to preserve a Crown,To give to others fears, and hide their own.The way’s but narrow between frowns and smiles,To avoid both Contempt and Tyranny.

In this opening of a lengthy soliloquy, Sigismond presents himself as an ordinary human bowed to breaking point by misfortune and as a king disillusioned with the idea of monarchy. The parallels between him and Charles II are obvious, especially when Sigismond remarks that when the people “venture to reform the State, / Princes must



suffer then / By their own fears, or by their people’s hate” (66–67). As a model of kingship, he undermines the heroic paradigm into which Howard has already cast Charles II and General Monck through his expressions of profound doubt. In the ensuing translation, Howard does not even grant Aeneas, during his departure from Dido, such human weakness. Howard’s Aeneas doubts not his kingly mission for a moment when Dido presses him to stay. To her first appeal, he responds coolly and politely:

This said, forewarn’d by Jove within his breast,With eyes still fix’d his troubles he supprest.At length replies, Fair Queen, I cann’t denyYour words or merits, nor shall ever IUnwillingly admit Eliza’s nameUnto my thoughts, whilst life inspires this frame.Thus much I onely say, I never tri’d,Or hop’d dissemblingly my flight to hide.

By the end of his speech he clearly has no love for anything but his mission: “But Phoebus now and Lycian Lots decree, / That I should fix my love on Italy” (155). Dryden’s 1697 Aeneas, by contrast, can barely contain his feelings:

Here paus’d the Queen; unmov’d he holds his Eyes,By Jove’s Command; nor suffer’d Love to rise,Tho’ heaving in his Heart; and thus at length, replies.Fair Queen, you never can enough repeatYour boundless Favours, or I own my Debt:Nor can my Mind forget Elisa’s Name,While vital Breath inspires this Mortal Frame.This only let me speak in my Defence,I never hop’d a secret Flight from hence. (Works 5: 468; 480–88)

This Aeneas is driven to Italy by duty, not by love: “But now the Delphian Oracle Commands, / And Fate invites me to the Latian Lands. / That is the promis’d Place to which I steer, / And all my Vows are terminated there” (5: 468; 496–99).

What, then, was Howard doing by electing to translate the episode from the Aeneid where Aeneas’s heroism is traditionally most in doubt, then juxtaposing his own impeccable Aeneas with a perfect king who undercuts his own powers? Why does he employ an epic framework to posit Charles II as a real-life mythical hero



only to explode the literary ideal with his wailing Sigismond? Why use comedy when he meant heroic seriousness? Whether conscious or not of the inherent contradictions of his collection—and The Blind Lady offers much evidence that Howard was not master of the modes he attempted—Howard feels the strain of an age at odds with a rhetoric that seemed an answer to its problems.

What the heroic has already become to Howard’s “Augustan” England is highlighted in the Statius translation he includes imme-diately before the “Panegyrick to Generall Monck.” Perhaps in an attempt to fortify the heroic underpinnings of his collection, Howard sandwiches between his Virgil and the Monck poem “Statius his Achilleis, with Annotations.” Yet, only to classical scholars would Statius’s poetic significance be familiar; the majority of Howard’s readers (those appealed to in the minor poems and The Blind Lady) would know him as a second-rate epic poet, one who, as the trans-lation reveals, has the great Achilles dressed in girls’ clothing and rescued by his mother. Even the length of Statius’s Achilleis is nota-bly unepic, though by following the Paris edition rather than the Amsterdam one, Howard remarks in his annotations, he has swelled the number of books from its customary two to five. He also stresses the elusiveness of the Ancients’ heroes, remarking in his exception-ally long invocation of the muse that “though in admired strains, / Great Homer sung” of the “great Æacides” and his deeds, “yet much untold remains.” He commences with uncertainty:

permit me nowTo guide my fearfull pen a little while,And on the great Achilles acts to toyl,Till I sing Thine, yet wanting confidence,And for thy Prelude with his name dispence. (171–72)

Howard accentuates his own sense of the otherness of the Ancients, as Dryden points out, by surrounding his translation with copious notes: “Your curious Notes [glossed as “Annotations on Statius”] so search into that Age, / When all was fable but the sacred Page, / That since in that dark night we must needs stray, / We are at least misled in pleasant way.” Dryden also pokes fun at the disguise of Statius’s Achilles: “Your [Howard’s] kindnesse great Achilles doth confesse, / Who dress’d by Statius in too bold a look, / Did ill become those Virgin’s Robes he took.”

By laughing at this Achilles and acknowledging that the ancient world is only accessible through a myriad of learned annotations,



Dryden highlights the gap between the heroic ideals and actual readership of Howard’s collection. As Howard himself recognizes by offering eclectic material and lowly language, his audience is composed not even of seventeenth-century Sigismonds but of those who attend the theater to enjoy the slapstick of The Blind Lady. Unacknowledged is the significant shift of authority from poet to audience. Davenant had observed in the previous decade that it was “not needful that Heroique Poesy should be levell’d to the reach of Common men” (13). In his collection, Howard unwittingly demon-strates, to the contrary, that any poetry with civic intentions must reach “Common men,” and as he embraces the humble in order to please such an audience, he is unable to sustain his epic premises. By inadvertently challenging the old hierarchies of genres, Howard attempts (almost as recompense) a generic fusion just as writers like Fielding would in the comic-historical-epic novels of the next century.

Sir John Denham, in his Poems and Translations with the Sophy (1668), also struggles with his commitment to Virgilian Augustan ideals and their increasing irrelevance to Charles II’s Augustan world. Like Robert Howard, Denham engages Virgil in a self-conscious Royalist poetics. Juxtaposed to the original poems, Denham’s two fragmented translations from Aeneid Books 2 and 4 (“The Destruction of Troy” and “The Passion of Dido for Aeneas”) strengthen his dependence on tradition, the mainstay of his poetics and his politics. While “The Passion of Dido for Aeneas” appears for the first time in this col-lection, Denham’s well-known and highly praised “The Destruction of Troy” is reprinted from its 1656 solo debut.14 As Lawrence Venuti argues, the title of that earlier publication subtly points to Denham’s lifelong dedication to the Royalist cause (197). Omitting his own name, Denham presented his translation as The Destruction of Troy. An Essay upon the Second Book of Virgils Æneis. Written in the Year, 1636. The imprint is For Humphrey Moseley. By withholding his name, Denham makes, as Venuti says, “a distinctively aristocratic ges-ture . . . typical of court culture in the Tudor and Stuart periods” (197). Moseley’s name also indicates the politics of the translation, for he was “one of the most active publishers of elite literature during the seventeenth century and a staunch royalist who advertised his politi-cal views in the prefaces to his publications” (197). Moreover, Venuti continues, the “temporal gap” between the date in the title and that on the title page “fills with significance from [Denham’s] own activi-ties in support of the royalist cause, both in the royal government and army during the civil wars and for the exiled family and court



during the Interregnum” (197). That the 1668 Poems and Translations is an extension of Denham’s previous literary and political efforts is immediately obvious in the dedication to the King. Here Denham talks of his sufferings in exile and his literary efforts under Charles I, making clear that his life works, of any persuasion, are absolute expressions of his devotion to king and country. Further stressing the continuity of his endeavors, he includes the old title page from the earlier Virgil with his translation—the date 1636 indicating the origins of this 1668 work.15 As poetics becomes politics and vice versa, the collection as a whole depends upon Virgil’s political sig-nificance to Stuart England. Yet, the authority thereby gained for the individual pieces and the traditions Denham strives to uphold in them is undermined by his necessary response to contemporary literary and political realities.

“The Destruction of Troy” is placed second in the collection, following the 1654 version of “Coopers Hill.” Denham in this way reinforces the complementary nature of Virgil’s and his own poetic struggles against major national upheaval: numerous editors and commentators have pointed out “Coopers Hill’s” dependence on Virgil and echoes in “The Destruction of Troy” of “Coopers Hill.” As the original Latin poem and the contemporary one in this way take on political disaster in similar language and with the same epic seriousness, English strife becomes a continuation of Troy’s and Rome’s sacrifices for imperial greatness, and Denham’s political efforts involve assuming Virgil’s poetic mantle.16 Even as Denham establishes evidence of the teleology of sacred history, however, his doubt pervades both his translation and “Coopers Hill,” dismantling his poetic edifice in the process. For a start, the revised ending of “Coopers Hill” casts a shadow over the mythology concerning England’s divinely ordained glory. All early editions of the poem end with a discourse on government that calls for popular obedience to the king. The last triumphant couplet advises, “And may that Law which teaches Kings to sway / Their Scepters, teach their subjects to obey” (O Hehir 90). But in the 1655 version (the “B” text) the discourse is pushed back, and the poem ends with the image of an overflowing river consuming the land:

No longer then within his banks he dwells,First to a Torrent, then a Deluge swells:Stronger, and fiercer by restraint he roars,And knows no bound, but makes his power his shores. (O Hehir 162)



Since throughout the poem, the river Thames is a hieroglyph of political power, as Brendan O Hehir claims, this dismal ending signals Denham’s disillusionment.17

The profound misgivings of Denham’s poem deepen in “The Destruction of Troy.” In the preface preceding the translation, Denham provides the first sustained English translation theory as he directs his readers to see Virgil’s description of Troy’s fall in English terms: “if Virgil must needs speak English,” he claims, “it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this age” (Works 160). He structures the collection to reinforce the implied fulfillment of Troy’s fate in England’s ongoing troubles by juxtaposing, on facing pages, the last lines of “The Fall of Troy” and the opening of the overtly loyal poem “On the Earl of Strafford’s Tryal and Death.”18 The related notion of the endurance, against all odds, of English Royalism as the telos of Roman (and Trojan) imperium is stressed in the final apocalyptic lines of the translation:

Thus fell the King, who yet surviv’d the State.With such a signal and peculiar Fate.Under so vast a ruine not a Grave,Nor in such flames a funeral fire to have:He, whom such Titles swell’d, such Power made proudTo whom the Scepters of all Asia bow’d,On the cold earth lies th’unregarded King,A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing. (Works 178; Poems 64)

The couplet yoking “State” and “Fate” attempts a positive message in the midst of horror that would ring with contemporary application to a post-1649 English audience: England’s divine-right monarchy will survive the fall of Charles I. The point is reinforced in Denham’s interpolated couplet, “Under so vast a ruine not a Grave / Nor in such flames a funeral fire to have.” Yet, as Venuti notes, hesitancy mars the confidence of even these lines when Denham admits the “signal and peculiar” nature of the king’s survival. In other words, Venuti goes on, “the king lived on but not in his kingdom” which was in the hands of a Commonwealth and Lord Protector (208). The mythology Denham at once props and questions receives a devastating blow in the last cataclysmic line where the king’s body becomes “A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.” In a Bakhtinian sense, this image signals the collapse of sacred hierarchies, for the “classical body,” associated with the sacred and the spiritual and epitomized in the



king himself, has been violently displaced by the “grotesque body” which allows no distinction between rank (Stallybrass and White 9). Further assimilating the royal person into the mass of the unwashed slain and so subverting the sacred is the labeling of the king “as a nameless Thing”; the figure in whom the highest titles of the land are sanctified is rendered an object, a nothing.19 The fragmentation of history, which this line both symbolizes and predicts, is reinforced as the translation breaks off at this point. Whereas Virgil offers some comfort in his second book as Aeneas and his family depart from Troy to begin anew, Denham leaves his reader focused on the dead king’s (unholy) “carkass” and unable to imagine a way out of the historical abyss.

While Virgil’s English presence at this point in the collection endows its politics with the epic seriousness that “Coopers Hill” affects, then, Denham’s seeping doubt and fragmentation thwart his Virgilian efforts. That ultimately Denham repudiates in his collection the epic grandeur to which he aspires is evident in its degenerative structure. The first three poems (“Coopers Hill,” “The Destruction of Troy,” and “On the Earl of Strafford’s Tryal and Death”) establish a continuum from Rome to Troy, in the process highlighting the national importance of Denham’s epic toils. Explicit Royalist politics inform the next three poems too. Rather than offering poems that will glorify a nation, however, Denham presents each as a news bul-letin (and, in the case of the last, one fit for the National Enquirer): “On my Lord Croft’s and my Journey into Poland, from whence we brought 10 000l. for his Majesty by the Decimation of his Scottish Subjects there,” “On Mr. Tho. Killigrew’s return from his Embassie, from Venice, and Mr. William Murry’s from Scotland,” and “To Sir John Mennis, being invited from Calice to Bologne to eat a Pig.” As the titles exile the poems from epic territory so too do the verse forms. After the classical dignity of the panegyric to Strafford, the nursery rhyme-like simplicity of the next two poems provides rather a shock. Despite the seriousness of Killigrew’s embassy, for instance, the verse reduces the event almost to limerick status:

Our Resident Tom,From Venice is come,And hath left the Statesmen behind him;Talks at the same pitch,Is as wise, is as rich,And just where you left him, you find him. (Works 111; Poems 70)



The abrupt shift to ostensibly English and vulgar verse forms reaches a low point with the farcical poem “To Sir John Mennis.”

Amidst this medley of classical and English, exalted and low poetry is Denham’s second translation, “The Passion of Dido for Aeneas.” Unlike “The Destruction of Troy” with its own title page, this translation appears unannounced, with no mention of Virgil. In this way it affects no more status than the poem it follows: “An occasional Imitation of a modern Author upon the Game of Chefs.” The fragmentation of the translation enhances this domestication of Virgil, for the poet is concerned only with the lovers’ quarrel. His consequent lack of interest in the heroic is apparent from the beginning:

Having at large declar’d Jove’s Ambassy,Cyllenius from Æneas straight doth flye;He loth to disobey the Gods command,Nor willing to forsake this pleasant Land,Asham’d the kind Eliza to deceive,But more afraid to take a solemn leave;He many ways his labouring thoughts revolves,But fear o’re-coming shame at last resolves(Instructed by the God of Thieves) to stealHimself away, and his escape conceal. (Works 181; Poems 128)

This hero responds like a man truly in love with Dido and with the comfortable life Carthage offers.20 Virgil’s Aeneas, by contrast, is struck dumb at the message from Mercury (definitely not called “God of Thieves” in the Latin); his voice sticks in his throat and his hair stands on end in lines that Denham ignores completely (At vero Aeneas aspectu obmutuit amens, / arrectaeque horrore comae et vox faucibus haesit). He immediately “burns to flee the pleasing lands,” completely “overcome by the divine command of the mighty gods” (ardet abire fuga dulcisque relinquere terras, / attonitus tanto monitu imperioque deorum [Loeb 1: 414; 4.279–82]). The original hero, in other words, has none of this hero’s humanity: none of his unwillingness to leave or his shame in deceiving Dido. Denham fur-ther undermines the divine mission that is Virgil’s focus at this point when his Dido subsequently accuses Aeneas that “The Kingdom thou pretend’st to [is] not thine own” (Works 182; Poems 129). Virgil’s Dido simply warns against sailing to foreign and unknown lands (arva aliena domosque ignotas peteres [1: 416; 4.311–12]). In drawing



attention to Aeneas’s insubstantial claim on Italy, Denham’s Dido punctures the whole concept of imperial destiny, on which Virgilian and Arthurian legends depend.

Denham’s interest in Aeneas’s moral dilemma as it concerns personal rather than national honor is emphasized in the two poems that follow “The Passion of Dido and Aeneas,” complicating matters for the reader who has just struggled along with Aeneas. Both poems are translations of Latin originals by noble Italians, contemporaries of Petrarch. The first, “Of Prudence,” offers a seemingly direct commentary on Aeneas’s situation as it begins:

Wisdoms first Progress is to take a ViewWhat’s decent or un-decent, false or true.Hee’s truly Prudent, who can separateHonest from Vile, and still adhere to that;Their difference to measure, and to reach,Reason well rectify’d must Nature teach. (Works 190; Poems 147)

Denham’s Aeneas’s agony lies in the “un-decent” abandonment of Dido, an act that the gods deem the “true” course of action. As a man he is clearly able to “separate / Honest from Vile,” yet his instincts (or natural impulses) are negated by the divine commandments of another “Nature” that forces him to pursue what is presented as wholly unreasonable: a kingdom “not thine own.” The complexity of a world where a divine plan or “justice” is in conflict with human justice is brought into sharper focus if the reader is still dwelling on Aeneas at the opening of the next poem, “Of Justice”:

’Tis the first Sanction, Nature gave to Man,Each other to assist in what they can;Just or unjust, this Law for ever stands,All things are good by Law which she commands;The first step, Man towards Christ must justly live,Who t’us himself, and all we have did give;In vain doth man the name of Just expect,If his Devotions he to God neglect;So we must reverence God, as first to knowJustice from him, not from our selves doth flow. (Works 198; Poems 163)

Again, Aeneas’s “justice” in assisting Dido (his obedience to Nature’s “first Sanction”) is at odds with his devotion to a god whose justice seems dubious at best. For Denham’s 1660s audience, this conflict



between personal commitment and obligation to a murky ideal with vague promises of future reward must have been all too familiar, especially to those faithful Royalists who had enjoyed no recompense for their suffering.21 The decade following Charles II’s “miraculous” Restoration, moreover, was plagued with successive national disas-ters and attendant prophesies of impending doom that served no better to elucidate questions of human and divine justice than had the civil wars, beheading of Charles I, and Hobbes’s Leviathan. So troubling was the state of humankind that, as Keeble remarks, “even those whose religion was of a very unexcited and worldly kind were subject to a kind of appalled fascination” with events, and one highly rational witness to the Plague was prompted to record, “Every Man is a terrour to his Neighbour and himself: for God for our Sins is a Terrour to us all. O how is London, the place which God hath honoured with his Gospel above all Places of the Earth, laid low in Horrours, and wasted almost to Desolation, by the Wrath of God, whom England hath contemned . . . ” (Keeble 165). In this climate of fear and the absence of clear laws, human or divine, probably the best advice anyone could offer was to trust one’s individual nature or instinct. Certainly, the shifts already apparent in Denham’s miscellany from interest in national issues to interest in personal dilemmas, from seriousness to laughter became more marked during Charles II’s reign, which was unable to maintain the promise with which it began.

OgilbyJohn Ogilby’s notoriously pedestrian The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, in both its versions, provides would-be relief to the piece-meal Virgil that existed before Dryden’s translation.22 Yet, even this one full-length translation fails to uphold the heroic. Because of Ogilby’s limited poetic skills and more because of his greater interest in book production than in Virgil, he does not produce the much-needed buttress of this so-called Augustan age. Even more so than the fragments, Ogilby’s Virgil marks the beginnings of the eighteenth-century shift from the authority of classical rules to the authority of the contemporary author.

The first edition of Ogilby’s first translation, a modest octavo, appeared in 1649 and was republished in 1650 and 1665. This Interregnum work by the former court masque dancer, danc-ing master, and theater manager and Lord of Revels in Ireland is



unremarkable. Dedicated to William, Viscount Beauchamp, the translation is clearly part of a Royalist tradition. Ogilby praises Beauchamp with “my just application to your Lordship: Mæcenas ata-vis edite Regibus, / O & præsidium, & dulce decus meum. And that it might not be thought a stain to so great a Patron, I have presumed . . . to wait on your Honour with no lesse then the Prince of Latine Poets; though in relation to my self, I call it but the shadow, and cold resem-blance of Virgil” (A3; italics reversed). There is a new Maecenas; Virgil is the prince of poets; and Ogilby’s own translation is unwor-thy. All these details are hallmarks of a Royalist. There is also a typi-cal Royalist tribute to the patron: “You are not onely descended from Sceptred Ancestors . . . but endowed with those abilities of Judgment and Science, to know and place an exemplary value upon Dedications of this nature.” The one explicit political reference is the observa-tion that while “Our nation hath not been unfruitful of” men ready to provide poets with “both protection and honor,” it is “at present under a cloud.”

The translation itself, however, is noticeably devoid of political implications. Ronald Knowles argues that Ogilby was being dar-ing in this 1649 Aeneid by inserting the “politically incriminating” words “ ‘Monarchie’ for regnum and ‘prerogative’ for honor” in his description in the sixth book of the Titan young (Entertainment 22–23). But, Knowles continues, in the 1654 revised edition “com-plete with Hollar’s engravings,” he reworked the lines to be safe, while in the “third edition of 1665, Ogilby reprinted his transla-tion of 1649—‘heavens high Monarchy’ and ‘heavens prerogatives’ had returned with Charles II” (23). Maybe so, but Knowles does not mention that the 1654 edition was reprinted again in 1668, 1675, and 1684 thus becoming the version the age was most familiar with. Moreover, the language on which Knowles comments is quite general and there are more obvious places in which to inject elu-sive political messages. For example, whether out of fear or lack of skill, Ogilby passes up the opportunity—invariably seized by other Royalist translators—to employ Virgil’s proud opening lines in a political cause. His own first Aeneid (the 1649 version) begins in a very prosaic fashion:

Arms, and the man I sing, who first did come,Driven by Fate, from Troy to Latium,And Tyrrhen shores. Much toss’d by Land and SeaBy wrath of Gods, and lasting enmity.



Of cruell Juno, suffering much by Wars,Whiles he a Citie builds, and Gods transfersTo Latium, whence Latine Originals,The Alban fathers, and Romes lofty walls. (1649 Works 1–2)23

Ogilby’s emphatic lack of desire to further a monarchal cause is also clear in his rendition of Jove’s prophecy:

Then Trojan Cæsar springs of a fair Strain,With Seas to bound his power, with Stars his fame,Julius, from great Julus, comes that name.Hee heap’d with Eastern spoyles, shall be instaldIn heaven by thee [Venus] and shall with vows be cald. (10)

Contrast this “straight” translation with that of Dryden, who though disillusioned in 1697 and in an equally dangerous position as Ogilby, clings to the idea of divine purpose at the opening of his translation:

Then Cæsar from the Julian Stock shall rise,Whose Empire Ocean, and whose Fame the SkiesAlone shall bound: Whom fraught with Eastern Spoils,Our Heav’n, the just Reward of Human Toyls,Securely shall repay with Rites Divine. (Works 5: 356; 390–94)

Dryden’s Royalist message is evasive but unmistakable, with its allusion to Spenserian toils in historical time for heaven’s future “just Reward” and its emphasis on Caesar’s divine genealogy.

Ogilby’s main goal in his 1649 translation seems to have been to establish a basis for the book production that was his real fascination.24 Interestingly, the 1650 edition is adorned with a portrait of “Iohannes Ogilvius,” the head of which is notably larger than the head of Virgil in the frontispiece opposite—as if Ogilby claims that this poem is as much, if not more, his than the Ancient’s.25 Certainly, his own creativ-ity as artist and authority as would-be classical scholar shapes his subse-quent revised Virgil and, more importantly, its elaborate presentation.

The 1654 translation is generally recognized as “a far more explicitly ‘Royalist’ version,” and it is (Harrison, “Dryden’s Aeneid” 143). Yet, Ogilby’s Royalism is, from the start, mostly a prop for his own status and that of his Virgil—of his work in general. He him-self unwittingly suggests as much as he comments on the evolution



of the 1654 Virgil in his 1670 biographical Preface to Africa: Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of Ægypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid. Admitting that the 1649 translation “fell much short,” he proudly wonders that

so happy prov’d the Version, and so fairly accepted, that of me, till then obscure, Fame began to prattle, and soon after I, forsooth, stood forth a new Author, and so much cheer’d up with fresh Encouragements, that from a mean Octavo, a Royal Folio Flourish’d, Adorn’d with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations, Triumphing with the affixt Emblazons, Names, and Titles of a hundred Patrons, all bold Assertors in Vindication of the Work, which (whate’re my Deserts) being Publish’d with that Magnificence and Splendor, appear’d a new, and taking Beauty, the fairest that till then the English Press ever boasted.

Two points stand out: Ogilby’s obviously conscious pride in his authority and social standing as author; and the idea that the “Royalty” of his folio inheres not in the fabric of the translation, but in the embellishments and association with noble names and titles.26 The political agenda of his translation, accordingly, is lim-ited to a surface rhetoric that is established in the physical makeup of the book itself.

Ogilby’s 1654 “Royal Folio” is adorned throughout with the hand-some full-page engravings that the late seventeenth century came to know so well;27 it also has entirely new prefatory material. The elaborate frontispiece depicts Virgil reading to Augustus Jupiter’s prophecy from Book 1 of the Aeneid. Marcellus’s mother faints in the background. At the top of the plate, a small scroll bears the same quotation from Scaliger that appears on the title page under Ogilby’s name thereby establishing his work in a serious scholarly tradition. Opposite the frontispiece is a new more glamorous painting of Ogilby by Peter Lely. It is inscribed in Latin with Ogilby’s and Lely’s names and adorned with the crowned lion of Scotland. This new portrait of the translator is, like the 1649 portrait, more than twice the size of the figures in the frontispiece, this time suggesting that of all the artists from Virgil to Lely to Hollar amongst whom Ogilby places himself, he is the supreme one—il miglior fabro. Finally, the dedica-tions of both the translation (to Wentworth again) and of the beauti-ful plates (to England’s noblest men) fully establish Ogilby’s position in Charles II’s regime.



This time the translator’s Royalist bias can be felt in the opening lines, which contrast starkly to the 1649 version in their awareness of the telos of Roman struggles:

Arms, and the man I sing, who first did land,Fate-forc’d from Troy, on the Lavinian Strand;Whom angry Gods at Sea and Land engage,And cruel Juno’s persecuting Rage.Much suffer’d he by War, whilst Walls he rear’d,And Trojan Gods to Latian Realms transferr’d;Whence Latins, and the Alban Princes come,And lofty Tow’rs of all-commanding Rome. (1654 Works 166)

As in the rest of translation, marginal annotations surround these first lines. Notably, however, Ogilby does not use his copious notes to point up the Roman/English connections. He even glosses his “Fate-forc’d” hero negatively: “It was commonly reported, that Æneas fled away from his Countrey, having first betray’d it; which Virgil, to take off, layes his banishment upon Fate: for which some adde this rea-son, That he was descended from Laomedon; the Hetrurian Tradition affirming, That whosoever was of a perjur’d Race, should be an Exile and Vagabond by Fate. Servius Fuld” (166). Either the self-taught translator was not sufficiently steeped in the English tradition that venerated Aeneas as the ancestor of Brutus, or (more likely) he chose to privilege his reading of the classical grammarians. In either case, his notes draw attention to his learning rather than to Virgil’s impor-tance to English history. The same happens when he comes to the politically and historically pivotal prophecy of Jupiter.

Again, Ogilby revises his 1649 translation of this crucial scene to speak to English pride as he records the Roman sense of national destiny:

From a fair Stock shall Trojan Cæsar spring,The Sea must bound his Power, the Stars his Fame,Iulius from Great Iulus comes that Name.Laden with Eastern Spoyls, him thou shalt seeIn State in Heaven and worshipped with thee. (1654 Works 177)

By emphasizing Caesar’s “fair Stock” (which replaces the “fair Strain” of the 1649 version), the openly Royalist Ogilby highlights divine genealogy, as Dryden does. This time, too, the notes do recognize



the English significance of these prophetic lines, but, still Ogilby is more concerned with scholarly readings than with the contemporary relevance of the passage. Of the second line, he writes in the mar-gin, “Alluding, saith La Cerda, to the Dream of Aecia, Augustus his Mother, that she conceiv’d him by Apollo in the Shape of a Serpent, and that her Bowels were rais’d to Heaven, and extended over all the Earth. Whether Virgil here means Britain or Hercules Pillars is largely discuss’d by him.” The same disinterestedness characterizes his discussion of the glorious lineage that was to descend from “Great Iulus.” The note summarizes a number of sources:

Turnebus refers this to Augustus; but La Cerda more naturally to Julius Cæsar, of whom Velleius Paterc. He was of the most Noble Family of the Julii, and, which was by all Antiquity confess’d, he deriv’d his Pedigree from Anchises and Venus, and Appian, lib. 2. speaking of the same; Sacrificing at midnight, he invok’d Mars and Venus; for the Family of the Julii seems to be descended of Æneas, and his Son Iulus, as the Name implies: thus he. But whether this Iulus were the same which Æneas had by Creusa, and brought from Troy, or his Son by Lavina, afterwards begot in Italy, is controverted: Our Author constantly means the first; But Livy and Clemens Alexandrinus are alleg’d by Titus, lib. 6. to prove the Julii deriv’d from the other. (1654 Works 177)

Any extension of this genealogy into English stock is left to the knowledge of individual readers. There is no real sense here, in other words, of a political agenda and so of a national and historical pur-pose. Ogilby is keenest to show off his learning by parading different readings of Virgil. The Royalist rhetoric of his epic-length transla-tion is consequently superficial: Virgil is a peg on which to hang the glamorous learning and rich artistry of Charles II’s reign, but there is no integral link between Virgil’s Augustanism and Ogilby’s.

The artificiality of such neoclassicism is apparent too in Ogilby’s use of Virgil in the “Entertainments” he designed to celebrate Charles II’s coronation. The first of these appeared in folio in 1661, entitled The Relation of His Majesties Entertainment Passing through the City of London, to His Coronation: With a Description of the Triumphal Arches and Solemnity. The following year, 1662, he published a much more elaborate second folio edition as The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in His Passage through the City of London to His Coronation. This second edition, claims Knowles in his facsimile reproduction of it, epitomizes the Augustan mentality that shaped Charles II’s monarchy. He even sees Ogilby as an antidote to the



fragmentation of Virgil’s works: “Ogilby’s application of the Virgilian schema, as an evaluation of English history [in his Entertainment], is the most complete formulation of a politically Augustan framework in the period. It has a thoroughgoingness which makes something like Dryden’s Astraea Redux seem quite fragmentary, though it is exactly fragments of this kind which preceded Ogilby’s formulation” (21). While Knowles admits that it is easy to see “the Augustan myth as little more than a rhetorical compliment,” he contends that this view “discounts the strength of a traditional concept conveyed gen-eration by generation, and fails to recognize its psychological status within the individual poet’s mind and work” (21). Knowles’s argu-ment would be convincing if Ogilby’s first Entertainment were read as his conception of Charles II’s significance to history. Yet, this first printing is displaced by the second, in which, as in his Virgil, Ogilby is more interested in glamor than sustaining English Virgilan mythol-ogy. To contrast the 1661 and 1662 editions is to trace the shift from Renaissance conviction in time-honored Augustanism to the skepti-cal post-Restoration psyche, which clung to the idea rather than the reality of messianic imperialism according to Virgil.

Ogilby’s initial design depends heavily upon Virgil, conflating English affairs with the world history forecast in Book 6 of the Aeneid, the first and fourth Georgics, and the fourth Messianic Eclogue.28 As described in the 1661 Entertainment, the first painting on the south side of the first triumphal arch built specifically for the royal proces-sion “is a Prospect of His Majestie’s Landing at Dover Castle.” Above this is an inscription, Adventus Aug[usti] (The Approach of Augustus). Beneath the painting itself, Ogilby continues, is the motto In solido rursus Fortuna locavit, alluding to Virgil. He quotes his source:

Multa dies variusque labor, mutabilis æviRettulit in melius, multos alterna revisens,Lusit, & solido rursus Fortuna locavit.

Then he provides a translation of the lines:

The Various Work of Time, and many Dayes,Often Affairs from Worse to Better raise;Fortune reviewing this she tumbled down,Sporting, restores again unto the Crown. (Relation 3)

Significantly, Ogilby has chosen one of the passages crucial to the Renaissance conception of Virgil’s significance: his advocacy of toil



(labor) in historical time (Multa dies . . . mutabilis ævi) for future gain ( rursus Fortuna locavit). He develops this notion of the healing powers of time in the inscription under the “Representation” in the painting “over the Middle Arch” of “the King pursuing Usurpation”: Volvenda dies en attulit ultro. This, explains Ogilby, is taken from the ninth book of the Aeneid:

Turne, Quod optanti Divum promittere NemoAuderet, volvenda dies, en! attulit ultro

“What none of all the Gods durst grant, implor’d,“Successive Time does of its own accord. (4)

Virgil is also used in the depiction on this arch of bloody rebels. In the painting on the north side is a tablet,

representing in a Trophy the late Examples of Gods Justice upon the Rebels, who commited that most horrid Murther upon his Majesties Royal Father of blessed Memory. To which Rebels the Motto beneath also referreth. Ausi immane nefas ausoque potiti. Said by Virgil of those, who were, for the like Crimes, condemned to the Pains of Erebus, as he closes the Description of it in the Sixth of his Aeneis, “Ausi omnes immane nefas, ausoque potiti; All dar’d bold Crimes, and thriv’d in what they dar’d.” (3–4)

In the description of the second triumphal arch, quotations from the Georgics support the iconography that associates the Stuart kings in their naval glory with Neptune (11).

As he glamorizes his 1662 version, Ogilby forgoes sustained cor-respondences that translate a Roman imperial vision onto English “Augustan” hope. While there are in this edition, as Knowles notes, many more Greek and Latin quotations (“[t]hough Latin antiquity tends to predominate with the figures of Virgil, Ovid, and Claudian”), the sheer mass and the nature of these citations ultimately thwart Ogilby’s Augustan affectations. Though he again begins by congrat-ulating the City of London on the “inexpressible Happiness, which these Kingdoms have received by the glorious Restauration of our Sovereign to His Throne,” he then launches into a lengthy account of the “Custom of erecting Triumphal Arches among the Romans” (Entertainment 2). His first citation from Virgil this time comes as support for his point that the first triumphs were “rude”—“nothing more than the Spoils hung up at the house of the Conqueror” (2). In contrast to the 1661 text, attention is diverted from rather than drawn to any parallel between Augustus and Charles II: Ogilby’s



interest is purely academic, as his numerous subsequent quotations from other Roman historians stress.

After this eleven-page history of triumphs, Ogilby inserts a full-page plate depicting the first arch. As before, he opens this part of his text with a description of Rebellion and Confusion. Rather than using Virgil, as he did in 1661, to promote the correspondence between English and Roman destiny, however, Ogilby again plunges into Roman history in a way that deepens the gulf he has already begun to dig between the nations’ histories. Having described Rebellion and Confusion, he reflects, “There was no War in the Roman, or Greek Common-wealths call’d by any name properly answering to Rebellion, which comprehends only the violation of that Natural duty, which the Subject owes to the supreme Governour . . . ” (Entertainment 13). So, Ogilby concludes, “we must look for its Description under Civil Discord, and Sedition, which Petronius Arbiter, in the Civil War betwixt Cæsar and Pompey, ha’s very elegantly delivered” (14). He cites Petronius before getting to Virgil: “But we cannot better take a view of Sedition, and Discord, then in the Description of the Authors of it, feign’d to be the Furies: as Virgil.” More interested in the ancients’ rhetoric, Ogilby foregoes the opportunity here to hammer home the similarities between Rome’s and England’s struggles for glory. Even his strategic “mottos” lose their force as Ogilby diverts attention from Virgil. Under his inscription “Adventus Aug.” Ogilby this time writes: “Beneath the Painting this Motto, In Solido Rursus Fortuna Locavit. This Inscription Adventus Augusti is often found among the Coyns of the Roman Emperors upon a peaceable return; which is sig-nified by the extension of the right hand: for saith Quintilian, Fit & ille habitus . . . ” (21). There is no mention of Virgil as the source of the motto; the lengthy passage seems to serve as an introduction for the illustration of Roman coins that are depicted immediately after it and act as a focal point for the page.

Ogilby’s encyclopedic ambition, that is, destroys the Virgilian significance of his original design. As in the 1654 Virgil, his con-cern in this 1662 Entertainment is with its glamorous appearance: its expensive illustrations and the sheer bulk of its (pseudo) learn-ing. That Ogilby did not even pretend any longer to provide Virgilian paradigms is reinforced in his 1685 abridged version of the Entertainment. Though the briefest version, this one has the longest title: The Kings Coronation: Being an Exact Account of the Cavalcade, with a Description of the Triumphal Arches, and Speeches Prepared by the City of London, For His Late Majesty Charles the Second, In His Passage from



the Tower to Whitehall. Also the Narrative of His Majesties Coronation, with His Magnificent Proceeding, and Feast in Westminster-Hall, April the 23th. As It Was Published by His Majesties Order, with the Approbation and License of Sir Edward Walker, Garter Principal King at Arms. This edition is what it purports to be: an “exact account” or description of proceedings on coronation day. This time there is not a word of Latin or mention of Virgil as Ogilby describes the paintings and other features of the arches. The only faintly Augustan moment occurs when the figure Thames is reported as addressing “our Cæsar and his Conquering Fate” (King’s Coronation 5).

Ultimately, then, Ogilby rejected the traditional Virgil as literary model and achieved the fame he sought because his elaborate books offered readers symbols of a world of glamor and intellectualism; Ogilby’s cumbersome folios were not, after all, conducive to long hours of communion with Virgil.29 That ownership itself of author-itative books—as opposed to engagement in the text—had become a sign of one’s cultural participation in Charles II’s England is also apparent in Ogilby’s efforts to raise money for the printing of his Homer’s Odyssey and a reprinting of his Aesop’s Fables. In the early 1660s, he publicly offered “A Standing Lottery of his own Books, Design’d and to be Erected by the Author.” Parading Ogilby’s achievements, the advertisement of the lottery offered a series of prizes that were combinations of his books. The first prize includes an Entertainment, an Aesop’s Fables, Homer’s Iliad, and an (as yet unpublished) Odyssey, a Virgil, and two Bibles with “chorographical” and “historical” sculp-tures; these are priced from £2 for the Entertainment to £25 for each Bible. The Virgil weighs in at £5—more than twice the price of an Entertainment. On this scale, Virgil has more cultural value than His Majesties Entertainment, but it is a value that inheres in the physical nature of the book rather than in Virgil’s usefulness to contemporary history or politics.

EpilogueIn employing the folio, Ogilby worked in an English tradition of presentation of major works “from Chaucer, through Ben Jonson, Drayton, and Shakespeare.” His own, however, were “larger and grander” and set a precedent that culminated with the “unmanage-able folios in which Dryden’s works were finally produced in 1701” (Foxon 63). Thereafter, the folio gave way to the quarto as the pop-ular form of publication. Even Alexander Pope, whose early folios



were intended to promote his importance as author, was aware of the shortcoming of the format, declaring in 1741 “I have done with expensive Editions for ever, which are only a Complement to a few curious people at the expence of the Publisher” (Foxon 32). Pope’s complaint about the exclusive readership of glamorous folios indi-cates the limitations of Ogilby’s in the previous century. What Ogilby produced were mid-seventeenth-century “coffee-table books”: ostentatious signs of the owner’s social standing and recog-nition of classical authority, not proof of an intimate familiarity with Virgil. Ogilby’s octavos were perhaps no more successful than the cumbersome folios in consolidating Virgil’s position in an Augustan England; though infinitely more “readable” in terms of their physi-cal size, these editions are equally overwhelmed by marginal notes, which draw the reader away from Virgil’s text and into predomi-nantly pedantic debates over semantic and etymological trivia.

Ogilby’s Virgil is, then, epic in a wholly modern sense, not in the traditional sense: it is vast and sprawling, not a bastion of national codes and sacred history. The translation reflects the author Ogilby’s place in Restoration England rather than the pertinence of Virgil. Likewise, Howard and Denham in their collections exhibit a con-cern typical of their age with the disintegration of history and of the mythology bolstering it, even if they set out with the Augustan intention of using Virgil to make sense of recent English disasters. In each case, the authority of the contemporary author displaces that of the Ancient and his English tradition. These post–civil war and Restoration appropriations of Virgil, moreover, are profoundly dialogic, a characteristic associated with eighteenth-century liter-ary modes, particularly the novel. For, if, as James McLaverty says, Pope’s Dunciad Variorum “resembles a novel in the plurality of its voices,” so do Ogilby’s, Howard’s, and Denham’s constructs, as these authors question, dissect, and disseminate ancient precepts (11). The absolute authority of the most revered ancient author is lost long before the turn of the century. By the middle of Charles II’s reign, the English Renaissance Virgil was thoroughly unseated if still a powerful presence, and writers worked to incorporate him into the popular sphere.


CHAPTER 2

VIRGIL IN THE 1670s AND 1680s: THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

Prologue

Charles II’s reign grew more unpopular as the 1670s progressed. Shortage of money was one problem. Another was lack of confidence in the monarchy due to perceived

failings such as the continuation of Dutch wars between 1672 and 1674, by which time, Tim Harris argues, “most people in England had come to believe that fighting the Protestant Dutch was against the national interest” (Restoration 71). Constant Whig agitation during the plentiful moments of crisis served further to undermine the authority of the crown, as early party politics took hold. As Harris observes, the dissemination of pamphlets and cheap newspapers and broadsides in coffee shops or pubs meant that the “reach of Whig pro-paganda was very wide—both socially and geographically.” Feeding out of “growing public anxiety about the foreign and domestic policies of the court,” Whig activity encouraged “political agitation out-of-doors.” There were public demonstrations of dissatisfaction, such as the “ widespread anti-Catholic demonstrations” in 1673 and the 1675 London riot by thousands of weavers trying to protect their jobs (81, 66). In this particular case, Harris remarks, “the local peace keepers simply refused to act” so that “troops under the command of the Duke of Monmouth had to be called upon to suppress the riots” (66). As a result of these popular expressions of disapproval, the crown suffered, as Harris puts it, “considerable loss of prestige”—a serious problem because at “the most basic level, majesty was sup-posed to be majestic” and “a king was expected to achieve glory for his nation” (70). As an Augustan monarch, Charles was failing miserably. The one triumph for the nation might have been a legitimate heir to ensure a glorious future of unbroken Protestant succession. Yet, here lay the deepest mine of national anxiety and agitation. As Charles



failed to produce that heir, the threat of a Catholic monarchy grew steadily. The “crisis over succession,” Harris notes, “mounted follow-ing the public acknowledgement of the Duke of York’s conversion to Catholicism in 1673,” so that by the mid-1670s, “with the threat of popery and arbitrary government seemingly confirmed by the King’s Declaration of Indulgence, the Anglo-Dutch war fought in alliance with the French, the prospect of a popish successor, and the blatant attempts by the court to build up a standing army and subvert the independence of parliament, things seemed to have gone from bad to worse” (6, 80). With the so-called Exclusion Crisis at the end of the 1670s, a return to civil war seemed imminent.1 While the monarchy recovered in the early 1680s despite fierce rivalry between Whigs and Tories, Charles II’s death in 1685 was a harbinger of the demise of the Stuart regime with its illusory divine right. Lacking the initial prom-ise and the lasting charisma of his brother, James II brought about the rapid disintegration of his reign.

More than any other aspect of the Restoration, the politics just outlined point to a much greater public input and expression of senti-ment than in any previous period. The fact was, as Harris concludes, that the “opinions of ordinary people mattered; it was important to have these people on one’s side, and to been seen to have them on one’s side, especially in England” (Restoration 412–13). Harris argues that Charles II’s ability to resurrect his power following the crises of the late 1670s “was related in crucial ways to the crown’s ability to win back public opinion, while royal collapse under James II was tied up with the crown’s failure to carry public opinion behind its ambi-tious and controversial policies” (16). “Public opinion” was a much more limited notion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than it is in the twenty-first, yet, in literary activity too there was greater diversity. The arena in which public opinion, politics, and entertainment mixed most easily was the theater; and playwrights of all genres catered to audience demand as they addressed political problems constantly and often directly, particularly in the 1670s and 1680s.2 Other literary forms also indicate broader public involvement both in politics and in cultural production, and, as writers directed themselves to nontraditional audiences, traditional literary boundar-ies eroded. When the subject matter was the venerable classics, the new text was often most reactionary. Indeed, the favored mode for presentation of the classics was the increasingly popular miscellanies and parodies, which consequently dominate this chapter, and while the authors of these works either depend upon or pay lip service to



ancient authority, particularly Virgil’s, they inevitably demonstrate (implicitly in the case of the miscellanies and explicitly in the case of the parodies) that ancient material must be made over if it is to have a place in contemporary culture. In aiming at a wide reading audi-ence, just as the theaters catered to a diverse patronage, that is, these experimental writers rejected the absolute values and civic focus of Augustan heroic even as they assumed its tales, and they demanded more down-to-earth and locally recognizable settings, language, and characters. In this sense, they were already expressing interest in native over foreign material, long before the early-to-mid- eighteenth-century surge in popularity of ballads and folklore. As the author of “Troia Redeviva, or, the Glories of London Surveyed in an Heroick Poem” (1674) suggests, heroism itself was not rejected—hence the tenacity of the tales—but its otherworldly nature was. In his title, the poet suggests he will continue the glorious Trojan genealogy and course of history, as well as the importance of the heroic in maintain-ing these, yet in the poem he sustains no allegorical link between London and Troy as he reflects on London’s various disasters, inter-jecting a few similes from ancient mythology. After reflecting on the wonders of the Hesperian Garden, the poet stops himself:

But hold, I must back to the water run.This is my Muses spring and Helicon.The Thames has more immortal poets known,Than Danube, Nyle, or Tyber ere cou’d own,Rich Tagus sands and old Pactolus streamesAre fancies, and Idle Poets dreams,If e’re such rich and pretious streames there were,If e’re the sun saw golden sands ‘twas here,And if you look for beauty you’d suppose,‘Twas from our christal streames that Venus rose,Look how the Bridges stride the River, seeHow large and spatious all the Arches be . . . (10)

The poet’s pride in native glory seems to derive from Christopher Wren’s post-fire London, and his rejection here of mythical “fancies, and the Idle Poets dreams” in favor of native and homegrown poetry is typical of the 1670s and 1680s.3

Set against the forces of innovation, just as Augustan propa-ganda flew in the face of political reality, however, were the vigorous efforts in these decades of neoclassical theorists, who, as Harrison notes, reiterated the precepts of Aristotle, Horace, and the French



neoclassicists, “with only minor variations.”4 The most influential theoretical work of the period was Rapin’s enormously popular dis-course on epic. The English translation of Rapin’s work appeared in 1672 as Observations on the Poems of Homer and Virgil: A Discourse Representing the Excellencies of Those Works; and the Perfections in General of All Heroick Actions. Out of the French by John Davies of Kidwelly. The title itself bespeaks the premises of this widely known treatise, which lasted well into the eighteenth century.5 Rapin’s opening claim—one that Dryden was to echo in 1697—sums up his stance: “Of all the productions Man’s mind is capable of, the Epick Poem is doubtless the most accomplished, in regard it involves all the perfections of the oth-ers” (Observations 1). Epic remains securely at the top of the hierarchy of literary genres, and Homer and Virgil represent the pinnacle of human achievement. Like his classical predecessors, Rapin believes in absolute values and the centrality of these to epic’s civic function, which is paramount. Consequently, he first considers “action” that for Aristotle was the primary element of epic: “The Epopea, saith Aristotle, is an imitation, or a draught or portraiture of an illustri-ous action. . . . [I]ts matter is Heroick action; its form, Fable; its end, the instruction of Princes and Grandees” (8). As Rapin then turns to con-sider “Fable,” his attention is on epic’s heroes. This emphasis is in line with contemporary English interest in “character,” which Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) is first to pinpoint as the strength of English drama and which becomes the key element of eighteenth-century literary works, helping to raise Shakespeare to his bard sta-tus. Yet, here, Rapin focuses his discussion of Homer’s and Virgil’s chief characters on their civic virtue, thereby upholding Virgil’s supremacy as epic poet. For, the “action of Achilles is pernicious to his Country and his own Party, as Homer himself acknowledges” (10). By contrast, “Virgil makes a conjunction, of all the vertues to frame his [hero]: he gives him Religion towards the Gods; piety, towards his Country; tendernesse and friendship for his Relations and equity and justice, towards all. He is undaunted in danger, patient in labours, courageous when occasion requires, prudent in the management of affaires. In fine he is a good peaceful, liberal, eloquent, gentile, civill person.” In short, he is the perfect model for an aristocrat: “his very aire makes a certain discovery of grandeur and majesty; and that he may not be destitute of any one of these qualifications which might contribute to the accomplishment of a great Person, he is fortunate” (22–23). Rapin then cites Aeneas’s companion, Ilioneus, on his sum-mary of his leader’s character in order to strengthen his own point



about Virgil’s hero as the amalgamation of those princely qualities necessary to ensure a nation’s greatness:

Rex erat Aeneas nobis, quo justior alterNec pietate fuit, nec bello major & armis.

“These are,” he concludes, “the three sovereign qualities which make up his essentiall character, Religion, Iustice, and Valour.” In the Servian Augustan tradition, Rapin then traces these princely virtues from “those of Augustus, whose pourtraicture, Virgil drew in the Heroes he dedicated to him, as Monsieur de Segrais hath well observ’d in the learned Preface to his Traduction of the Aeneid” (23). Rapin concludes by stressing the necessity of these absolute virtues embodied in historical and literary heroes who represent and sustain national glory: “So that out of the vertues of Augustus, and an infinite number of perfections distributed and scattered among divers other Heroes, Virgil fram’d his; in as much as the true Heroick virtue is a combination of all the virtues as Aristotle affirmes in his Ethicks” (24).

Rapin’s traditional sentiments were reinforced by his French contemporaries, whose influence was equally felt in England. Levine points out that “probably” in the mid-1670s, Dryden “read the crit-icism of two other notable French ‘ancients,’ the Sieur de Boileau and Père Bossu.” In 1674, Boileau published “L’Art poétique, in imi-tation of Horace, and a translation and commentary on Longinus,” both of which were, Levine observes, “uncommonly influential in both countries.” The former work, Levine continues, “shares exactly the same literary values as the Reflections on Aristotle; it is hardly more than a poetic version of Rapin’s prose.” When Bossu’s Traité d’un poème épique appeared the following year, “it was accepted by Dryden and his contemporaries as particularly authoritative” (Levine 59–60). While the Traité was not widely known in England until 1695 when it appeared in “W. J.’s” translation, Bossu’s basic principles are worth outlining here for their proximity to Rapin’s. Certainly, his influence was as widely felt. Stuart Curran, the edi-tor of the 1970 facsimile of Bossu’s Traité, points out that men like “Dennis, Dryden, and Addison . . . praised him without reserve” and that “it was not uncommon in the eighteenth century” to “defend Le Bossu as a worthy equal of Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus” (Le Bossu viii). In Curran’s view, the treatise is “quite simply the most intensive and profound Aristotelian analysis of narrative literature produced in its time and is still largely unsurpassed.” Its hold over



eighteenth-century England was such that when Laurence Sterne rebelled against traditional restraints in Tristram Shandy, as Curran observes, he included “biting satire on it”: “And for the epic poem, your lordship bid me look at it;—upon taking the length, breadth, height, and depth of it, and trying them at home upon an exact scale of Bossu’s—‘tis out, my lord, in every one of its dimensions—” (x).6

For Bossu, epic poetry remained divine. The civic and didactic function of the poem was therefore still crucial: “The Presence of the Deity, and the Care such an August Cause ought to take about any Action, obliges the Poet to represent this Action as great, important, and manag’d by Kings and Princes. It obliges him likewise to think and speak in an elevated way above the Vulgar, and in a Style that may in some sort keep up the Character of the Divine Persons he intro-duces” (5). In other words, “The epopea is a Discourse invented by Art, to form the Manners by such Instructions as are disguis’d under the Allegories of some one important Action” (6). Yet, Bossu allows for a more general audience than Rapin: “The End of the Epick Poem is to lay down Moral Instructions for all sorts of People both in general and in particular” (8). Since civic instruction is the key element, Bossu feels obliged, like Rapin, to confront Homer’s apparent shortcom-ings, reflecting that the Odyssey “is more useful to the Vulgar, than the Iliad is, where the Subjects suffer rather by ill Conduct of their Princes, than through their own fault. But in the Odysseis, ‘tis not the Fault of Ulysses that is the ruin of his Subjects. This wise Prince did all he could to make them sharers in the Benefit of his Return. Thus the Poet in the Iliad says, ‘He sings the Anger of Achilles, which had caus’d the Death of so many Grecians; and on the contrary, in the Odysseis he tells his Readers, ‘That the Subjects perish’d through their own fault’ ” (26). Because of its clearer national purpose, the Aeneid is, in Bossu’s analysis just as in Rapin’s, “more noble than the Iliad” for, while it lacks “that simplicity, which Aristotle esteem’d so Divine in Homer,” yet “the vast extent of the Matter it furnishes him with, starts up such difficulties as require more Spirit and Conduct” (26). As Thomas Blackwell would do in the eighteenth century as he punctured the divinity of Homer and Virgil, Bossu considers the dif-ferences in the epic poets’ times: “the Instructions, which the Poet [Virgil] ought to give both to Prince and People were quite differ-ent from those Homer left his Countrymen” (27). He also struggles somewhat with Virgil’s propaganda, as Dryden would do—fatally to epic wholeness—in the 1690s: “He was oblig’d to make them lay aside the old Antipathy they had to Monarchy, to convince them of



the Justice, and the legal Prerogative of Augustus, to divert them from so much desiring to oppose his designs, and to raise in them a Love and Veneration for this Prince” (28). Yet, finally, Bossu is convinced of the Augustan historical and poetic purpose of Virgil: “He ought to instruct Augustus as the Founder of a great Empire, and to inspire into him as well as his Successors, the same Spirit and Conduct which had rais’d this Empire to such a grandeur. . . . This then is the Instruction Virgil would give the Roman Emperors, which began in the person of Augustus to be settled on the Throne” (27).

The same confidence about epic’s codes and their continued sig-nificance spills from another staunchly neoclassical work published in partial and complete form nine times in the 1670s and 1680s: The Destruction of Troy. This rendition of a fifteenth-century French work by Raoul Lefevre had a profound English heritage. Translated by William Caxton as The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, it was, in 1473, the first book printed in English. Republished continuously through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the English Renaissance, it bore the title The Destruction of Troy as well as a prefatory address from “The Printer to the courteous Reader.” This note stresses the didacticism of history and the relevance of Troy’s heroes to English chivalry:

the Reading of Annales and Histories most delighteth Men of all Ages, but especially young Men, whose affections are quickly incensed, and their hearts set on fire with an Emulation of whatsoever Notable and Valorous Enterprises they shall hear of read of: But principally Gentlemen and Noble-men, are by the viewing of Memorable Deeds and Martiall Prowess, so enflamed with an approbation of good and famous Exploits . . . that the reading and hearing thereof, do as it were kindle in their minds, an ardent desire of imitating, if not overgo-ing the most glorious and haughty attempts of the greatest and most excellent.

This language of superlatives and fixed values is that of Rapin and the epic; it is also that of English (Arthurian and Caroline) chiv-alry, which the 1670s and 1680s editions carry over into Restoration England as they address their own “courteous readers.” The ongo-ing pertinence of these “Memorable Deeds and Martiall Prowess” is reinforced by the assurance on the title page of almost every seventeenth-century edition that the text is “newly corrected” and “much amended.” In keeping alive Trojan-Arthurian-Caroline glo-ries as a didactic history, this work denies—even reverses—the trend



seen in Robert Howard’s “Statius” (see page 44) and in antiquarian endeavors to separate myth from history: Hercules and “his worthy Deeds” are here presented as real as “Priamus” and “Dame Helen” or as the readers themselves.

Also part of the resurgence of classical values is Roger L’Estrange’s The First Book of Virgil’s Æneis: Made English (1687), the one new transla-tion produced during these years. The poet’s emulation of the heroic, however, is uneasy. Ostensibly, the poem is a last-ditch effort by an ardent Royalist to “Naturalize that Prince of Poets” for the glory of his native land. L’Estrange’s opening lines are uncompromisingly dignified:

I sing fierce Wars, and that great Man, whom FateDrew from Troy’s ruin’d Walls, and sinking State,To wander long, till Italy’s wish’d ShoreThe weary’d Troops and Godlike Heroe bore;Oft was he wreck’d, oft lost, while Seas and LandsConspir’d with angry Juno’s stern Commands,Oft prest by Wars, while he Lavinium rais’d,And Trojan Gods in Latian Temples prais’d;From whence the Latin Race and Fathers come,The grand Originals of our Eternal Rome. (1–2)

L’Estrange celebrates “greatness” (not in the Latin) in the midst of hardship, and the last line with its subtle “our” translates the glories of a “Godlike hero” (also not in the Latin) into England: the telos of “Eternal Rome.” Yet, his reflection on the “grand Originals” of an eter-nal empire is countered by weariness as an abundance of interpolated epithets (“ruin’d Walls,” “sinking State,” “weary’d Troops”) renders the lines heavy. The tiredness is perhaps that of L’Estrange himself, whose unrelenting loyalty to the Stuart cause resulted in more than one imprisonment and an order of execution that was not dropped until three years after its issue in 1644. Even after Charles II’s return, L’Estrange campaigned relentlessly for the next twenty five years to suppress nonconformists (Keeble, Restoration 151–52).7 His hesita-tion over the Augustan Virgil’s place in the English Restoration also surfaces as L’Estrange ponders the Ancient’s fate amongst English authors. Noting “how Player and Stainhurst, of old, and how Ogilby, of late, had Murder’d the most absolute of Poets; how Sandys, Denham, and Waller, had undertaken some scatter’d Parcels without any design of Prosecuting the Work, he pity’d the Hard Fortune of so Divine an Author, and therefore resolv’d with himself” to give Virgil



his rightful place in English letters. Yet L’Estrange himself managed only one book. His inability to sustain the weight and glory of epic despite his sincere efforts to salvage its Augustan force is typical of the Restoration, as the new texts produced illustrate.

The Miscellanies and AdaptationsThe question of who was reading what in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is even harder to answer than that of who could read. Yet, the form and content of newly emerged and increasingly popular literary forms, notably miscellany collections and adaptations of venerated texts, point to a target audience of both male and female readers who desired the new as much as the old—but only if the old were packaged palatably. The clearly “widening audi-ence to whom these [new] books were aimed,” as Barbara Benedict comments, was remarkable for the “significant number of women who both represented and enacted cultural consumption”; for, in this “increasingly commodified culture,” women “as consumers and participants . . . became an important topic and target in literature as it became commodified itself” (109–10). The content, for example, of the 1704 Athenian Spy by John Dunton, a master at packaging materials that will sell the book, “explodes the fiction,” as Benedict puts it, “of a purely male literary club and propels women and female responses into the very middle of this male culture” (112–13).

The immediate consequence of this broader and frequently “inexperienced” readership was a transformation of notions of what constituted important literature; for, male or female, read-ers demanded materials that “highlight[ed] fashionable concerns: novelty, curiosity, rarity, or popularity” (Benedict 113). In catering to this new demand, the proliferating miscellanies, for example, were “bundled together from contemporary fashionable material by booksellers” (3). The many that included classical excerpts, there-fore, rendered ancient poetry “fashionable” and made it much more accessible than ever before.8 Yet, in popularizing the Ancients, the miscellanies irrevocably, if unintentionally, altered their literary status. Benedict recognizes that the “emphasis on Variety inscribes différence in the Derridean sense: a dislocation of meaning that traces value in the dynamic comparison, contrast, and differentia-tion between similar or opposing forms and messages” (12). Readers are forced, in other words, to weigh texts comparatively rather than hierarchically; ancient poetry consequently loses its traditional



sway as it is read and valued on the same grounds as contemporary literature. Two major changes in literature at large accompanied this dethroning of the Ancients, and of Virgil in particular. First, a shift in writers’ interest in the civic function of literature to aesthetics and to the passions meant that already in the Restoration so-called eighteenth-century literary values had emerged. Second, the demys-tification of ancient superiority accompanied, if not ushered in, a notable lack of divinity in the world of contemporary readers.

The miscellany industry that so quickly became an important means of literary consumption was spearheaded by John Dryden and Jacob Tonson. Their first production was Miscellany Poems: Containing a New Translation of Virgill’s Eclogues, Ovid’s Love Elegies, Odes of Horace, and Other Authors, with Several Original Poems by the Most Eminent Hands (1684), which inaugurated a whole series of mis-cellanies. The title of this first anthology is revealing. It entices read-ers not with the authority of the “Prince of Poets” but with a “new translation”—a modish commodity. These new eclogues (and it is significant that Virgil’s most humble poems are offered up) appear on the same platter9 as odes from the philosophical Horace, love elegies from that master storyteller Ovid, and “original poems” by England’s own “eminent hands.” Virgil is, in other words, put in fash-ionable light dress in a collection that begins to eliminate any clear distinction between ancient and modern.

The consequent compromising of Virgil’s epic stature is embed-ded in the fabric of the miscellany, for the various poets venerate the heroic as they stealthily displace it with modes appropriate to the times. There is no prefatory material, except the extensive contents that promise a wealth of variety, and the reader first encounters the opening of MacFlecknoe:

All humane things are subject to decay,And, when Fate summons, Monarchs must obey:This Fleckno found, who, like Augustus, youngWas call’d to Empire, and had govern’d long. (1)

As the miscellany opens, the focus is on the decay that is the human condition. An attempt to counter the ephemeral follows as the author of the subsequent text—Absalom and Achitophel—is raised to heroic status. Like MacFlecknoe, the poem is here presented anonymously, though in its sixth edition.

Immediately following the note “To the Reader,” which spells out the historical design and biblical relevance of Absalom and



Achitophel, are three poems in praise of Dryden’s. The first of these commendatory poems, “To the Unknown Authour of this Excellent Poem,” begins “Take it as Earnest of a Faith renew’d, / Your Theme is vast, your Verse divinely good” (19). The second poet, in “To the Unknown Authour of this Admirable Poem,” also claims that that the verse is as sacred as the subject matter is worthy of epic:

Not David’s self could in nobler VerseHis gloriously offending Son rehearse,Tho in his Breast the Prophet’s Fury metThe Father’s Fondness, and the Poet’s Wit. (22)

In the third tribute, “To the Conceal’d Authour of this Incomparable Poem,” the poet hails the author of Absalom and Achitophel as an English epic poet:

Hail Heav’n-born Muse! hail ev’ry Sacred page!The Glory of our I’le and of our Age.Th’inspiring Sun to Albion draws more nigh,The North at length teems with a Work to vieWith Homer’s Flame and Virgil’s Majesty.

“Our Poet” even overcomes inadequacies of “Our Language”:

for Maro’s Mines,He dreins of all their Gold t’adorn his Lines;Through each of which the Mantuan Genius shines. (23)

Patent throughout is the yearning for a Virgil who can exalt and unify even an age riveted by factions and idols:

Your Loyal Theme each Loyal Reader draws,And ev’n the Factious give your Verse applause,Whose Lightning strikes to ground their Idol Cause. (24)

Equally patent, however, is the desperation that permits Absalom and Achitophel epic status:

In vain, almost in vain our Hero’s fought.Yet by one Stabb of your keen Satyr dies:Before your Sacred Lines their Shatter’d Dagon lies. (24)



The entire panegyric is shot through with irony; “our” fighting “Hero’s” have no name, nor does this glorious Virgil!10 The repeti-tion of “in vain” betrays a doubt that is not overcome by the “almost,” and the final blow to the poet’s construction of an Augustan age comes with the admission that its only literary force is “Keen Satyr.” Satire is a serious mode, but it is not epic—not in design, nor purpose, nor dignity, nor scope. Despite such instructions as these two pan-egyrists give on how to read the age and its poetry as Virgilian, the Ancient’s “Gold” could only be used as adornment; the fabric of his poetry was of a different stuff to that of Dryden’s age.

What this age really demands, the miscellany demonstrates through its eclectic contents.11 The mixing of classical and contemporary, high and low, occasional and time-honored is exemplified by the final four items before Virgil’s Eclogues, which come last in the list of contents:

A Poem Spoken to the Queen at Trinity Colledge in Cambridge. [Anon.]Floriana, a Pastoral, upon the Death of the Dutchess of Southampton.By Mr. DukeThe Tears of Amynta for the Death of Damon. By Mr. DrydenThe Praises of Italy, out of Virgil’s Second Georgick. By Mr. Chetwood.

This list points to the actual status of the classics in Restoration England. An anonymous occasional poem to the Queen sits cheek by jowl with an attempt by an unknown author to eternize the Duchess of Southampton through the pastoral Floriana—a clearly fictional character from an ancient world of woolly sheep and singing shep-herds. Mr. Dryden’s name, on the other hand, seems to be of more significance than that of the author of the sentimental classical tale about Amynta’s woes, while Mr. Chetwood offers a small fragment of Virgil that may or may not be a disguised commentary on England.

The same simultaneous suggestion and denial that Virgil’s concerns are England’s characterizes the closing poems, “Virgils Eclogues, Translated by Several Hands.” The first notable feature of these particular eclogues is that they have different translators, thereby promising readers Virgil in a variety of tongues and so again emphasizing novelty over classical authority. Yet, Dryden, the most authoritative poet, presents the fourth, so-called Messianic eclogue which is introduced with the following argument:

The Poet celebrates the Birth-day of Saloninus, the Son of Pollio, born in the Consulship of his Father, after the taking of Salonæ, a City in



Dalmatia. Many of the Verses are translated from one of the Sybils, who prophesie of our Saviour’s Birth. (30)

In this way a sacred poetic genealogy is established from the Sybil to Virgil to Dryden, who had already employed in his Astraea Redux the Virgilian lines that promise the teleological process of history’s cycles.12 Here he translates,

The last great Age foretold by sacred Rhymes,Renews its finish’d Course, Saturnian timesRowl round again, and mighty years, begunFrom their first Orb, in radiant Circles run.The base degenerate Iron off-spring ends;A golden Progeny from Heav’n descends. (31)

Yet, as Dryden handles the eclogue’s prophecy of the birth of a boy, his lines could now be read as a bitter commentary on contemporary England:

The lovely Boy, with his auspicious face,Shall Pollio’s Consulship and Triumph grace;Majestick Months set with him to their appointed Race.The Father banish’d Virtue shall restore,And Crimes shall threat the guilty world no more.The Son shall lead the life of Gods and beBy Gods and Heroes seen, and Gods and Heroes see.The jarring Nations he in peace shall bind,And with paternal Virtues rule mankind. (31)

The glorious patriarchal bulwark prophesied here is impossible for the 1680s, where the conspicuous lack of a baby prince threatens to topple Charles II’s monarchy. The lines are all the more ironic viewed along-side Absalom and Achitophel, where another “lovely Boy, with [an] aus-picious face” is at the center of threats to his father’s throne. In 1684, when this miscellany was published, moreover, Monmouth had fled to the Netherlands following the unsuccessful Rye House Plot, and the chances seemed slim that the “Father banish’d Virtue shall restore, / And Crimes shall threat the guilty world no more.” Perhaps, instead, given the argument, Dryden intended to prophesy the Second Coming. Even so, to present this savior resurrecting the kind of patriarchy pic-tured here and in Royalist readings of Virgil is to beg the question of why Charles II’s monarchy has failed to achieve its earthly manifestation.



In catering, in this way, to readers clearly invested in the present, the poets drive a wedge between poetry and politics and repackage the classics that former generations knew. To be sure, as Benedict has persuasively argued, miscellanies like this one, which serves up snippets of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, made readers feel proficient in the classics (91–92). In the process, however, the classics meta-morphose. First, even the mighty Virgil is viewed from the same perspective as contemporary frivolities; second, the clearly strained connections between, say, Virgil and Absalom and Achitophel shows (or teaches) a superficial understanding of Virgil’s traditional place in Western cosmology, thereby reducing his significance. This sub-tle shift in Virgil’s time-honored position is further highlighted in Dryden’s and Tonson’s next production, Sylvæ: Or, the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (1685).

Dryden’s own hand is heavily felt in Sylvæ. He launches it with a lengthy essay that is his first major attempt at a theory of translation. He then offers fifteen of his own translation fragments—one-fifth of the entire work, which is made up mostly of translations, mostly from Lucretius, Theocritus, Horace, and Ovid. There are only seven original pieces. Amongst the translations are three Virgilian frag-ments by Dryden and two others, one by an unknown hand and the other by Mr. Strafford. Yet, Dryden’s extended discussion of Virgil in his Preface indicates the focus of the miscellany.

At the heart of this important critical essay, Dryden emphasizes translation as poetic communication through the ages. As he trans-lates, he claims, he uses his own special powers as a poet to bring his original to life: in some “particular Passages,” he says, “I have thought that I have discover’d some Beauty yet undiscover’d by those Pedants, which none but a Poet cou’d have found.” This gives him liberty to omit and add as he sees fit: “I desire the false Criticks wou’d not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduc’d from him” (Works 3: 4).13 A translator must be a poet in his own right and one who can commune with the spirit of his original and maintain that “Character of an Author, which distinguishes him from all oth-ers, and makes him that individual Poet whom you wou’d interpret,” for “a good Poet is no more like himself, in a dull Translation, than his Carcass would be to his living Body” (3: 4).

As he moves inevitably to consider style, his focus is Virgil, and his discussion of the “Divine Æneid” revolves around aesthetics. Even where Dryden reflects on Virgil’s “Majesty” and “propriety,” he is



concerned with the “Pleasure” these create, not civics. He further indicates his current interest in Virgil when he claims, “That which distinguishes Theocritus from all other Poets, both Greek and Latin, and which raises him even above Virgil in his Eclogues, is the inimita-ble tenderness of his passions” (Works 3: 15). Accordingly, the passages from Virgil that Dryden translates here emphasize human loyalty and blameless suffering—the last moments of true friends Nisus and Eurylas and of the equally devoted father and son, Mezentius and Lausus. He also offers Venus’s sexy seduction of Vulcan from the Aeneid Book 8. In focusing his seminal essay on poetic communion, aesthetics, and the passions of poetry, while using the great civic poet as his example, that is, Dryden marks a shift in the Ancient’s role in English letters.

Another 1685 work, Miscellany Poems and Translations by Oxford Hands, ignores Virgil altogether. Clearly a production by univer-sity wits, this anthology of classical translations and contemporary poems “illustrates,” as Benedict observes, “the association between university translations and general literary culture” (92). By present-ing the classics in translation in a popular literary format, the new intelligentsia locates them at the center of a breakdown between “high” (classical) and “low” (popular contemporary) literature. Further highlighting this breakdown, the note from the “Publisher to the Reader” is aware of “the Authority of able Criticks,” while the anthology reads like light fare for ladies. The second item on the con-tents page, for example, is “The Third Elegy of the Third Book of Tibullus, to his Mistriss by F. Willis.” This classical translation has no more authority than the “Love Verses, by the same Hand” that follow with titles such as “Falling in Love with a Lady for her Wit” or The Unconstant.” Nor, obviously, does Virgil—the creator of one of the greatest ancient love stories—have the standing of Tibullus, Catullus, Ovid, or even Horace in this anthology’s gauging of reader tastes.

The same cultural homogenization characterizes Aphra Behn’s Miscellany, Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands. Together with Reflections on Morality, or Seneca Unmasqued (1685). There are no osten-sible signs that this collection is the product of a woman’s hand. The title indicates the work of “Several Hands”; Behn’s conservative dedication to Sir William Clifton is signed only “A. Behn” (though by 1685 Behn was well enough known); and the contents, with their mixture of classical and contemporary poems, are similar to those of the other anthologies. Yet, the fact that this is the production



of a woman—and one who had her finger on the pulse of London cultural consumption—indicates that the changing status of the classics had much to do with the growing numbers of women read-ing, writing, and appropriating material that was once the domain of a small number of aristocratic men. Virgil appears in the same piece-meal, diminished form in Behn’s miscellany as he does in that of the age’s greatest neoclassical poet. For, here, too, alongside Ovid’s third elegy and “The Vizard Masque” and “The Female Wits: A Song by a Lady of Quality” appear “Tityrus and Melibeus, from Virgil” and “Palemon, Menalcas, Dametas, from Virgil.”

Like the miscellanies, the stage offered what contemporary tastes and issues demanded. So when Nahum Tate reworked the story of Dido and Aeneas as Brutus of Alba: Or the Enchanted Lovers, a Tragedy Acted at the Duke’s Theatre (1678), he presented characters and scenes that belonged rather to Restoration London than to Virgil’s epic. Tate claims concern for Virgil’s reputation as the reason for his adap-tation, citing the “advice of some Friends” who “told me it wou’d appear Arrogant to attempt any Characters that had been written by the Incomparable Virgil” (Preface). Yet, in the play, Tate reveals that, despite his sincere interest in Augustan ideals, his primary aim was to satisfy audience desire for the sensational.

Tate begins by imbuing his adaptation with the epic seriousness of heroic drama. His Aeneas (significantly, renamed Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas and legendary founder of Britain) has all the quali-fications of Virgilian-style heroes. The queen’s address in the opening scene ensures the audience knows of his cosmic significance:

But Prince, you bring more then a common claim,Fame, worthy of your noble Ancestors—There’s magick in his Language, Looks and Meen! (1)

This kind of ancestry rings of the “old feudal aristocratic ideals” that went hand in hand with Augustan Virgil traditions and that, J. Douglas Canfield argues, resurged in royalist tragedies of the late 1670s and the 1680s (235).14 Tate bolsters his aristocratic framework by highlighting Brutus’s place in the translatio imperii tradition. As his companion Assaracus reminds him,

Your rich Loins hold an endless Race of Kings,Fair Albion of their Reign th’Eternal Seat,Albion, that in the Flouds erects her Cliffs



Sits Queen o’th’Seas, whilst the Aw’d Nations roundAt distance wait, and in their mutual JarrsFrom this great Arbitress take Law. . . . (13–14)

Yet, Tate is unable to sustain the weight of the heroic he evokes. In this case, the Augustan seriousness sounds outmoded to the char-acters themselves. Even to Brutus’s heroic ears, Assaracus’s vision is too otherworldly: “Thou speak’st my Friend as thou wert still at Delos / One of th’Orac’lous Tribe, whilst hallow’d Wine / Had steept thy Breast for the Inspiring God” (14). There are, conspicuously, no inspiring gods in this Carthage; moreover, as Tate’s audience now expected of protagonists, Brutus has more down-to-earth concerns. He shows humanity right away in weeping over his dead wife. By the end of the play, Brutus’ human flaws prevail: unlike Virgil’s Aeneas who “Stands firm as an oak” before Dido’s pleas, this one wavers fran-tically like Dryden’s Antony in All for Love. Finally, only the appear-ance of the queen’s husband’s ghost forces him to depart. While such a hero reflects “all the keeping tonies of the pit” (as Dryden accounts for his Antony), like Antony, he simply does not pass muster as an epic hero because of his status as a contemporary one. What Tate has created is the “man of feeling” that Aeneas would become known to eighteenth century. Tate’s palpable metamorphosis of the Virgilian hero is equally felt in his depiction of Locrinus—his replacement for Ascanius. This hero’s son is fully grown and as passionate as his father. Provoked by a son of one of the queen’s noblemen, Locrinus kills him. While immediately forgiven by the queen, he earns the wrath of others. The entire episode is un-Virgilian, but it does look back to Homer’s self-centered heroes—and forward to a character like Tom Jones, who kills (he thinks) a provoker for no sound rea-son and is immediately forgiven by his female supporters even as he increases the wrath of those who have selfish reasons for wishing him dead.

The key point is again the inadequacy of Virgil’s divinely con-trolled and socially interested world for an audience living in one increasingly centered on the individual. The marked lack of divinity in this new world and its collapsing hierarchies are also features of Tate’s play that highlight its distance from the Augustan Virgil. Here there are no feuding deities manipulating human hearts; instead Tate offers black magic of the kind Pope will in his Cave of Spleen in the Rape of the Lock. The resulting cynicism gives way to farce when the witch-like Raguza and her deformed spirits set about casting



a spell and Raguza falls flat on her face. Such slapstick is no more detrimental to the heroic, however, than is the queen’s confidence in her maid: “Not Queen and Subject now, but Friend and Friend” she assures her before asking her advice (8). While such behavior is unimaginable in the hierarchies of epic, it would not disturb audi-ences increasingly used to the strong servant characters that popu-late early eighteenth-century plays, particularly by women. Like the miscellanies, then, Tate, in his stage adaptation, pays homage to Virgil’s illustrious reputation and acknowledges his place in English letters and history—then quietly discards his traditional garb and re-dresses him in contemporary, lightweight clothing. In so doing he illustrates how the progressively audience-centered nature of literary production unseated ancient supremacy, even as the new was built upon the old.

The ParodiesIn 1709, The Tatler No. 9 cited a lengthy passage from Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of the Morning” as the work of an “ingenious” member of the “family of Staffs, Mr. Humphrey Wagstaff by name.” Wagstaff’s ostensible purpose in the poem, his cousin Bickerstaff contends, is deliberately to turn the tide on those “jaunty scribblers [who] are so justly laughed at for their sonnets on Phillis and Chloris, and fantastical descriptions in them.” The poet’s approach, there-fore, blazes “a way perfectly new,” for he “describe[s] things exactly as they happen: he never forms fields, or nymphs, or groves, where they are not, but makes the incidents really appear.”15 While clearly tongue-in-cheek, this discussion of “A Description of the Morning” is telling for its interest in the “newness” of literary modes that point-edly reject classical forms and present people or “incidents just as they really appear.” In effect, it throws a red herring to critics who trace the emergence of essentially modern literary forms and values to the early decades of the eighteenth century. For, in the 1650s and the Restoration, there was an outpouring of mock-heroics, which enjoyed particular popularity during Charles II’s mock-heroic reign and which constitute evidence of the permeation already of new lit-erary interests and of the altered relationship of literature to history. As the examples that follow demonstrate, the irreverent treatments of Virgil (which were voraciously consumed long before Swift’s mock-eries) are founded upon the phenomena attributed to the eighteenth century’s new literary modes.



An integral part of the parodies, for example, is the irreverence for tradition that constitutes part of Hunter’s argument about nov-elistic activity. Similarly, the “plausibility crisis” surrounding ancient rules and literature that Brean Hammond concentrates on results in mockery of Virgil long before the 1690s (Professional Imaginative Writing 112). Indeed, Michael McKeon notes that parody is a crucial agent in the dialectics that forged the novel as fiction writers took models from established categories, mocked them, and replaced them (“Revisionist Grand Theory” 357). In tracing novelistic activity primarily from romance rather than from epic and in situating his argument about the eventual “self-conscious reflexivity” of literary works largely in the eighteenth century, however, McKeon bypasses the Restoration and its parodies as a crucible period.

The importance of parody in these literary processes is indicated by Michael Edwards, who notes that this genre, more than any other, explores the relationship between life and the aesthetic, and that mock-heroic draws attention to the way “reality is being changed by art” (48). Perhaps the most understated of the phenomena contribut-ing to literary change in this period is weariness with worn out liter-ary modes that no longer have any relevance to the national, social, or personal interests of readers. Yet, eighteenth-century critical activity obfuscates the importance of the Restoration as a period generative of “novelty,” and the neoclassical criticism of the 1670s and 1680s, in particular, belies writers’ rejection, in effect, of traditionally ven-erated genres and their ethical codes. In practice, there was a huge gap between critics’ reiteration of classical standards and writers’ responses to readers’ actual interests. Rapin might well declare that epic is the highest accomplishment of “all the productions Man’s mind is capable of” and that its “end” is “the instruction of Princes and Grandees,” but the early mock-heroics, with their heroic subject matter and trivial language, point to the transparency of poetry’s efforts to raise the world (Rapin, Observations 1). For, in outright con-demning heroic codes and tropes, these poets recognize that read-ers are now skeptical of heroes who embody a nation’s codes and history, just as they are of assurances about an English “Augustan” future. In parodying the subject matter, style, or specific content of epic, these works are parodies in the ancient sense outlined by Margaret Rose: they constitute separate poems “alongside” the orig-inals from which they arise, their challenge to venerated poetic tra-ditions resulting in the “production of something new” from those originals (7–8, 46). The “element of ridicule” in this way becomes a



“positive characteristic” as Rose observes parody can (25–26). In each case, literary change is generated as the poet injects contemporary concerns or language into traditional heroic forms. In short, these Restoration parodists mock the heroic, not as an end in itself (though the resulting humor is intentional), but because such mockery deeply questions the givens of the heroic.16 In providing such a critique, they also create a thriving body of literary criticism within Restoration literature. Their brand of criticism is refreshing, moreover, for it counters the contemporary rehearsal of neoclassical platitudes and supports the advice given in Dryden’s 1667 Essay of Dramatick Poesie regarding the importance of native English traditions over classical and French ones and of gauging audience taste instead of following ancient rules.

In part, continental influence accounts for the popularity of clas-sical parodies from the 1650s on. While Nicolas Boileau’s Le Lutrin (1674–83) had an enormous impact on eighteenth-century English mock-heroics, Paul Scarron’s Le Virgile Travesti (1648–52) inspired Charles Cotton’s Scarronides: Or, Le Virgile Travesty (1664–66), which in turn generated an outpouring of similar verses. Despite Scarron’s model, however, the atmosphere was already ripe for mock-heroic and for the essentially English literary modes supplied by the par-odies. A new outlook on the classics is already apparent in Musarum Deliciae: Or, The Muses Recreation; Conteining Severall Select Pieces of Sportive Wit (1655) by Sir John Mennis and Dr. Smith. The collection begins with a note from “The Stationer to the Ingenious Reader,” where “H. H.” (Henry Herringman) declares that “Latin Poetry is now disesteem’d, it must be Drollery or it will not please.” His sole purpose in this collection, he admits, is “to regal the curious Pallats of these Times,” and he ends with an exhortation to “Read, Laugh, and enjoy” (italics reversed). Herringman concedes new attitudes toward the classics, but he also acknowledges the current appetite for curiosities—what is modish. Emphasizing the difference between use of Latin poetry now, in the 1650s, and twenty years earlier, when it embodied political high seriousness, the authors assume the title of a 1635 publication, Musarum Deliciae: Contayning More Than a Select Century of Royall Latine Anagrams, Besides Diverse Written in English, upon the Sacred Name and Titles of Our Dread Soveraigne and of His Dearest Consort, and Their Most Princely Progeny. Whereas that earlier collection begins with a Virgilian “Præfatio Poetica” dedicated “Ad Carolum Regem Augustum,” the 1655 version includes a poem, “To a friend upon a journey to Epsam Wells” in which Virgil appears in



a sorry state: “Here lyes Romes Naso torn and rent” (5). Nor is there any respect for the philosophical Horace: “there lay Horace, / Which newly had wip’d his, or her Arse” (5). In the past, that is, the “Muses’ Recreation” had been exaltation of sovereigns and “Princely Progeny” through Latin verse and Virgilian allusion; now the muses delight in lowly fare, rejecting outright Virgil, Horace, and their friends.

Certainly, when Charles Cotton published the first book of his Scarronides—a parody of Aeneid Book 1—in 1664, it enjoyed great suc-cess. The same was true of the subsequent books that appeared in 1665 and 1666 and remained current into the nineteenth century.17 A highly educated man and a Cavalier, Cotton was to his generation what, say, William Wycherley and George Etherege were to the next: he demonstrated his ease in the realm of classical authority while displacing it with one immediately relevant to his readers. In part, Scarronides fed out of current French and English verse— Scarron obviously, but also works by such popular English writers as John Cleveland and Richard Flecknoe.18 Such pandering to the audience, which accounts for Cotton’s success, is evident right away.

Prefacing the 1664 (and subsequent) editions of “the First Book of Virgils Æneis in English, Burlesque” is a note “To the Reader” in which Cotton invites his readers to participate in scholarly activity as they peruse this “Mock-Poem.” Drawing attention to the Latin footnotes accompanying his text, he “desires” the “Reader . . . for the better comparing of the Latin and English together, to read on for-ward unto the ensuing Letter of Direction, before he compare the former with the Original.” In his assumptions about audience eager-ness to compare Cotton’s words with Virgil’s, he flatters even readers with no knowledge of Latin. Audience response is still of uppermost concern as the poet begins the work proper:

(a) I Sing the man, (read it who list,A Trojan, true, as ever pist)(b) Who from Troy Town, by wind and weatherTo Italy, (and God knows whither)Was packt, and wrackt, and lost, and tost,And bounc’d from Pillar unto Post. (Scarronides 1; Cotton’s Works 121)

The invitation to “read it who list” signals the author’s sensitivity to worn-out material, while the promise of “A Trojan true, as ever pist” punctures the boredom of Virgil’s opening, supplied in footnote “a”: “Arma virumq. cano.”19 The ordinariness of this hero and his



experiences are emphasized by the abundant colloquialisms: “by wind and weather,” “packt and wrackt,” “from Pillar unto Post.” Footnote “b” glosses the offhand “God knows whither” with Virgil’s “fato profugus” (a fugitive by Fate), thereby undermining classical authors’ supposed insight into individual and cosmic destiny. The poet subsequently mocks Virgil’s confidence about divine responsibility (reproduced in note “d” as “Vi Superum” [by the force of the gods]): this Trojan is “Forc’d (as ’tis said) by the Gods spite” (Scarronides 1). This poet’s open-ing, that is, signals his two main missions: to cater to readers’ hunger for the fashionable, displacing the traditional in the process, and to undermine some basic tenets of the most revered Ancient.

Cotton’s work is, from the start, less subtle than Scarron’s—he goes much further, uses a sledgehammer where Scarron with a fine “stroak . . . separates the Head from the Body, and leaves it standing in its place.”20 Yet, in Scarronides, Cotton acknowledges implicitly what Dryden does explicitly in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie in the same decade: the tastes of an English audience were unique. To be sure, the appeal of the mock-heroic (like that of Charles II’s court) was in part its French modishness, yet its characters and their con-versations, Cotton knew, had to come from everyday English life and literature. So when the Trojans land in Carthage, for example, they are “such Mutton mongers” as English readers had enjoyed laughing at in a 1640s “series of works upon ‘great eaters,’ ” a tradition to which, A. I. Dust observes, Cotton had already contributed two poems.21 Yet, in the same scene, Aeneas appears as a newly returned English captain—the kind of realistic figure that would provide heroes in eighteenth-century literature. Having landed,

He thus begins, in Words most easie.Here Lads, have at ye, and be merry,W’are got at last, safe o’re the Ferry;And though w’ave had but angry wark, yetLet’s make the most of a bad market:To day let’s drink, and hang tomorrow,A grain of mirth’s worth pounds of sorrow. (Scarronides 35; Cotton’s Works 133)

The scene could be from an English tavern on the docks, and the hero could be Macheath sixty years before Macheath makes an entrance. The delight of the passage lies not only in its earthy language and aware-ness of what sailors would really feel in this situation, but its implicit debunking of Virgil’s Aeneas’ “Chins up!” pep talk at this moment.



The same gritty realism characterizes Cotton’s Dido tale. Dido, “ravish’d” from the moment she sets eyes on Aeneas, quickly loses her dignity:

Scarce were they got within the dores;But Dido call’d her Maids all Whores,And a great coyle, and scolding kept,Because the house was not clean swept. (Scarronides 91; Cotton’s Works 153)

Again the scene is lifelike and literary. Dido is endearing for her realistic desire to impress a man with her housekeeping, yet she is also the termagant of French and, increasingly, English literature—a prototype for Etherege’s Mrs. Loveit. Unsurprisingly, given the bawdiness that leads up to the cave scene, Cotton makes the sexual liaison explicit, where all others, including Scarron, just hint at it:

The Cave so darksome was, that I doThink Joan had been as good as Dido:But so it was, in that hole theyGrew intimate as one may say. (Cotton’s Works 181)

If this passage is vulgar, Cotton goes further still in his descrip-tion of Dido’s death by hanging, an idea taken from Scarron whose Dido considers but rejects the method (Cotton’s Works 59). As Brean Hammond notes, Cotton now draws on his experience of public executions. His Dido’s final speech parodies that of a Newgate felon (Professional Imaginative Writing 118):

I go (quoth she) and is it just,I die like Felon vile or Traytor,Sans vengeance on this Fornicator?And whilst the Stallion proudly stalks it,Must I be thus hang’d up for Hawks-meat?

Her last moments could not be more undignified:

She caper’d twice, or thrice, most finely;But th’ Rope imbrac’d her neck so kindly:Till at the last, in mortal trance,She did conclude the dismal dance.



A yellow aromatick matterDropt from her heels, comixt with water. (Cotton’s Works 220)

The grotesque appeal of this episode is that of public “entertainments” on Tyburn Hill or at Newgate prison. So Cotton employs Virgil to cater to contemporary taste. Yet, by directly displacing the heroic with such subject matter, he also condemns literature that has little to do with day-to-day life. People in love do not behave like Virgil’s Dido; they behave like Cotton’s heroine. Death is not matter for glorification; it is ugly and humiliating. The “sole purpose” of Cotton’s poem, as Dust observes, is to render Virgil’s Dido-Aeneas episode “ridiculous.”

That Cotton’s target is the Augustan underpinnings of Virgil’s epic, not his love story, however, is readily apparent in his exploita-tion of epic’s weaknesses. Most obviously he inflates to bursting point the human foibles of Homer’s and Virgil’s deities. Juno, for example, is introduced as “That cross-grain’d, peevish, scolding Quean, / That scratching, catter-wawling Puss” (Scarronides 1; Cotton’s Works 121). The deity is then humorously held up to the standards of contem-porary polite society: “Have Goddesses no better Manners?” (ibid.). Venus, meanwhile, simply makes no sense at all, as her son notes:

Mother (quoth he) why dost thou run thus,And with thy Mumming cheat thy Son thus:Why may we not shake one anotherBy th’hand, and talk like Son and Mother? (Scarronides 61; Cotton’s Works 143)

For readers frustrated by Virgil’s Venus’s elusiveness, this is an entirely satisfying moment. Human figures are likewise demysti-fied. As Aeneas leaves Troy in the “Second Book” he turns “Unto my much recruited men; / Rogues, whores, with Bastards at their backs.” In presenting the mighty Trojans, founders of a world empire, as riffraff, Cotton probes a problem that Virgil glosses over: Aeneas’s companions were fugitives—those who did not fight to the last for their country as true patriots should. Dido, at the end of Book 1, also points to Aeneas’s real situation. Tell me, she says, of

Your Challenges, your Fights and Battles,And how you lost your Goods and Chattles;And to what Places you have wander’dE’er since you were so basely Squander’d. (Scarronides 112; Cotton’s Works 161)



This destabilization of Virgil’s global vision and his hero is reinforced as Cotton arbitrarily inserts English names and references: to compare Dido’s new church to St Pancras or Cupid’s shooting to that of Robin Hood is to mock the idea of translatio imperii (Scarronides 65, 97; Cotton’s Works 144, 156). Finally, proverbs scattered through the poem point up the utter banality by now of any heroic statement. By insisting upon the ordinary and undercutting any notion of epic’s prophetic pow-ers, Cotton stresses in Scarronides that the real world can no longer be transformed or glossed by the Ancients. At the same time, by injecting (at this stage) new material into worn-out structures, Cotton seeks to revitalize English poetry with a neo-neoclassicism.22

As Dust points out, Cotton created a model for Virgilian parody (Cotton’s Works 72). Maurice Atkins, whose Cataplus: Or, Æneas His Descent to Hell was published in 1672, followed Cotton most obviously in printing footnotes that supply the Virgilian original. For Atkins, too, the purpose of the notes was to flatter readers by alluding to their assumed knowledge of the venerable classics—and to laugh at Virgil’s redundancy by highlighting his now foreign language. Even more conscious of his audience than Cotton, Atkins constantly addresses his “Reader,” and intervenes in first person to remark upon the narrative. More than Cotton, too, he is aware that he offers a commentary on Virgil’s place in English letters.

Atkins’s purpose—hence his choice of Book 6 in which Aeneas views the past in order to take action for Rome’s imperial future—is to debunk Virgil’s Augustan framework.23 He begins by parodying Virgil’s relation of historical Cumae, Aeneas’s landing place and the home of the Sybil whom Aeneas must consult before he can enter the underworld to gain instructions about Rome’s founding and heroic character. For Virgil there is no distinction between history and myth as he tells of Cumae’s prior famous visitor, Daedalus, and of his escape from the Minotaur, whose abode is given an exact geographi-cal location. The ancient poet pauses, moreover, to hail Apollo as he points to the temple Daedalus dedicated to him at Cumae. Atkins’ narrative, in deliberate contrast, immediately dismisses the account as fanciful fiction: “This town did get its fame and glory / (As ‘tis recorded in old story) / By Dædalus the Carpenter” (5). The address to Phoebus is omitted, and the narrator swings into full storytelling mode as the tale of the Minotaur begins in a “Once upon a time” fashion: “And now I’m come (Reader) to tell / A story sad that there befell: / There liv’d a woman . . . ” (7). Having refused Cumae any historical authenticity, Atkins does the same with the Sybil.



As the Sybil is introduced, Atkins’s scatology, which far exceeds that of Cotton, is uncontained. Virgil’s Sybil is filled with the god’s spirit (literal “inspiration”) and suffers prophetic frenzy; Atkins’s Sybil is moved only by her lower regions:

The Sybil would belch, fart, and stink,As if possesst, or in her drink.Assoon’s the scoundrels came she hoistedHer bum, and in their faces foisted.Wrigling out nasty grunt and cry,Like farrowing Sow immur’d in Sty.Then lest she should too much a scent give,Thrust into breech finger retentive.But bowel thorow-purging pangTwitcht her with wombling gripe and twang.At last by force it flutter’d outLike pump water stopt up with clout.Flouncing about in such large dosesAs made the Trojans hold their noses,She lookt o’th sudden pale as ashes,And smear’d with excremental dashes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At last she howl’d and gave a squawle,And thus did ‘pon Æneas call. (10–11)

Like Cotton, Atkins exploits precarious moments in Virgil: the Sybil’s frenzy is indeed like a drunkenness, and the sexual overtones pervading Virgil’s episode are potentially as undivine as Atkins’ depiction of a dysentery-afflicted Sybil. In presenting Aeneas’s cru-cial consultation with the Sybil as an encounter with putrid bodily discharge rather than with divine spirits, furthermore, Atkins achieves a carnivalesque inversion of one of Virgil’s most revered scenes. The employment of the grotesque body (the lowest realm of human experience) where the reader is used to the pure classical (a transcendental realm) establishes Virgil as a memento classici for which, to use Stallybrass and White’s terms, readers are “the eternal latecomers” (21–22).24 Virgil’s text (embodied in Atkins’s footnotes) has become a classical statue, a relic of a past that now has no utility. Or, in an equally Bakhtinian sense, Atkins’s frankness shatters the monologism of the heroic with satiric dialogic: the implausible ele-ments of Virgil’s poem are laid bare.25 His most telling scene is his Aeneas’s underworld encounter.



When this Aeneas first glimpses the illustrious future heroes of Rome, they are feuding. To his wondering questions, Anchises, his guide in the underworld, replies,

I cou’d tell many pleasant storiesRelating to these drunken Tories,But I must tell of noble HeroesThat shall be to the world meer scare-crows,Who though we look like fools shall beDasht from the loins of I and thee. (74)

While the reference to “drunken Tories” is another obvious sneer at the idea that Rome’s future glories are also England’s, the turning of noble heroes into “meer scare-crows” of history is more than slap-stick. Atkins indicts writers’ presentation of history as effectively as Jonathan Swift will in Gulliver’s Travels. Though Gulliver, permit-ted glimpses into the past during his trip to magical Glubbdubdrib, finds the ancient Roman senate heroic in contrast to its seventeenth- century counterpart, Swift presents Europe’s revered ancestors in the way that Atkins does Rome’s. Gulliver “desired the Governour would call up a dozen or two of the Kings with their Ancestors in order for eight or nine Generations. But my Disappointment was grievous and unexpected. For instead of a long train with Royal Diadems, I saw in one Family two Fidlers, three spruce Courtiers, and an Italian Prelate. In another, a Barber, an Abbot, and two Cardinals.” Disillusioned by his experience, Gulliver concludes that “the World had been misled by prostitute Writers, to ascribe the greatest Exploits in War to Cowards, the Wisest Counsel to Fools, Sincerity to Flatterers, Roman Virtue to Betrayers of their Country, Piety to Atheists, Chastity to Sodomites, Truth to Informers” (198–99; Part 3, Chapter 8).

The main point of Atkins’s limited passage is essentially the same as that of Swift’s sophisticated episode: the lies told by literature (particularly in heroic genres) have misrepresented the past—and the present as its deficient legacy. The result in both cases is the cre-ation of a gulf between history and literature. Atkins’ poem is also evidence of literary criticism embedded in a literary text before the period in which this became a feature of fiction. And, just as much as Swift’s or Fielding’s or Sterne’s work, Atkins’s questioning of generic norms emanates directly from his confrontation of the Ancients’ role in English literature.



Atkins’s mission as literary commentator is revealed as his knockabout “mockery” gives way to the more biting techniques employed by satirists. His vignette of Augustus Caesar could be taken from Juvenal:

He shall have jurisdiction o’reTurk, Tartar, Scythian, Jew and Moor,Extending out his power and swayFarther than Horse can reach a day:Governours of Forts and CastlesShall yield their rights up and be VassalsIn future expeditions, cries he,Io, veni, vidi, vici. (80)

Atkins uses bathos to ridicule his subject here. The great Augustus shall hold sway over—barbarians. His mighty reputation shall be cir-cumscribed only by—trite proverbs. The same technique prevails as Atkins reaches the climax (at least in the original) of the sixth book:

But O thou son of Rome let thisBe thy only masterpiece,To have an order and decorumIn the affairs of Court and Forum,Be kind to honest bully SandersBut pluck down proud and sawcy panders. (86)

The Latin lines that, in Augustan readings, are the proudest in the poem appear in a footnote: “Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento, / Parcere subjectis & debellare superbos” (Remember, Roman, your lot is to rule an empire: to spare the conquered and to overthrow the proud [Loeb 1: 69; 1.851–53]).26 Atkins’s bathos, then, reduces Rome’s mission to maintaining some kind of internal order and dealing with rabble. The shocking contrast between the instruc-tions of his Anchises and those of Virgil’s Anchises reinforces his exposure of the gulf between history and the Virgilian presentation of it. In the final lines of Cataplus he completely dismisses Aeneas’s underworld adventures as humbug:

Thus Father, Son, and the old WomanWalkt along th’Elysian Common,Mingling discourses here and there,And building Castles in the ayr.



Somnus the lazy god of sleepTwo doors to enter in doth keep,The eyes, to wit, which are suppos’dSometimes open, sometimes clos’d:Æneas had lain long a napping(These doors being shut) in quiet Cabbin,When on a sudden opening themHe found he had been in a dream. (88)

Virgil’s imperial vision is nothing more than “castles in the air,” a “dream,” and this episode, which has been taken so seriously for so long, is, if readers look carefully at Virgil’s references to ivory gates, nothing but a fantasy, a dream. More subtle than Scarronides (despite its early effusive scatology) and more incisive in its desta-bilization of Virgil’s authority, Cataplus is a telling commentary on the place of the classics in the last years of the seventeenth century.

In 1672 appeared another Virgilian parody, Maronides, or Virgil Travestie: Being a New Paraphrase upon the Fifth Book of Virgils Æneids in Burlesque Verse, by “John Phillips Gent. the Author of the Satyr against Hypocrites.” Much simpler than Cotton’s or Atkins’s poems, Maronides makes similar complaints about the heroic. Indeed, in his dedicatory epistle, Phillips hopes that his readers find his pages rather “serious Satyr then a jocular story.” In labeling the poem a “new Paraphrase” as well as a “Travestie” he also indicates his mockery of the Virgil adulation embodied in endless reflections on the Ancient. Like those of Cotton and Atkins, this narrator constantly steps for-ward in first person to comment on Virgil’s tale; his hobbyhorse is the triteness of Virgil.

Maronides opens with a yawn at theories that reconcile Aeneas’s heroism and his doltish abandonment of Dido. The poet condemns “Monsieur Æneas” outright:

I con him little praise,To leave a Lady, not ith’mire,But which was worser, in the fire.He Neuter-like, had no great aim,To kindle or put out the flame. (1)

This portrayal of a wishy-washy Aeneas debunks those “Paraphrases” excusing his behavior. The narrator then allows a glimpse into his ignoble mind: “He knew his last demeanor ill, / And his departure



ungentile” (2). As in Cotton’s and Atkins’s poems, the Trojans are also exposed as louts: the boat races of Virgil’s fifth book provide an ideal canvas for painting the “yaul[ing] and baul[ing]” figures that are to be masters of the world. The ceremony surrounding the games too is ripe for mockery. The Trojan chief, Cloanthus, tries to bribe the gods. If, he says, I

Shall win the prize, I make this vow;An Ox shall be the Recompence,Of your Divine omnipotence;And then to please your appetite;That in Ragou’s take much delight,The body shall be stuft with parsly;The Entrails spiced, and pepper’d fiercely. (45)

His self-serving prayer is a comic exaggeration of ancient pleas to the deities. As such, it highlights the essential selfishness of both humans and gods in Virgil’s poem about individual sacrifice for a national cause. Elsewhere, Phillips points up the implausible nature of Virgil’s tale by noting minor illogicalities. On Aeneas’s distribu-tion of prizes during the races, the poet observes, for example, that “As for who ’twas these guists deserv’d / Virgil is very much reserv’d” (49). Of Palinurus’s death at the end of the book, likewise, the narra-tor says that he fell off the ship “heav’n knows how, / Only that Virgil says ‘twas so” (149).

Phillips is so set on being down to earth that even the most prophetic character of this book groans at Virgil’s transcendental moments. Anchises warns Aeneas that when he makes his underworld journey, he “shall hear me make Tautologies, / Concerning all your Genealogies, / Which every day I con by heart, / As Children says their mornings part” (130). Aeneas, in turn, responds in a wonderfully human way, for leaving, “he knocks”

His Princely shins against a Chair,That passion urg’d could not forbear;Quot he, pox take this dog my father,To lead me thus I know not whither;I warrant it an Inch-Incision,The Devil take him with his vision.But by and by when pain was over,His anger cooles, and he repentsOf his ungracious complements. (132)



This realistic and compelling scene goes to the heart of Maronides: Phillips delights in pointedly replacing otherworldly figures and situ-ations with immediate meaningful ones. Like Cotton and Atkins, he aimed to please readers rather than to engage in scholarly activity.

In the other major Virgil parody of the 1670s–1680s, The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor against the State of Troy: A Poem (1682), the author takes a different tack in a more-angry-than-bemused indictment of Virgilian cant. Rather resembling Pope in his Rape of the Lock than the 1670s parodies, this anonymous poet contrasts heroic language and unworthy subject matter. As Pope would in that satire, he also attacks contemporary society. Yet, the absence of any implied moral values besides common decency indicates that the real butt of this parody is the dishonesty of the heroic.

Beginning with the title, which announces the poem’s subject as the betrayal of Troy by Virgil’s perfect prince, the poet employs shock tactics to puncture notions of heroism.27 Then appears an Aeneas, who is as much a traitor as his fellow anti-hero Antenor—a character akin to Dryden’s Shaftesbury or Achitophel. Antenor the “spatious Name of Patriot . . . assumes / And Mutiny with Liberty perfumes,” all in the name of “change of Government” or “making less unequal Laws” (14). Asked by Priam to fire the Greeks’ ships and so prevent their escape, Aeneas does so successfully. He is next approached by Ulysses, now in a position of weakness, and bribed into betraying Troy to the Greeks on the grounds that only with Priam’s and Troy’s fall will he receive his destined “absolute Empire, and a Spiritual Rome; / Which shall extend her Sway to that degree, / That Phrygia shall a petty Province be” (12). Antenor, whose only function seems to be to offer a republican parallel to prince Aeneas’s dishonesty, escapes from Troy “we know not how” (19). Unlike Absalom and Achitophel, which it resembles, The Conspiracy contains neither reproach nor consolation for the thwarted progress of divine history. The poet refuses to promote either monarchy or republicanism; instead, he debunks the ancient precepts with which English writers explain away historical chaos. This anti-epic campaign is clearest in the poet’s treatment of war and religion.

The opening echoes Virgil’s in order to draw attention to war’s wastage:

Long time had Troy through various Tumults past;And War laid all her Habitations wast,A Holy War! For the pretended causeWas, as ’tis still; Religion and the Laws. (3)



Virgil’s and England’s so-called holy wars are equally phony. There is no great purpose behind the razing of a land; the self-interests of those in power are always to blame:

Twas said the King [Priam] when he receiv’d his Crown,Did Bargain with the Gods to Guard his Town;And’s People claim’d his Coronation-Oath,But as ‘twas whispered then, he broke ‘um both:His Subjects might not their own right dispute;His Empire was from Heaven and absolute;Wherefore th’avenging Gods more angry grown,Espous’d the cause, and made it all their own:They drove their own Anointed to distress,And Crown’d a Rebel Army with success. (3–4)

Most obviously for a Restoration audience, this passage derides Stuart divine-right claims as well as those of Cromwell’s “rebel Army.” Again, however, history is not the main concern. In blackening Priam—mythology’s spotless king—the poet follows the 1670s parodies in demolishing Virgil’s story of empire building: if Priam cannot be believed in, nothing can. Above all, the passage highlights the extent to which those in power claim divine favor for their own cause, and poets, the source of the (oft-repeated) “ ’twas said,” are as blameworthy as kings. As in the other parodies too, Virgil’s grand scheme of global “Fate” is quickly dismissed: in just one example, Priam, unaware of his imminent demise is now shown as “Born on his Subjects Love, and big with Fate, / Suppos’d the only means to fix the State” (5).

Dust remarks that whatever the popularity of these travesties, they “apparently produced no marked effect upon the reputation of the classics” (Cotton’s Works 83). Yet, reputation is not an accurate indicator of the status of the venerable Ancients in Interregnum and Restoration England. These parodies lay bare readers’ tastes; they also point to the irrelevance of the characters and ethics pro-moted by Rapinian texts. As an inherently carnivalesque genre, the mock-heroic at once invokes and transgresses the venerated in “rad-ical opposition” (to use Stamm’s terms) “to the illegitimately pow-erful, to the morose and monological” (55). By reminding readers of the lofty loves of Dido and Aeneas, of Virgil’s assurances about Fate and omnipotent gods, of selfless heroes and national values, and then offering instead the weaknesses of fleshy bodies, a godless existence and misfortune, and greed, hypocrites and fools, these poets refuse to perpetuate a rhetoric that has no current meaning—if it ever did.



Their goals and effects are the same as those of the Virgilian tributes in the fragments, miscellanies, and Ogilby: they pay attention to the modish rather than the time-honored as they defer to the buying public; the “high” and “low” become indistinguishable; heroes who encompass national values are ridiculed; the divinity of history is denied; a wedge is driven between politics and literature; and a new kind of literature emerges.

EpilogueThe court of Charles II, as Stallybrass and White observe, “was both classical and grotesque, both regal and foolish, both high and low” (102). The inevitable product of this Jeckyll-and-Hyde monar-chy (and the turmoil that preceded it) is a cultural dialectic that is nowhere more palpable than in the treatments of Virgil, its potential savior. Like Ogilby and those who composed translation fragments in the 1650s and 1660s, creators of the early miscellanies seriously undertake to pay the homage due to the most revered ancient poets. Yet, as the parodists do explicitly, they inevitably recognize the essential futility of Virgil and his Augustan vision to contemporary readers. They do so, moreover, even as Virgil becomes popularized—moved wholesale, for the first time, into the sphere of nonelite and nonscholarly readers.

Virgil’s fate is important not just in what it reveals about con-temporary attitudes toward ancient literature. In an age generally considered obsequiously neoclassical, writers’ reactions to ancient restrictions, particularly those of Virgil, the most revered ancient author, set literary revolutions in motion. Contrary to the conclu-sions of most discussions of “novelistic,” phenomena, writers in the Interregnum and reign of Charles II rather than the early eighteenth century or even 1690s first replaced divinely guided national heroes with characters who must negotiate an apparently godless universe. In this age, not the next, readers first enjoyed literature embellished by “low” language, domestic situations, and repudiation of ancient platitudes. For, Restoration writers took delight, as they confronted Virgil, in destroying generic givens and mixing high and low. As middle classes took an interest in Virgil, moreover, experimental poets generated a “public sphere,” employing the poet to negotiate “a cultural alliance between the gentry, the Court, and the town” long before the early periodicals of the eighteenth century, to which Stallybrass and White attribute this role (83).



That all the works discussed here subvert traditional Virgilianism indicates that writers of parodies in this age shared the same values as those who composed the Astraea Reduxes. As Michael Wilding has powerfully argued in his discussion of Hudibras and Paradise Lost as “explicit rejections of the heroic code,” this was not, as critical consensus would have it, an age of the heroic (174). The overlooked travesties of Virgil write large Wilding’s contention that “epic in England transformed into the burlesque epic of Hudibras and the Christian epic of Paradise Lost” and that epic’s military heroes were now seen as “plagues of men” (173–75). These reactionary poems, like the miscellanies that appeared simultaneously, point to the fact that the “times were too contemptible for heroic treatment” (Wilding’s conclusion) as well as to a rejection of the Ancients that was untempered by nostalgia—the nostalgia was to come.


CHAPTER 3

VIRGIL, 1688–1700: A WATERSHED OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Prologue

Dryden’s Works of Virgil (1697) was hailed as England’s long-awaited epic, and the poet was celebrated in commendatory poems for offering new hope and resur-

recting Virgil’s majesty from stifling “dogrel” and “mangling Ogleby’s presumptuous Quill”:

thy Virgil’s awful Shade,Whom thou hast rais’d to bless our happy Land,Does circl’d round with radiant Honours stand:He’s now the welcom Native of our Isle,And crowns our Hopes with an auspicious Smile . . . .1

According to these poets, whose praises preface the first editions, Virgil is still the key to English national glory, and Dryden has achieved what Virgil would have were he alive in England at this moment. His “Copy share[s] an equal praise” with Virgil’s original, and “ ’Tis certain, were he [Virgil] now alive with us” then “Himself cou’d write no otherwise than thus” (Dryden, Works 5: 57–64).2 The Augustan epic mission is still feasible in 1690s England, it would seem, and Dryden’s splendid translation has achieved it. Yet, for all their majestic language even these enthusiastic prefatory poems lack an imperial vision and signal the final abandonment of epic ambitions that occurred in this decade. One poet compares Dryden’s ambitions and England’s only subtly to denounce the latter:

As Britain, in rich Soil abounding wide,Furnish’d for Use, for Luxury, and Pride,



Yet spreads her wanton Sails on ev’ry Shore,For Foreign Wealth, insatiate still of more. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .So Dryden, not contented with the FameOf his own Works, tho’ an immortal Name,To Lands remote he sends his learned Muse,The Noblest Seeds of Foreign Wit to chuse. (5: 63)

England’s greed for foreign goods means “Luxury” and “Pride” prevail, yet Dryden’s quest for the “Noblest Seeds” of “Foreign Wit” offers some hope to a nation still “in rich Soil abounding.” The other poems too focus rather on Dryden’s poetics than Virgil’s cosmic vision and England’s place in it. For H. St. John, Dryden is “Wit’s Universal Monarch Crown’d” and the poet’s “Fancy” as “Sublime” as his “Mind” is “boundless” (5: 62). The other poems too employ this language of eighteenth-century criticism, the first beginning with a eulogy to Virgil’s “wild Fancy” (5: 57).

These panegyrics reflect the new literary emphases of the 1690s, a decade when writers become more interested in aesthetics, or wit for its own sake and abandon traditional paradigms, sometimes quietly, sometimes flamboyantly. Often even when they have good civic intentions, as this chapter will demonstrate, they extricate lit-erary works from politics, or at least subordinate the political to the aesthetic. In engaging fully in centuries of English Royalism while transcending politics, Dryden’s Aeneis embodies the complicated dialectics of this watershed decade, even accomplishing, as John Barnard argues, a unification of the nation “in an aesthetic realm which transcends the fractious and unstable actualities of 1697” (201). As Barnard and others point out, Dryden uses the translations and prefatory essays of his Works of Virgil to reflect unequivocally on Stuart politics and express Jacobite disillusionment with William III and Mary II’s regime. Ultimately, however, he erases political partisanship. While elaborate plates and dedications offer Jacobite sentiments, the prefatory subscribers’ list documents supporters from all social ranks and political persuasions. In the translation, the poet explores time-honored and contemporary notions of heroism but refuses to comment on the values a hero or nation should embody. Mock-heroic moments, which subvert Virgil’s heroic, reinforce this political and moral ambiguity. Dryden’s Virgil is, finally, a national poetic monument, not an expression of English Augustanism.3

It is so because Virgil collided, in Dryden’s hands, with drastic historical change. Dryden was unable to produce the translation that would stand in the stead of an epic-length Astraea Redux or Annus


Virgil, 1688–1700 99

Mirabilis, not just because Virgil’s Augustan vision had dwindled into fragments and Ogilby’s dullness, but because historians and cultural preservers in William III’s England were simply unable to believe in active divine intervention in history. While even some Williamite writers tried to salvage Augustan ideals in order to present the Dutch prince as legitimate successor and English monarchy as uninterrupted, the vigor itself of their efforts whispered that such notions of sacred history belonged to the past. During this decade, writers—and Dryden is outstanding among them—began to present history as a marvelous repository of instructive examples but no more, thereby approximating eighteenth-century “novelists, histo-rians, and biblical commentators,” who, as Thomas Preston argues, “all sought to explain human character and behavior on rational and humanly probable grounds” (184). Like his immediate contemporar-ies, Dryden finally abandons Rapinian instruction of national lead-ers, despite the initial heroic stance of the Aeneis, and he denies a divinely manipulated universe as he confronts the political and historical uncertainties of the Glorious Revolution.

The tensions of the previous decades become more noticeable in the 1690s, and the gulf between theory and practice widens as the historical and psychological impact of the rapid revolutionary changes in government and in approaches to the past permeate liter-ary endeavors. The Augustan impulses of the 1670s and 1680s persist both in new editions of the works discussed in the previous chapter and in new efforts to endorse the old hierarchies and the authority of the heroic. Particularly influential was Le Bossu’s 1675 Traité du poème épique, popularized in the 1690s through “W. J.’s” translation, Monsieur Bossu’s Treatise of the Epick Poem Containing Many Curious Reflexions, Very Useful and Necessary for the Right Understanding and Judging of the Excellencies of Homer and Virgil. Reinforcing Bossu’s Aristotelian precepts, W. J., in his “Preface of the Translator,” emphasizes the divine origin of poetry and the civic function of epic, including the role played by Virgil’s Aeneid in directing history. As W. J. praises the dedicatee of his translation, Sir Richard Blackmore, for his 1690s epic, he commends him on “signaliz[ing] his own Country” in the “happy Choice of his Subject and Hero,” but more for the fact that “according to the Rules Bossu has laid down, his [Blackmore’s] Fable will appear to be exactly the same with that of the Aeneid. His Action is like that of the Latin Poet, One, Entire, Noble, Great, and Important, viz. The Restoration of a decay’d Church and State to its ancient Splendor and Glory.”4 W. J. seems convinced of the supremacy



of the Ancients and of the possibility of emulating them to great effect as he further lauds Blackmore for seeming “in a great Measure to have confin’d himself to the Rules of Aristotle and Horace, to have copy’d the best of any Man the Perfections of Virgil.” In this decade when the Ancients/Moderns debate raged fiercely, W. J.’s confidence in the superiority of the Ancients was shared by many vocal contemporaries, including William Wotton, who claimed in 1694 that “the Excellency of Ancient Eloquence and Poetry . . . is so generally held that I do not fear any Opposition here at home. It is almost an Heresie in Wit among our Poets, to set up any Modern Name against Homer of Virgil, Horace or Terence” (qtd. by Levine 98). Traditional Augustan values also reverberated in a work entitled Verdicts of the Learned Concerning Virgil and Homers Heroic Poems (1697), where the author considers “the main End of an Heroic Poem, which is to direct Persons of Quality,” and concludes, like Rapin, that “ ’tis the noblest and most important Work of the Mind.” Nay, more, he continues, “ ’tis the most sublime, the most ingenious, and the hardest” (1).

Despite his traditional superlatives, however, this author just as quickly and typically for the times contradicts himself by taking a Modernist stance in denying that literary perfection lies only in the ancient world: “notwithstanding all the transcendent Elogiums of Homer and Virgil in the Schools; yet is the Perfect Heroic Poet still to be born, as well as the compleat Prince or Perfect Captain” (2). Even more dramatically, considering the Augustan sentiments of his open-ing, the author eventually dismisses the Ancients as impractical. Relegate them to the schools, he advises, for Homer and Virgil have no useful place in civic life: “Let therefore Homer’s and Virgil’s Poems be confin’d to the Schools . . . But not appear in Court, nor be put into the hands of such Scholars as wear Swords by their sides, and hold a Commanders Staff in their hands” (27). In insisting on the everyday relevance of literature, this author reveals the new imperatives that affect even those in the 1690s whose initial ambitions, like Dryden’s in his Virgil, appear to involve heroic achievement. Blackmore, too, despite W. J.’s excessive praise of his Augustan framework and inten-tions, is unable to sustain any epic grandeur in a poem that is con-certedly aimed at his contemporaries. The big stumbling block for Blackmore, as demonstrated below, is allegory, which is the crux of true Augustan epic endeavor but is so alien in the 1690s that this would-be epic poet denounces it.

The purpose of this chapter, in short, is to demonstrate how abso-lutely representative of this watershed decade is Dryden’s translation


Virgil, 1688–1700 101

of Virgil, which seems to offer a much-awaited national Augustan epic, but subtly (and at times not so subtly) calls for new literary and historical outlooks. The texts examined here begin with an implicit faith in ancient authority and the power of revived Augustan ideals actually to effect historical change—the kind of faith that inspired such Restoration works as Astraea Redux. Blackmore, for one, hopes at least to counter that “leud and abominable way or writing which was encourag’d in the late Reign” and seems alone able to “please the Nation” (Preface to Prince Arthur). What Blackmore and Bossu’s translator—and even, initially, Dryden—cannot acknowledge, how-ever, is that the heroic has no place in 1690s England, that “debauch’d World,” to which W. J. attributes the “general Disesteem which Epick Poetry lies under.” Yet, where Blackmore’s efforts result in a poem that has been mocked since it appeared, Dryden works his way toward a novel kind of epic, one that included the kind of passions and the sublime, on which John Dennis was already reflecting.5 By com-paring the dilemmas of Dryden’s epic translation and the markedly different directions he took from his earlier works to the challenges and choices of his contemporaries, this chapter also demonstrates the importance of the 1690s in English literary history.

Dryden’s AeneisDryden begins the Dedication of his Virgil by reiterating epic’s unquestionable supremacy, just as the current editions of Bossu and Rapin were doing. He even echoes Rapin as he declares from the outset that “A heroick Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform. The Design of it, is to form the Mind to Heroick Virtue by Example; ’tis conveyed in Verse, that it may delight, while it instructs: The Action of it is always one, entire, and great” (Works 5: 267). As he goes on to consider Virgil’s hero and his Augustan aims, Dryden seems as conservative as Levine labels him, his subject matter sug-gesting, as the same critic claims of the state of literature in the late seventeenth century, that the Moderns had made very little head-way (Levine 79).6 Dryden insists, for example, that Augustus is “shadow’d in the Person of Æneas” and that Virgil supplies Augustus with “good Counsel, how to behave himself in his new Monarchy, so as to gain the Affections of his Subjects, and deserve to be call’d the Father of his Country” (Works 5: 283). Ostensibly, Dryden confirms Rapin’s assertion that the “end” of epic is the instruction of “Princes



and Grandees” and concurs with W. J’s praise of the Aeneid, in his translator’s “Preface” to Bossu, for effecting political change for the better. W. J. declares,

’tis more than Probable that the publishing of [Virgil’s] Aeneid conduc’d very much to the settling Augustus on the Imperial Throne. We know what a strange Aversion the Romans had to the very name of Monarchy, and ‘tis not likely they would so soon have exchang’d their belov’d Democracy for that which they so much hated, had they not been work’d over to it by the Instructions of Virgil: who informs them, ‘That when Heaven decrees to settle a State upon such or such a Foundation, ‘tis Atheism and Irreligion to oppose its Designs; and such an Affront to the divine Majesty and Wisdom as should certainly meet with speedy and condign Punishment.

To read Dryden’s rehearsal of truisms as representative of his Augustanism, however, is to ignore the complexities of the trans-lation that follows and of passages within the Dedication. Despite his proclamations about epic—proclamations that give his transla-tion authority—Dryden fails to follow the basic neoclassical rules of instruction and decorum. Rather than manipulating history, he struggles with and finally concedes the disjunction between Augustan imperial destiny and the realities of an England where popular tampering with that most sacred institution, monarchy, ren-ders questions of rightful leadership and civic duties troubling to say the least.

Dryden encounters the history problem head-on as he comes in his Dedication to consider Aeneas’s role in raising one empire from the “Ruins” of another:

Æneas cou’d not pretend to be Priam’s Heir in a Lineal Succession: For Anchises the Heroe’s Father, was only of the second Branch of the Royal Family: And Helenus, a Son of Priam, was yet surviving, and might lawfully claim before him. It may be that Virgil mentions him on that Account. Neither has he forgotten Priamus, in the fifth of his Æneis, the Son of Polites, youngest Son to Priam; who was slain by Pyrrhus in the Second Book. Æneas had only married Creusa, Priam’s Daughter, and by her could have no Title, while any of the Male Issue were remaining. In this case, the Poet gave him the next Title, which is, that of an Elective King. The remaining Trojans chose him to lead them forth, and settle them in some Foreign Country. (Works 5: 283–84)


Virgil, 1688–1700 103

As Zwicker points out, Dryden’s interest in Virgilian politics centers on “political revolution”: in a wholly conventional manner, the lan-guage of English politics presents Rome and London as analogues; and Jacobite views shade the passage as William III’s claims on English monarchy are reduced to that of “Elective King.”7 Dryden seems committed still to Augustan ideals. Yet, to argue, as Levine does, that Dryden “could, like his master, hope for a reconciliation with reality, though he was clearly less happy with William than Virgil was with Augustus” is to dismiss the poet’s contortions of history (107). The main point here is not that Aeneas offers a pre-cept for the latest revolution in English politics, rather that he is the prime example of how poetic powers (those of the “Prince of Poets” moreover) have manipulated history by presenting him as divinely designated founder of a world empire. Dryden’s exposure of obscure details in Virgil ridicules (as do the mock-heroics of the 1670s) the notion of almighty Fate legitimizing Aeneas’s claims on Latium as the transferred seat of Trojan power; the true Aeneas, he declares here, was a poor cousin, the nominee of the “remaining Trojans,” for whom there was no option but to settle “in some Foreign Country.” Aeneas’s stature as the perfect hero is destabilized; so too is the historical legitimacy of divine-right claims.

Dryden subsequently considers the arbitrariness of poets in gen-eral and Virgil in particular, further to undermine Virgilian proph-ecy. He first invokes Horace to warn of the dangers of upsetting a poet: “For genus irritabile Vatum, as Horace says. When a Poet is thoroughly provok’d, he will do himself Justice, however dear it cost him, Animamque, in vulnere ponit. . . . The Vengeance we defer, is not forgotten” (Works 5: 283). Reflecting on Virgil’s relationship with Maecenas, he suggests that poets’ personal feelings shape even their greatest works: “Oblig’d he was to his Master for his Bounty, and he repays him with good Counsel, how to behave himself in his new Monarchy, so as to gain the Affections of his Subjects, and deserve to be call’d the Father of his Country.” Finally he highlights the impact on European genealogy of Virgilian propaganda: “We, and the French are of the same Humour: They would be thought to descend from a Son, I think, of Hector: And we wou’d have our Britain, both Nam’d and Planted by a descendant of Æneas. Spencer favours this Opinion what he can. His Prince Arthur, or whoever he intends by him, is a Trojan. Thus the Heroe of Homer was a Grecian, of Virgil a Roman, of Tasso an Italian” (5: 283). Self-interested poets shape history. The imperial teleology of poems like Astraea Redux and Annus Mirabilis



is forgotten; Dryden has abandoned seventeenth-century modes of history and literature.

His new approach to history becomes clearer as he points to “another sort of Kingship in the Person of Latinus”: “He is describ’d a just and a gracious Prince; solicitous for the Welfare of his People; always Consulting with his Senate to promote the common Good . . . And this is the proper Character of a King by Inheritance, who is born a Father of his Country” (Works 5: 284). The Jacobite undertones are obvious: the language of succession furthers the earlier attack on William III. Yet, nobody, not even Dryden, could unflinchingly portray James II, the last English born “Father of his Country” through a prince who was “solicitous” of his people’s wel-fare and always consulting with parliament for “the common Good.”8 Dryden presents a Stuart ideal, to be sure, but the key phrase is “another sort of Kingship.” Throughout the Dedication and transla-tion he holds up “types” in the modern sense: examples of wise and deplorable leadership that his readers can themselves judge, not pre-figurations that spell out history’s end. The tactic is that of histori-ans in the next century—of, say, Jonathan Swift’s A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (1701). Swift claims there to present the English “paralleled in Athenian characters” in a “kind of remonstrance in behalf of king William and his friends, against the proceedings of the house of com-mons” (Works 283). Just like Dryden’s, ultimately, in the Aeneis and its Dedication, Swift’s purpose in employing the classical world is not to presage fulfillment of ancient tyranny in England, but to warn by example “that the measures [the commons] pursued had a direct tendency to bring on the tyranny they professed to oppose” (283).

As Swift would, too, Dryden considers a nation’s natural form of government. His approval of Latinus is due to the monarch’s mainte-nance of power balance and his being “born a Father of his Country.” The latter virtue is central to divine-right kingship; the former was the catchcry of parliamentarians who looked to the Magna Charta to validate their claims. In either case, as Dryden argues in an ear-lier passage, national harmony is achieved by following the “natural” laws of one’s native land. Contrasting Roman and English monarchy, he reflects,

For his Conscience could not but whisper to the Arbitrary Monarch [Augustus], that the Kings of Rome were at first Elective, and Govern’d not without a Senate: That Romulus was no Hereditary Prince . . . that


Virgil, 1688–1700 105

the last Tarquin was Expell’d justly, for Overt Acts of Tyranny, and Male-Administration; for such are the Conditions of an Elective Kingdom: And I meddle not with others: being, for my own Opinion, of Montaign’s Principles, that an Honest Man ought to be con-tented with that Form of Government, and with those Fundamental Constitutions of it, which he receiv’d from his Ancestors, and under which himself was Born. (Works 5: 281)

“I,” he concludes, “am ‘pleas’d to have been born an English Man.’” Again the attack on William III’s “elective” monarchy is unmistak-able. Yet, this is no straightforward Royalist politics, for the “last Tarquin” so justly expelled for “Overt Acts of Tyranny and Male-Administration” is more likely to call James II to mind than William III. Dryden’s emphasis is on following the natural laws of one’s own country, whatever they may be. The same philosophy had shaped his Absalom and Achitophel; there, after weighing up the various options in his discourse on government, he concludes:

All other Errors but disturb a State;But Innovation is the Blow of Fate.If ancient Fabricks nod, and threat to fall,To Patch the Flaws, and Buttress up the Wall,Thus far ‘tis Duty; but here fix the Mark:For all beyond it is to touch our Ark. (2: 29; 799–804)

As in all Dryden’s pre-1688 political works, however, this warning against innovation is part of the teleological English history encom-passed by the poem: England’s new Aeneas/Augustus/King David, Charles II, will ensure the nation’s fulfillment of Roman destiny. At the end of the poem, “David’s” reprimand is met with the “Almighty’s” nodded “Consent,” and “Henceforth a Series of new time began, / The mighty Years in long Procession ran: / Once more the Godlike David was Restor’d, / And willing Nations knew their Lawfull Lord” (2: 36; 1026–31). Dryden’s complex attack in the Dedication contrasts starkly with his former stance. Detached from an Augustan par-adigm (even as he employs the language of English Augustanism), his injunction to be “contented with that Form of Government, and with those Fundamental Constitutions of it” passed down from ancestors is nonprefigurative advice such as Swift would later give in his “Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome.” The same approach char-acterizes Dryden’s translation. Even the most palpably Jacobite



scenes offer examples rather than solutions, betraying a lack of confidence in divine-right monarchy. Still, however, the ghost of Royalist conviction hovers, producing a Janus-faced poem steeped in the nostalgia that typifies the 1690s.

The most notable result of the tension between Dryden’s desire for the old Augustan assurances and his acute awareness of the world of his contemporary audience is the unevenness of his translation. In some places, particularly near the beginning, there is a serene majesty reminiscent of the heroic moments of Astraea Redux. The “clearness, the Purity, the Easiness and the Magnificence” of Virgil’s “Stile” that Dryden praises in his Dedication is recreated in his own translation as he presents Jupiter’s magnificent speech prophesying empire without bounds in Aeneis I.9 Venus asks her immortal father why his promises regarding her mortal son, the epic’s hero, remain unfulfilled:

To whom, the Father of th’immortal Race,Smiling with that serene indulgent Face,With which he drives the Clouds, and clears the Skies:First gave a holy Kiss, then thus replies.Daughter, dismiss thy Fears: To thy desireThe Fates of thine are fix’d, and stand entire.Thou shalt behold thy wish’d Lavinian Walls,And, ripe for Heav’n, when Fate Æneas calls,Then shalt thou bear him up, sublime, to me;No Councils have revers’d my firm Decree.And lest new Fears disturb they happy State,Know, I have search’d the Mystick Rolls of Fate:Thy Son (nor is th’appointed Season far)In Italy shall wage successful War:Shall tame fierce Nations in the bloody Field,And Sov’raign Laws impose, and Cities build. (Works 5: 353; 346–61)

So confident is Dryden’s translation that the English poet seems con-vinced of the original Augustan vision and promises of peace. Later, however, Dryden abandons heroic decorum altogether as he brings human suffering to life for an audience used to the ranting characters of the theater world. Deserted by her princely lover, Dryden’s Dido, for example, forgets all about her regal status and bawls Aeneas out like a fish wife:

Of Man’s Injustice, why shou’d I complain?The Gods and Jove himself behold in vain


Virgil, 1688–1700 107

Triumphant Treason, yet no Thunder flyes:Nor Juno views my Wrongs with equal Eyes;Faithless is Earth, and Faithless are the Skies!Justice is fled, and Truth is now no more;I sav’d the Shipwrack’d Exile on my Shore:With needful Food his hungry Trojans fed;I took the Traytor to my Throne and Bed:Fool that I was—’tis little to repeatThe rest, I stor’d and Rigg’d his ruin’d Fleet.I rave, I rave: A God’s Command he pleads,And makes Heav’n accessory to his Deeds. (5: 469; 531–44)

In contrast to the benign god-centered universe invoked by Jupiter in Book 1, the world presented here is an indifferent one where cruel acts are committed in “Heav’n’s” name. Virgil’s Dido doubts not the might-iness of the gods, rather lamenting their unfairness and the vulnera-bility of trust (“iam iam nec maxima Iuno / nec Saturnius haec oculis pater aspicit aequis. / nusquam tuta fides” [Loeb 1: 420; 4.371–73]). While she acknowledges that the “furies have enraged her” (furiis incense feror [Loeb 1: 420; 4.376]), she never loses composure in the way the Dryden’s Dido does here. The Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the name calling, the repetition, and the choppiness of the harangue all produce a heroine that is more suitable to a work like John Lewkenor’s 1693 antiepic discussed below than to a heroic translation.

Dryden’s concerted shift away from the heroic is all the more disrup-tive to epic wholeness in those political passages where he confronts contemporary history. In his rendition of the fall of Troy in Aeneis, Book 2, for example, Dryden recognizes the collapse of the Augustan world-view he had promulgated so vigorously during the Stuart regime. After describing the bestial slaughtering of Priam by Pyrrhus, he concludes,

Thus Priam fell: and shar’d one common FateWith Troy in Ashes, and his ruin’d State:He, who the Scepter of all Asia sway’d,Whom Monarchs like domestick Slaves obey’d.On the bleak Shoar now lies th’abandon’d King,A headless Carcass, and a nameless thing. (Works 5: 403; 758–63)

As critics and editors have long pointed out, Dryden’s passage closely follows Denham’s 1654 version, which, as discussed above, evokes civil war strife:

Thus fell the King, who yet surviv’d the State,With such a signal and peculiar Fate.



Under so vast a ruine not a Grave,Nor in such flames a funeral fire to have:He, whom such Titles swell’d, such Powr made proudTo whom the Scepters of all Asia bow’d,On the cold earth lies th’unregarded King,A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing. (Works 178; Poems 64)

By deliberately echoing Denham, Dryden signals that his own com-mentary on a fallen king is shaped not just by recent events but also by the tale of Stuart monarchy in the last fifty years. In the past, he had taken comfort in the cycles of history and their inevitable progress toward a divine end; here, the resonance of Denham serves to accen-tuate the decline of English monarchy. Dryden’s deep pessimism is evident in the finality of his first couplet, which replaces Denham’s optimistic insistence in his first two couplets that monarchy is immortal. Dryden further darkens Denham’s horrified vignette by replacing his “cold earth” with “the bleak Shoar”—his view now of the English shores to which Charles II had so triumphantly returned in 1660. Also unlike Denham, Dryden blames the people for the sit-uation: his Priam is “th’abandon’d King” whereas Denham’s simply lies “unregarded” in the midst of chaos. The verbatim reproduction of Denham’s last apocalyptic line, however, most clearly bespeaks the demise for Dryden of the worldview he had so long maintained. By incorporating into his epic structure Denham’s subversion of clas-sical hierarchies (see discussion of the line at p. 47–48 above), Dryden dismantles both the mythology of English kingship and the author-ity of epic as a bulwark of sacred history. In this scene, as in Dryden’s Virgil as a whole, epic closure confronts the deeply uncertain nature of contemporary history.10 Dryden may praise the function of epic, as he does in the Dedication, but he can no longer provide his own epic with a great action or even a set of ethics.

Further darkening both the Priam episode and the Dido scene is the conspicuous absence of a divine purpose to the suffering, an absence that ultimately undoes Dryden’s heroic. His refusal to provide the consola-tion embedded in the promises of translatio imperii is best illustrated in his capricious rendering of Fate throughout the translation. As Dryden opens his epic, Fate is presented in a typical Augustan manner:

Arms and the Man I sing, who, forc’d by Fate,And haughty Juno’s unrelenting Hate,Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan Shoar:Long Labours, both by Sea and Land he bore,And in the doubtful War, before he won


Virgil, 1688–1700 109

The Latian Realm, and built the destin’d Town:His banish’d Gods restor’d the Rites Divine,And setl’ed sure Succession in his Line. (Works 5: 343; 1–8)

The lines recall Astraea Redux as the poet evokes the trials of both recent Stuart monarchs with his interpolated emphasis on expulsion and exile. In the couplet yoking the “Fate”-forced hero to “haughty Juno’s unrelenting Hate,” he points to divine punishment on a nation and individual suffering in the cause of history’s ultimate triumphs. As he employs Virgil to confront the specific dilemmas of the 1690s, however, Dryden betrays doubt over poetic assurances about divine interest in the course of human affairs. By Book 8, which depicts the infiltration into Italy of a foreign prince, Dryden highlights the arbi-trariness of claims to the workings of “Fate”:

Æneas landed on the Latian Coast,With banish’d Gods, and with a baffled Hoast;Yet now aspir’d to Conquest of the State;And claim’d a Title from the Gods and Fate. (Works 6: 609; 17–20)

Virgil’s Aeneas does not “aspire to Conquest of the State.” Instead, he “calls himself a king summoned by the fates.” In alluding, quite obvi-ously to William III and accusing him of aspiring to conquest of the state as he claims his title “from the Gods and Fate,” Dryden demon-strates how easy it is either to blame or to claim Fate as the force behind historical change. Elsewhere, he employs mock-heroic techniques to ridicule the notion of divine intervention. As Aeneas approaches the Sybil for instructions for the future, for example, Dryden exploits the sexual aspect of a priestess impregnated with divine inspiration, trans-forming that venerated mouthpiece of Fate into a lusty fraud: “Deep in a Cave the Sibyl makes abode; / Thence full of Fate returns and of the God” (Works 5: 27; 14–15). Likewise, he offers a blustering Jove, scolding his holy council at the start of Book 10:

Then thus th’Almighty Sire began. Ye Gods,Natives, or Denizens, of blest Abodes;From whence these Murmurs, and this change of Mind,This backward Fate from what was first design’d? (Works 6: 679; 7–10)

The “Murmurs” recall the “murmuring Jews” from Absalom and Achitophel; this time, though, mighty gods, not the English people, display their fickleness. Jove is helpless as an instrument of Fate,



and the wars of these final books are, consequently, rendered futile. By the end of his epic, Dryden is explicit in equating Fate with the arbitrary outcome of human struggles. As Book 12, opens, the fren-zied Turnus prepares to determine both Italy’s history and his own: “The more his Fury boil’d within his Breast: / He rowz’d his Vigour for the last Debate; / And rais’d his haughty Soul, to meet his Fate” (Works 6: 765; 5–8). By yoking “Debate” and “Fate,” Dryden empha-sizes the interdependence of human struggle and its outcome; rage alone guides Turnus.

As he negotiates a godless world and confronts 1690s confusion over rightful kingship, Dryden creates another problem unimagi-nable for a true Augustan poet: he is unable to provide a hero who offers a set of recognizable ethics, embodies a national purpose, or is even consistent. Instead, he plays with notions of heroism, testing and rejecting old ideals and ultimately opening the way for novel con-cepts of heroism. In places, particularly in the first half of his epic translation, Dryden presents Aeneas as a Stuart king in the mode of his earlier Virgilian poems. The hero wears the literary garb of James II, for example, as he introduces himself to Venus in Aeneis I:

The Good Æneas am I call’d, a Name,While Fortune favour’d, not unknown to Fame:My houshold Gods, Companions or my Woes,With pious Care I rescu’d from our Foes.To fruitful Italy my Course was bent,And from the King of Heav’n is my Descent.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Myself distress’d, an Exile, and unknown,Debarred from Europe, and from Asia thrown,In Lybian Desarts wander thus alone. (Works 5: 360–61; 521–33)

The last lines especially evoke James II’s exile in France, and the passage looks like a lightly disguised plea for the return of England’s rightful Aeneas, the monarch descended from “the King of Heav’n.” Yet, elsewhere, the same hero represents William III. As the passage concerning Aeneas’s aspirations to “Conquest of State” illustrates, Dryden portrays Aeneas’s arrival in Italy as invasion. The opening of Aeneis VII is particularly ominous: “A foreign Son-in-Law shall come from far, / (Such is our Doom) a Chief renown’d in War” (6: 583; 371–72). Still the perspective is Jacobite, but the hero is now an embodiment of polar opposites. In key passages this confusion comes to a head.


Virgil, 1688–1700 111

Jupiter’s order for Aeneas to depart Troy, for example, is prefaced by his odd reflection on the hero’s destiny:

Hers was a Heroe, destin’d to commandA Martial Race; and rule the Latian Land:Who shou’d his ancient Line from Teucer draw;And, on the conquer’d World, impose the Law. (5: 462; 336–39)

This hero is at once “destin’d to command” as a result of his semi-divine lineage, and a military conqueror whose lineage is dubi-ous (it “shou’d” descend from Teucer but does it?) and who intends to “impose the Law” on the world. The ambiguity is that of 1690s England. For Dryden and his contemporaries the question of what now constituted kingship was problematic at best. Both James II and William III had legitimate claims, yet neither was quite legit-imate. The deplorable lack of an obvious heir undercut the notion of divinely guided monarchy, but the idea of a king proving himself through military prowess was appalling. Dryden is typical in his attack on military heroism in Examen Poeticum (1693): Homer, he says, “forms and equips those ungodly Man-killers, whom we Poets, when we flatter them, call Heroes; a race of Men who can never enjoy quiet in themselves, ’till they have taken it from all the World” (4: 374). The position is shared by Sir William Temple: “The designs and effects of conquests are but the slaughter and ruin of mankind, the ravaging of countries, and defacing the world: those of wise and just govern-ments are preserving and increasing the lives and generations of men, securing their possessions, encouraging their endeavors, and by peace and riches improving and adorning the several scenes of the world” (qtd. by Johnson 30). A minor work by a Williamite poet takes a similar line against violence but uses the new king himself as an exemplar of the kind of heroism now needed. John Tutchin, in his An Heroick Poem upon the Late Expedition of His Majesty to Rescue England from Popery, Tyranny, and Arbitrary Government first condemns the destructiveness of ancient poets: “Antique Worthies in Destruction skil’d, / With their own Swords plough’d the Pharsalian Field” (3). In contrast, the new age heralded by the “Glorious” or “Bloodless” revolution provides an entirely new hero:

Let old Renowned Bards of Honours tell,How by their Swords the Mighty Thousands fell:The Subject of my Younger Muse must be,



A Harmless War, and Bloodless Victory.I sing the gentle Man of War, to whomDistressed Nations do with Tribute come. (3)

As Williamite poets often did, Tutchin attempts to graft this new hero onto an Augustan landscape: “Now is Augustus to Augusta come” (12). In the same breath, he attributes lack of violence to the new prince’s greatness: “Our Conquest not one Scene of death affords; / Nor were our Plough-shares turned into Swords” (12). Given William III’s end-less and draining wars on the continent such praise is ironic, but the sentiment is in line with eighteenth-century notions of epic heroes, as expressed by Voltaire: “Of all the Warriours, the courageous, the tender, and the pious Hector, deserves most of our Affections. He hath the best Character, though he defends the wrong Cause; and he is betray’d by the Gods, though he hath so much Virtue” (52).

Ultimately, Dryden’s Aeneis, too, promotes nonviolent, vulnerable heroes who represent universal human plights rather than national ideals, for Aeneas’s role as either William III or James II is overshad-owed by his humanity. Dryden develops Virgil’s moments of compas-sion and fallibility—the Ancient’s own attempts to lower the bar set by Homer’s super heroes. Before his Jacobite Aeneas addresses Venus, for example, he protests his condition more than Virgil allows:

To whom, with sorrow streaming from his Eyes,And deeply sighing, thus her Son replyes:Cou’d you with Patience hear, or I relate,O Nymph! the tedious Annals of our Fate!Thro’ such a train of Woes if I shou’d run,The day wou’d sooner than the Tale be done! (Works 5: 360; 511–16)

The one consistency of Dryden’s Aeneas, in all his manifestations, is his recognizably human traits, whether selfishness or ambition, vul-nerability or confusion. Indeed, Dryden devotes several pages of his Dedication to Aeneas’s “sense of Compassion,” defending him from those who condemn his tears and “make Æneas little better than a kind of St. Swithen Heroe, always raining.” Dryden lists other heroes who reveal their vulnerability. Achilles, for example, “went roaring along the salt Seashore, and like a Booby, was complaining to his Mother, when he shou’d have reveng’d his Injury by Arms” (5: 291). In his “Character of St Evremond” (1692), he had pointed to Aeneas’s shortcomings as hero: “we must confess that Æneas was none of


Virgil, 1688–1700 113

the greatest Hero’s, and that Virgil was sensible of it himself. But what cou’d he do? The Trojan on whom he was to build the Roman Empire, had been already vanquish’d; he had lost his Country, and was a Fugitive” (20: 9). Dryden then excuses Aeneas on the grounds of Virgil’s Augustan imperatives: “the Poets chiefest aim,” he reflects, required that piety was Aeneas’s principle virtue so as to facilitate “a nearer Resemblance betwixt Æneas and his Patron Augustus Cæsar, who, above all things, lov’d to be flatter’d for being Pious, both to the Gods and his Relations” (20: 9). Yet in the hero-less 1690s, Dryden finally loosened his grip on Royalist ideals of history and of the liter-ature built upon it.11 Unable, in his translation, to affirm any “virtue” as the mark of a hero, he relinquishes his own wandering, weeping Aeneas to the kind of arbitrary universe inhabited by the Gullivers and Tom Jones of the next century. He maintains his stance in his final major work, Fables (1700), where the most Dryden-like character, the “Good Parson,” dismisses both Jacobite and Williamite monarchical claims and commits himself to his humble Apostolic work.12

Still, however, the shadow of old ideologies fell over Dryden’s Aeneis as over the decade. Hunter identifies Dryden as the age’s barometer when he observes that “Dryden, poised as he was on the border of two centuries and even more delicately balanced between old and new values, gives a much fairer sense of what contemporaries saw when they looked forward than does Swift or Pope” (Before Novels 97). The point should be highlighted and placed in the context of Hunter’s later assertion that “by the 1690s, the world of print had joined the world of conversation, gossip, and rumor in a single devo-tion to issues of the moment, and the directions of publishing in the nineties represent a milestone in the developing concern with con-temporaneity” (171). Even more than Hunter allows, the 1690s was a pivotal moment in the shift to a “novelistic” mode of literature, and Dryden’s nonheroic translation embodied and furthered this move-ment. History clashed head-on with traditional literary paradigms, and a new reading public ensured that, just as in the theater, its own tastes were met. Ancient influence lingered in theory rather than in practice, and the new literary forms that emerged in the 1690s quickly superseded the old.

Other Heroic EndeavorsAmidst the uncertainty of the 1690s, Augustan ideologies with their perceived stability were attractive even to vigorous



supporters of William and Mary’s regime, the basic tenets of which were fundamentally opposed to traditional Augustanism. Matthew Prior, for example, whose “An Ode, Humbly Inscrib’d to the Queen On the Glorious Success of Her Majesty’s Arms, 1706” is discussed above, had no qualms about decking his praises of William III in the same English Augustanism, which he would later employ in that poem to a Stuart monarch.13 In a collection discussed below, an even more earnest Williamite, Thomas Fletcher, employed Virgil and the miscellany form to create a Fables-like paean to the Dutch Prince. The most flamboyant attempt to dress William III in Virgilian Augustan robes, however, is Sir Richard Blackmore’s unintentional mockeries of the epic, his Virgilian Prince Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1700). Despite the ridicule Blackmore’s epic poems have endured since their publication, they are typical of attempts in the 1690s to legitimize the new by transposing its figures and politics into revered ancient paradigms. In the end, Blackmore is no more successful than Dryden or other lesser poets in resurrecting such Augustanism.

For Blackmore, as for Bossu’s translator, epic poetry was “first in Dignity” as well as an antidote to the age’s degeneracy (Preface to Prince Arthur).14 He claims, in the Preface to Prince Arthur, that “Our Poets seem engag’d in a general Confederacy to ruin the End of their own Art, to expose Religion and Virtue and bring Vice and Corruption of Manners into Esteem and Reputation.” His own epic is “one Effort towards the rescuing the Muses out of the hands of these Ravishers, to restore them to their sweet and chast Mansions, and to engage them in an Employment suitable to their Dignity.” Blackmore’s view of the poet’s function is entirely conventional. He first asserts, “To what ill purposes soever Poetry has been abus’d, its true and genuine End is by universal Confession, the Instruction of our Minds, and Regulation of our Manners.” The didactic element overrides all else for Blackmore: “ ’Tis true indeed, that one End of Poetry is to give Men Pleasure and Delight; but this is but a subor-dinate, subaltern End, which is it self a Means to the greater, and ultimate one before mention’d.” In accordance with his conserva-tive stance, he rehearses the hierarchies perpetuated by epic and its absolute values: “In an Epick Poem, where Characters of the first Rank and Dignity, Illustrious for their Birth or high Employment are introduc’d, the Fable, the Action, the particular Episodes are so contriv’d and conducted, or at least ought to be, that either Fortitude, Wisdom, Piety, Moderation, Generosity, some or other Noble and


Virgil, 1688–1700 115

Princely Virtues shall be recommended with the highest Advantage, and their contrary Vices made odious.” Unsurprisingly, he professes to have “endeavour’d mostly to form my self on Virgil’s Model, which I look on, as the most just and perfect, and which is most easily accommodated to the present Age, supposing the Christian Religion in the place of the Pagan.”

The Virgilian model is readily apparent from Blackmore’s open-ing lines:

I sing the Briton, and his Righteous Arms,Who bred to Suff’rings, and the rude AlarmsOf bloody War, forsook his Native Soil,And long sustain’d a vast Heroick Toil,Till kinder Fate invited his Return,To bless the Isle, that did his Absence mourn:To re-enthrone fair Liberty, and breakThe Saxon Yoke, that gall’d Britannia’s Neck. (Prince Arthur 1)

The Virgilian notions of Fate and “Return” after “bloody War” Blackmore subsequently employs in a thinly allegorized validation of the Glorious Revolution. As Brean Hammond puts it, in “Arthur’s heroic deeds in leading the early Britons against the Saxon king Octa aided by the Neustrian Odar can be discerned the invitation to William to free Britain from the Catholic yoke” (Professional Imaginative Writing 130). So Blackmore also draws on the Arthurian Historia of Geoffrey of Monmouth, as he states in his Preface. By placing the new king within an Augustan epic framework so as to envelop events of 1688–89 in the ordained course of English his-tory, he would demonstrate the workings of Providence and set his Christian machinery in motion. In both cases, he was doomed to failure and not just because of the overblown verse that has been the main object of ridicule since 1695.

Dryden’s prescription for epic in his “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693) doubtless influenced Blackmore’s heavy reliance on Christian machinery, for in his Dedication of the Aeneis he complained, “it was not for this noble Knight that I drew the plan of an epic poem on King Arthur” (Works 4: 19).15 Probably, Blackmore also heeded Dryden’s advice to would-be poets, in the “Discourse,” on how to manage Christian machinery for an English epic. He suggests the “perusing of one Chapter in the Prophecy of Daniel, and Accommodating what they there find, with the Principles of Platonique Philosophy, as it is now Christianis’d” and



concludes, “ ’Tis a Doctrine almost Universally receiv’d by Christians, as well Protestants as Catholicks, that there are Guardian Angels appointed by God Almighty as his Vicegerents, for the Protection and Government of Cities, Provinces, Kingdoms, and Monarchies; and those as well of Heathens, as of true Believers” (4: 19). Yet, Dryden also cautions, “We cannot hitherto boast, that our Religion has furnish’d us with any such Machines, as have made the Strength and Beauty of the Ancient Buildings [poems]” (4: 18–19).

What Dryden came to realize as he translated the Aeneid John Dennis had voiced in his attack on Prince Arthur. Pondering his dissatisfaction with “the Machines in a Christian poem,” Dennis remarks, “Poetry pleases by an imitation of Nature. Now the Christian Machines are quite out of Nature, and consequently can-not delight. The Heathen Machines are enough out of nature to be admirable, and enough in Nature to delight” (1: 105). Kelsall states the dilemma more bluntly: “the religiosity of Virgil, which led the Middle Ages to christianize the Aeneid as the profound spiritual rep-resentation of the pilgrimage of the soul, has evaporated before the cold light of skeptical common sense” in the late seventeenth cen-tury. Even in Le Bossu, “there is no longer much emphasis on Virgil the ‘anima naturaliter Christiana’ ” (Kelsall 367). While Blackmore never grasped that the translation of the pagan deities into Christian terms was doomed to failure before his sophisticated audience, his laughable deities—a Lucifer modeled on Juno and a Thor on Jupiter, for example—manifested the implausibility of such “machinery.” On the surface, his bumbling gods are no more ridiculous than what Frost calls the “alehouse deities” of Dryden’s Aeneis.16 Yet, Dryden intentionally undermined the divine underpinnings of epic with his mockery; Blackmore, by contrast, meant his deities to be taken seriously. He also presents Providence throughout his epic as an unalterable, benign force shaping English history. Admittedly, his assurances of Providence’s guidance of history were in line with the efforts of many contemporaries who similarly accounted for the Dutch Prince’s arrival in 1688.17 For Providence magically to supply a feast for Arthur’s shipwrecked men in Prince Arthur, after all, is no less credible than her casting of William at Torbay in England’s hour of need. Unlike Dryden, however, Blackmore remained obliv-ious to the disjunction between the realities of his readers and the unrealities of Augustan promises.

While Blackmore felt he could present a divinely controlled uni-verse, he rejected the mystical allegory that was so intrinsic to epic’s


Virgil, 1688–1700 117

historical and mythical power—perhaps because he intuited his inability to produce it. The transparent allegory he used instead is the major fault line in his epic. Condemning in his Preface culprits like Ariosto and Spenser who “are hurried on with a boundless, impet-uous Fancy over Hill and Dale, till they are both lost in a Wood of Allegories, Allegories so wild, unnatural, and extravagant, as greatly displease the Reader,” Blackmore urges that the “Literal Sense [be] obvious to every Reader,” for if “the Allegory is presently discern’d” then “the Reader is by no means impos’d on, but sees it immediately to be an Allegory and is both delighted and instructed with it.” Just as Dryden in his Aeneis confronts the 1690s, Blackmore, with his egg-shell thin allegory, grounds his poem in the nitty gritty of here and now, and his epic ambitions falter. For, divine purpose is embedded in allegorical episodes of human struggle and suffering; once that is stripped from them, the brutishness of life is revealed.

Frequently, too, as Dryden does intentionally in his Aeneis, Blackmore lapses unwittingly into mock-heroic. Dryden renders unrecognizable some of Virgil’s battles, for example, as he blames pious princes for body-strewn fields:

The Prince, whose Piety had long repell’dHis inborn ardour, now invades the Field:Invokes the Pow’rs of violated Peace,Their Rites, and injur’d Altars to redress:Then, to his Rage abandoning the Rein,With Blood and slaughter’d Bodies fills the Plain.(Works 6: 786–787; 719–24)

Piety, the key virtue of Virgil’s Aeneas, here gives way to personal pas-sion. The classical associations still haunting the word are defunct, and the message is ultimately that of The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor discussed above: poets use “piety” as an excuse for “holy” blood shed, but when all is said and done plains are filled with “Blood and slaughter’d Bodies.”18 While Blackmore retains the idealism Dryden lacks, he colors his battle scenes with similar grisly details. During the battle in Book 8, the poet’s limited gruesome vocabulary results in dozens of lines like the following:

Slaughter and Death in dreadful Pomp appear,And Brains, and Gore, the slippery Field besmear. (Prince Arthur 228)

and



The Weapon struck him, as he turn’d his Head.In Gore and Brains the glitt’ring Javelin reeks,And from his Veins a Purple Torrent breaks. (237)

Nor once the battle is over is Blackmore eager to abandon his blood-drenched scenes; he describes how

the Saxons bear away their Dead,Whose putrid Heaps, the bloody Field o’erspread.Innumerable Piles they raise on high,Which kindled fill with Smoak and flames the Sky. (252)

Equally melodramatic is the ensuing description of grief as the Saxons “wring their Hands, and tear their flowing Hair” (253).

Both 1690s epics signal the redundancy of the heroic and its ide-als; in each case, this is the result of contemporary literary tastes. Dryden’s many years as playwright dependant on audience whims and his consciousness of the political and social diversity of the sub-scribers to the Aeneis surely influenced his translation. Likewise, by Blackmore’s own admission, the imperfections of Prince Arthur are those of a poem “written in Coffee-houses, and in passing up and down the Streets; because I had little leisure elsewhere to apply to it.” A professional rather than a trained poet (he was the king’s physi-cian), Blackmore immersed himself in the debates and texts of the coffeehouse culture that helped shape his epic poem.

By the 1690s, writers aimed to entertain a broader and lowlier audi-ence than before instead of imbuing literature with civic and moral examples to be absorbed by the elite and imposed on the nation. Even Charles Perrault, with his Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688–92), offered from across the channel a more down-to-earth approach, establishing in a discussion of Homer and Virgil that modern accomplishment not only matches but outdoes that of the ancients. Perrault’s goal was to caution against unthinking accep-tance of ancient supremacy and, implicitly, to draw attention to what was really relevant to contemporary readers. Other less prominent writers expressed similar impatience with ancient irrelevancies.

The author of Verdicts of the Learned Concerning Virgil and Homer (1697), for example, begins with the old claim that “the main End of an Heroic Poem . . . is to direct Persons of Quality” but quickly follows Perrault (in some places explicitly) in finding fault with the two great-est ancients, concluding that “notwithstanding all the transcendent


Virgil, 1688–1700 119

Elogiums of Homer and Virgil in the Schools; yet is the perfect Heroic Poet still to be born.” This concession that heroic poetry is still possible gives way, however, to concerns about its tediousness. The author notes Virgil’s excessive length in places: “I question not but good Queen Dido yawn’d often all the time, at the Story of Æneas’s Adventures” (8). He also debunks Virgil’s perfect hero, calling upon Perrault for authority: “The main and constant Character of Æneas being Piety, says Bossu: What had that Piety of Father Æneas to do in the Cave with Dido Queen of Carthage? says Perrault. A very homely Room to court a Lady in. Nay his pretended Piety at every turn, may be stiled Superstition, and make him rather pass for the Founder of a Religious Order, than of the Roman Empire” (11). Even Blackmore in his later “Essay on the Nature and Constitution of Epick Poetry” (1716) finally dismisses Homer and Virgil as the ne plus ultra of epic poetry suggesting that modern writers need to find their own stan-dards: “Nor will a modern Heroick Work be any longer acquitted or condemn’d, merely as it bears a Conformity or Dissimilitude to the Iliad or the Aeneid . . . It will no more be allow’d an undeniable Proof of any Poet’s erroneous and absurd Conduct, that he deviates from the Examples of Homer and Virgil; nor will it justify him in any Instance objected to his Writings, that he has the Practice of those excellent Poets to bear him out” (“An Essay” 13). According to his pre-scription for modern heroic, the heroes themselves can be ordinary people: “the principal Character of the Poem may be as well inactive and in a State of Suffering and Calamity” (49) He now proclaims it wrong to “believe the idea of a Hero implies illustrious Vertue as well as military Fortitude” (49). Having himself attempted more than one “Augustan” epic, Blackmore realized that the mode was no longer plausible.

Yet, the idea persisted of epic poetry as a kind of national mon-ument: a sealed-off genre embodying the best of national history and teaching national values. Nowhere was this more evident than in the complaints against Blackmore. Dennis conceded the didac-tic requirements of epic in condemning Blackmore’s for having “neither unity, nor integrity, nor morality, nor universality” (qtd. by Levine 90). Tom Brown’s attack inferred the continuing viability of epic as a national literature. The “City Bard,” he snarls, “has been guilty of the grossest, vilest Flattery imaginable, and prostituted the Dignity of an Epic Poem more than any one before him. An Epic Poem is a noble magnificent Composition; the chief End of it is to excite Men to Virtue, by celebrating illustrious Examples, and proposing



them to Imitation. ‘Tis a Publick Building, like that of a Temple, or a Town-Hall” (qtd. by Richard Boys 12).

During this shaky decade, the traditional powers of epic were per-haps most appealing to supporters of William III. Thomas Fletcher, for one, drew upon Virgil’s authority in an overtly Williamite cause in his Poems on Several Occasions, and Translations: Wherein the First and Second Books of Virgil’s Aeneis Are Attempted in English (1692). Like Restoration writers, Fletcher has epic ambitions for his collection. Also like earlier composers of miscellanies, he is torn between the serious task of translating Virgil and the heroic, and the necessary informality of a miscellany that juxtaposes fragmented translation with poems of various genres.

Fletcher’s pride in the miscellany, he reveals in his Preface, lies in the Virgil translation, not in the other poems that comprise its bulk. Stressing Virgil’s “Majesty” Fletcher follows the practice of earlier Royalist translators as he proclaims his translation in “every way unworthy of the Original.” He then discusses at length why, in English, blank verse is better able than rhyme to impart to the hero and the heroic that masculine energy they have in the original. Yet, Fletcher denies his own work the generic purity and high seriousness he deems so important. He highlights the informality of his Virgilian efforts by an admission, akin to that of Blackmore’s self-professed coffeehouse poem, that his translation is the product of “broken Hours,” when “I chose to let down my Soul and prepare myself for Conversation, by entertaining my thoughts with the Elegancies of the inimitable Poet.” He then acknowledges that this conversational engagement involved piecemeal treatment of Virgil: “Being pleased with his Thoughts in Latin, it was natural to try how they would look in English, and that Trial produced a Verse, and another, and another; till at length I found myself far gone in a bold Work, before I knew what I was doing.” His haphazard approach, which starkly contrasts with the serious under-taking of an heroic translation, is that adopted by Dryden in 1700, when he presents Fables as an unheroic work for a new age. There, Dryden admits, he jumped from author to author, work to work as his fancy took him until “I found, by the Number of my Verses, that they began to swell into a little Volume” (Works 7: 24).

Fletcher opens his collection with brief translations from Horace’s Second Epode and Boethius’ first book of the Consolations of Philosophy. These set a melancholy domestic tone and place emphasis on the individual. A selection of light and serious verse ensues, rang-ing from poems “On a Lady’s Birth-Day” and “On a Lady’s Picture”


Virgil, 1688–1700 121

to five political panegyrics. The last two panegyrics are to William III, and fall immediately before the translations of the Aeneid, Book 1 and parts of Books 2, 3, and 4, which constitute the climax of the collection. Both panegyrics establish a political framework within which to read the Virgil. They praise William III’s military glory and his victory at the Battle of the Boyne as the ultimate statement of his “Conquests,” a word that reverberates through the poems. In both, William is the envy of nations. In the first, “To the King,” he is akin to those warlike English kings Edward III and Henry V, a tactic that surreptitiously works him into the natural line of British monarchs: in his military prowess lies his spiritual kinship to earlier British monarchs, his place in English history as rightful as theirs. The poems also incorporate imagery and motifs from the Stuart era, thereby suggesting the uninterrupted flow of English monarchy from the reigns of the Stuarts into that of William III. Especially notable is the panegyric “To the King” where the image of William as a mighty lion pursuing his “Conquest o’er the bloody Plain” is rem-iniscent of Dryden’s depiction of James II. The idea that a nation’s prosperity hinges on its charismatic king is central to all five poems, as is the sense of a benevolent universe smiling upon him.

“The First Book of Virgil’s Æneis Translated” follows “To the King” ensuring that readers accustomed to seeing Virgil address English affairs will view the translation in a contemporary English context from the opening lines:

I Sing of Wars, and that great Exile’s Fame,Who first from Troy to destin’d Latium came:Long exercis’d with storms at Land and Sea,By stress of Fate and Juno’s Cruelty:Much too by Chance of doubtful War distress’d,Ere he or his tir’d Gods could fix their rest.Hence sprung the Glory of the Latin Name. (64)

The “Wars” and “Glory” link Virgil’s embattled prince to the one of the preceding poem. Likewise, “Fate,” which is central to the pan-egyrics, dominates the translation. At every opportunity, even where there is no basis for it in the original, Fletcher stresses that providen-tial “Fate” guides all affairs. After Aeneas is shipwrecked, for example, Fletcher’s Jupiter “fix’d his Eye / On Libyan Realms; while Schemes of Destiny / And providential Plots employ’d his Head” (80); Virgil’s god simply “weighs such cares on his breast” (illum talis iactantem pectore curas [Loeb 1: 256; 1.227]). Like the many arguments about



William’s “providential” arrival, the point here is that England’s new Aeneas is the destined one.

Yet, if the reader does, as invited, see these opening lines in a con-temporary context, a problem immediately arises as to the identity of the “great Exile.” The lines suggest William III, whose “destin’d Latium” is England. Yet, the exile on everyone’s mind is James II—exiled from his rightful homeland, the “destin’d Latium” of the Stuart monarchs. The dilemma, which also plagues the opening of Dryden’s epic translation, is a result of unheroic 1690s politics.19 The fragmentary nature of Fletcher’s “Virgil,” like that of Restoration translations of the Ancient, further thwarts the heroic: his Aeneis I is followed by snippets from Books 2, 3, and 4, and the whole ends with the focus on Dido’s lovesickness. Like Dryden with his Jacobite sym-pathies, the Williamite Fletcher cannot produce the heroic he feels the age needs because contemporary history and politics jar against heroic paradigms. What Fletcher cannot see, Dryden finally does: if this new age is to have an epic, that epic needs to be quite different from those offered by Virgil and his earlier emulators.

Toward a Modern EpicIn a tribute to Sir Godfrey Kneller in 1694, Dryden empathized with the painter:

Thy Genius bounded by the Times like mine,Drudges on petty Draughts, nor dare designA more Exalted Work, and more Divine.For what a Song, or a Senseless OperaIs to the Living Labour of a Play;Or, what a Play to Virgil’s Work wou’d be,Such is a single Piece to History. (Works 4: 465–66; 147–53)

Most immediately an attack on William III and his “stupid Military State,” as he puts it elsewhere in the poem, this outburst sums up Dryden’s view of history and culture in 1690s England. Once Virgilian epic (or exalted and divine works) glorified an overarch-ing history; now plays and “petty Draughts” must suffice, for a frag-mented history produces “single Pieces”—like those comprising the miscellany in which this poem appears. Songs and “Senseless Operas,” or humble pleasures, were the aesthetic modes of choice. Yet, the previous year, in the preface to Examen Poeticum: Being the


Virgil, 1688–1700 123

Third Part of Miscellany Poems, Dryden had implicitly condemned the world of epic in his tirade against “those ungodly Man-killers, whom we Poets, when we flatter them, call Heroes” (Works 4: 374). This out-burst is all the more remarkable considering that Dryden was then contemplating his own Virgil.

Yet, in the decade that he finally composed his “Augustan epic,” Dryden was inspired less by Augustan optimism than the satirist’s despair he expresses at the start of the 1693 preface: “No Government has ever been, or ever can be, wherein Time-servers and Blockheads will not be uppermost. The Persons are only chang’d, but the same juglings in State, the same Hypocrisie in Religion, the same Self-Interest, and Mis-management will remain for ever” (Works 4: 363). Such disillusionment necessitates his preference in the Aeneis and Dedication for an “exemplary” approach (an investigation of differ-ent types of heroism, kingship, love, nationalism) over typology. It also accounts for his ultimate relinquishment of heroic ideals in his translation and the consequent fragmentation of a work that begins by declaring, “A heroick Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the great-est Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform. The Design of it, is to form the Mind to Heroick Virtue by Example” (5: 267).

Amidst the political uncertainty of the 1690s, writers also began noticeably to emphasize aesthetics over the moral and historical func-tion of literature, and Dryden’s Aeneis and other works in the decade are equally products of this new preference. Indeed, the Ancient who influenced Dryden in the 1690s was Ovid, the storyteller. The 1693 miscellany is typical; Dryden’s Ovid translations dominate the collection, while the poet declares the Ancient “more according to my Genius” and “certainly more palatable to the Reader, than any of the Roman Wits” (4: 369). The miscellany has an Ovidian spirit with its variety and its delight in voice and poetic fancy. It also includes several of Dryden’s earlier poems that demonstrate how poetry can transcend earthly woes: “To the Dutchess on her Return from Scotland, in the Year 1682,” “To . . . Mrs. Anne Killigrew” (1685), and “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687.”20 Yet Ovid seemed also to appeal to Dryden for his fundamental dialogism, another feature of 1690s literature. Substantiating Bakhtin’s theory that dialogue punctures the sealed world of epic enabling the inconclusive modern world of literature (the domain of the novel), writers in this decade other than Dryden pointedly reject traditional absolute genres, preferring mixed forms and using classical texts and motifs only to question their authority.21



Comparing Dryden’s Aeneis with other renditions of Virgil and with the poet’s own Fables demonstrates the ubiquity of these new poetic emphases. Like Dryden in the Aeneis, others attempted, at times almost consciously, to replace ancient epic codes. John Lewkenor, for example, challenges Virgil and the hierarchies of epic in a Petronius-style antiepic. In the way that Dryden was to do in the Aeneis, however, Lewkenor transcends the decade’s gloom through faith in literature. John Crowne’s innovative mock-heroic version of the Dido tale further demonstrates the key role parody played in establishing in English letters a true dialogism. The literary processes concentrated in these uses of the Classics culminate in Dryden’s own Fables—the first truly modern epic.

Lewkenor’s anonymously published Metellus His Dialogues: The First Part Containing a Relation of a Journey to Tunbridge-Wells; Also a Description of the Wells and Place with the Fourth Book of Virgil’s Aeneids in English (1693) is an antiepic in the mode of Petronius’ third-century Satyricon. It is composed of three dialogues fol-lowed by the Virgil translation. In each of the dialogues Lewkenor critiques ancient literature, testing its plausibility to contempo-rary readers. This testing begins in the dedication, which suggests the possibility of modern heroic by allowing epic-worthy subjects. While the poet is disillusioned that his book “f lies, My Lord, therefore first (to almost all that is left of ’em) the Shadow and Name of Ancient Heroes,” he goes on to praise the family of the dedicatee, William Lord Biron, as proof that the ancient Roman heroes live on in the present aristocracy. Simultaneously, how-ever, he declares his intention to “speak to the Vices of our Age,” and any epic pretensions are subverted as Dialogue One estab-lishes the structure for the whole: a journey to Tunbridge Wells, which, as in the Satyricon, mocks the epic journey by depicting a descent into a wasteland rather than movement toward a destined homeland.

At first this journey seems to be a vehicle for a satirist’s wrath: the corruption of the present is measured by the degree to which both characters and their situation fall short of the grandeur of the epic framework into which they are cast. In the “First Dialogue,” five “Scholars” respond to the corrupt times by setting off to restore themselves and their scholarly powers with the air and water of the wells. One of them, Acer, becomes separated from the others. When they are later reunited, the others prevail upon him to tell of his journey. Acer’s reply draws a parallel between him and Aeneas, who


Virgil, 1688–1700 125

protests at the beginning of Aeneid Book 2 that his sufferings are too great to relate:

O Friends forbear to askSo hard a thing; It is no pleasant taskFor a tir’d Poet, twelve long hours immur’d,In such a Coach, to tell you what h’endur’d.Some things indeed hereafter, but scarce theseCan be so well remembred, as to please. (10)

His companion Æsculape coaxes him on, asserting that his tale will benefit his audience: “In Verse relate, / Acer, said he, Satyr will expiate” (11). The tale that follows reads like an eighteenth-century novel worthy of Fielding or Smollett, many of whose characters also undergo Petronius-style antiepic journeys. It is a tale of corrupt innkeepers, continual mishaps, and human greed. Mostly, how-ever, it is an account of female corruption, its vitriolic equal to that of Juvenal’s sixth satire. Acer tells of a stagecoach ride in which he finds himself cursed with “being one / Man ’mongst three Women” and “damn’d that day / For thirty six Miles, to such Birds of Prey” (13). Accentuating the horror of this “Treble Virago,” Acer declares that whoever “encounters a Harpy’s Nest” would “need be a Trojan Hero at the least” and he “must be more that ‘scapes, or can sub-due / That foul bespattering foeminean Crew” (14). Proving him-self worthy of a Trojan hero, Acer survives and, finally, approaching Tunbridge, he expresses hope that “We might come, / At last beyond Hell to Elysium” (27). Yet, the place turns out to be “A low, dirty, and ill-favour’d Town” filled with yet more examples of female lust and greed (36).

Acer’s companions praise this attack on society and women for its satiric power. Yet, Lewkenor complicates his mock-heroic mode. Embedded in his damnation of women is a real sympathy for wom-en’s plights. As Acer describes the old maid of the “treble Virago,” he notes how she had a “Humour” and “Grace” that “made the most of a decaying Face” (16). He also punctures his own mock fear of women by noting, amongst other signs of distress, that she “Much in Body suffer’d, much in Mind, / And much in Reputation for being kind” (16). The moments of sympathy for these female antiheroines betray Lewkenor’s real interest in contemporary social problems that heroic codes are inadequate to express. In other words, the heroic is mocked rather than a society that fails to live up to its ideals. By the



“Second Dialogue,” Lewkenor explicitly rejects classical formulae. The springs themselves, which lie just outside the town, are, Curio feels, a much more likely site for civilization’s renewal than that to which Virgil’s Aeneas was directed:

From Vulture’s flying the Founder of great RomeConceiv’d first hopes of what was then to come.The place was mark’d to Æneas by white Swine,A prosperous Colour, but no hopeful Sign.Who wou’d have thought, that ruiner of groundShou’d show, where Gods still-standing Rome wou’d found?We here have better, whiter Signs in sight,The fairest prospect of a fair delight.No rav’nous Vulture invites, nor Swinish wealth,Nor brutish pleasure, but thou, candid Health:And all those rural pastimes which agreeWith Innocence and Ingenuity.Nor does Heaven now its Will by Brutes declare,Or flying Vultures: Elements here areBoth cause and Omens of our future bliss:Air with the Water does prognostick this. (76–77)

The pagan, superstitious world of Virgil is mocked. Sophisticated readers do not look to “rav’nous Vultures” or “Swinish wealth” for directions; nor, in their scientific world, “does Heaven now its Will by Brutes declare.” Rather, common sense and nature—the “Elements”—provide better guidance to “future bliss.”

Ultimately, Lewkenor offers nature’s delights as consolation for readers. The climax of the dialogues, the travelers’ arrival at the well itself, echoes Aeneas’s arrival at the Sybil’s cave:

In mid’st of Rocks, within that sandy space,Fam’d Well, the ancient Mother of that place,Nature has plac’d . . . She wou’d by th’Ancients have been Goddess thought.But with more truth the wise contemplate nowHis Finger there, to whom all Mortals bow. (60)

Lewkenor encourages his readers to look for wonder not to Sybils but to nature, God’s handiwork:

Nature, the Soul of the great World, we seeDemonstrating here the Divinity.


Virgil, 1688–1700 127

Whilst she supported by th’Almighty hand,Works daily wonders by great God’s Command.And whether we admire her by the NameOf Goddess, God, or Nature, ‘tis the same.We see Effects that can be none but his,Adore great God in what great Nature is. (60–61)

This turn from social ills to comfort in nature and God’s power is a common practice of eighteenth-century poetry. Here, it is the saving grace of a poem that rejects classical norms but refuses to supply a new set of social and moral codes.

A similar poetic process shapes Dryden’s Aeneis. Finally unable to present historical disaster as the cost of imperial telos, Dryden offers comfort, Ovidian-style, in the transforming powers of nature and poetry. As early as the end of his first book, for example, he dwells on the cyclical process of nature where there are no grounds for it in Virgil. Dido’s plea to Aeneas for the tale of “Your Flight, your Wand’rings, and your Woes” ends with an interpolated reminder that since the fall of Troy “Sev’n times the Sun has either Tropick view’d, / The Winter banish’d, and the Spring renew’d” (Works 5: 377; 1061–64). Aeneis, Book 1, in this way closes with an emphasis not on the “fatal Issue of so long a War” but on nature’s renewal.22 Nature poetry also enhances Dryden’s translation. His description of the inlet where Aeneas lands in Aeneis, Book 1, according to Mark Van Doren, marks “the beginnings of the stereotyped Nature which graced the verse of England for at least two generations”:

Within a long Recess there lies a Bay,An Island shades it from the rowling Sea,And forms a Port secure for Ships to ride,Broke by the jutting Land on either side:In double Streams the briny Waters glide.Betwixt two rows of Rocks, a Sylvan SceneAppears above, and Groves for ever green:A Grott is form’d beneath, with Mossy Seats,To rest the Nereids, and exclude the Heats.Down thro’ the Cranies of the living WallsThe Crystal Streams descend in murm’ring Falls.No Haulsers need to bind the Vessels here,Nor bearded Anchors, for no Storms they fear.Sev’n Ships within this happy Harbour meet,The thin Remainders of the scatter’d Fleet. (Works 5: 349–50; 228–41)



Such language as “briny waters,” “sylvan scenes,” and “crystal streams,” Van Doren observes, created a vogue as Dryden’s Virgil “was read by every poet and served as a storehouse, like Pope’s Homer, of cultivated phrases” (55). This passage, like Lewkenor’s description of the Wells, shows most clearly the ascendance of the aesthetic at the moment the heroic faltered.

Even so, Lewkenor and Dryden are both reluctant to abandon the heroic and the codifiable world it stood for. From the melancholy comment in the dedication about “the Shadow and Name” only remaining of “ancient Heroes,” Lewkenor emulates Virgil’s heroic even as his characters express sentiments that are uncontainable by it. In this way, Lewkenor’s Dialogues exhibit, in the same manner as the Aeneis, the dialogic that Bakhtin sees as exploding the epic and marking a distinction between more primitive forms of literature and their sophisticated successors. The character Metellus, in the “Third Dialogue,” remarks on this dialogic. Still, complaining of his own “soft’ned Age” with its “Maim[ed] Wit” and “cripple[d] Fancy,” he targets those who take

A Licence far beyond Poetick Use,Not to Translate old Authours, but abuseThe Wit of Romans; and their lofty SenseDegrade into new Poem made from thence,Disguise old Rome in our New Eloquence. (82)

Translators, that is, are guilty of debasing the heroic world and “Wit” of the ancient Romans. In his outrage, Metellus denies any loss of prestige for the classics. Inadvertently, however, he pinpoints two problems now facing any writer who addresses “old Rome”: readers prefer the “new Eloquence” over political or historical emphases; and “old Rome” has become a foreign other.23 Even if the dignity of Rome can be maintained, as Metellus professes, it must be in “the old way.” He bids writers translate

Not A-la-mode, but like George Sandys or May;Shew Virgil’s every Period: not steal Sense,To make up a new-fashion’d Poem thence,In our New Tongue, speak his old Eloquence. (83)

According to this prescription intended to revive the heroic, Virgil belongs to a lost realm of “old Eloquence”; so too do his


Virgil, 1688–1700 129

seventeenth-century translators. Metellus is simply out of sync with contemporary literature, as Curio warns when he reflects that “of modern Crimes / It is the worst to contradict the Times” (82). The friends finally settle on a “Hope to speak Virgil, and speak English too” (84), yet the dialogue has exposed the incompatibility of “Virgil” and contemporary “English.” As Laelius now “reads the fol-lowing Translation,” the “Fourth Book of Virgil in English,” which immediately follows the dialogues, the original text has already been alienated from the present.

The opening of Lewkenor’s translation picks up the themes of the first dialogues by emphasizing Dido’s passion:

Meanwhile the Queen, inflam’d with great desire,Full of Love-cares, burns with a secret Fire,Fond of her wound, indulges the sweet pains:The secret grief is nourish’d in her Veins. (86)

The translation makes four lines out of the two Latin ones, and replaces the original’s emphasis on Dido’s anxieties and Aeneas’s heroism with greater stress on Dido’s lust. There is, as a result, little essential difference between Lewkenor’s Dido and his lusting har-pies. The shared theme of the translation and dialogues also places in a domestic light (and so in a “female” and unheroic realm) Anna’s speech encouraging Dido to marry again and hope for a son. Where Virgil’s Anna entices her sister with an image of “sweet children and the rewards of love” (nec dulcis natos Veneris nec praemia noris? [Loeb 1: 398; 4.33]), this Anna presents a husband and son as a woman’s goal: “By such a Husband, and such hopes of Son, / As you have now, you shou’d methinks be won” (87). Her pragmatic approach is that of the old maid in Acer’s tale, who, having spent her days in “sowre Virginity” had notheless “prov’d” that “she / By Man’s side always had a right to be” (17). The determination of the lusty women in this story is also carried over to the translation. “Ah, what can Temple, what can Image do; / Or Praye’rs, when Women are resolv’d to wooe?” asks the translator of Dido’s decision to act upon her passion (90). The humor and subtle indictment of women are absent from Virgil’s more general question: “What good do shrines or prayers do for a mind inflamed with passion?” (quid vota furentem, / quid delubra iuvant? [Loeb 1: 400; 4.65–66]). But just as Acer expresses sympathy for his old maid, so the translation pities Dido as a “poor miserable Woman”—one who is in the hands of deities as ignoble as those of



Dryden’s Aeneis, including a childlike Jove who whines to Mercury that Aeneas “is not the Man his Mother promis’d me” (99). So the heroic is undercut; simultaneously, however, the translator strives to recreate Virgil’s heroic, in part by repeatedly calling Aeneas “hero,” often where the original does not.

Like Metellus and his friends, the translator vacillates between seventeenth-century Augustan ideals and contemporary issues. The consequent generic uncertainty is that of Dryden’s Aeneis, where it is also particularly notable during the Dido episode. As he contem-plates Dido in his Dedication, Dryden presents Virgil’s fourth Aeneid as a nexus of the heroic; he draws attention to the common roots of epic and tragedy, arguing that the Dido tale is a tragedy within the epic and that the tragic hero has “the shining Quality of an Epick Heroe, his Magnanimity, his Constancy, his Patience, his Piety . . . ” (Works 5: 269–272). Later, however, in a typical inconsistency, Dryden questions the usefulness of the heroic as he considers contemporary readers’ probable response to Virgil’s tragic heroine: “the Ladies,” he says, will make “a numerous Party against him [Aeneas] for being false to Love, in forsaking Dido. And I cannot much blame them; for to say the truth, ’tis an ill precedent for their Gallants to follow. Yet if I can bring him off with Flying Colours, they may learn expe-rience at her cost; and for her sake, avoid a Cave as the worst shelter they can chuse from a shower of rain, especially if they have a Lover in their Company” (5: 294). This tongue-in-cheek advice is akin to Pope’s address to Arabella Fermor, a decade and a half later, in the 1714 dedication of The Rape of the Lock. Also gently mocking the “ancient Poets,” Pope claims they “are in one respect like many mod-ern Ladies; Let an Action be never so trivial in it self, they always make it appear of the utmost Importance” (2: 142). Dryden’s repudia-tion of epic seriousness continues in his translation, where his incon-sistent Aeneas does not sustain any of the virtues the poet attributes to tragic or epic heroes in his Dedication. He also, like Acer, presents Dido rather as a harpy than Virgil’s tragic heroine. She rants like a Greek Fury or a raging heroine from Dryden’s plays. In one curse, she wishes that she had “torn [Aeneas] piecemeal; strow’d in Floods / His scatter’d Limbs, or left expos’d in Woods: / Destroy’d his Friends and Son; and from the Fire / Have set the reeking Boy before the Sire” (5: 479; 861–64). The lack of dignity here exceeds the limits of tragedy or epic. The result for the translation of the disjunction between form and content is the kind of dialogic that, Bakhtin has argued, ensues from confrontation between an idealized past and the present.


Virgil, 1688–1700 131

Another poem, which Brean Hammond labels the “first proper mock-heroic poem in English,” demonstrates, in the similarities it shares with Dryden’s translation and The Rape of the Lock, how the processes at work in the Aeneis are those of the mock-heroic and those that shaped much early eighteenth-century literature (Professional Imaginative Writing 105). The humorously long title of John Crowne’s “Heroic Poem” immediately indicates the need to popularize Virgil’s tale: The History of the Famous and Passionate Love, Between a Fair Noble Parisian Lady, and a Beautiful Young Singing Man; a Chanter in the Quire of Notre-Dame in Paris, And a Singer in Opera’s: An Heroic Poem in Two Canto’s, Being in Imitation of Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas; and Shows All the Passions of a Proud Beauty, Compell’d by Love to Abandon Her Self to Her Inferiour; but Finding Some Slights, How She Reveng’d Her Self and Recovered Her Honor (1692). The poet’s subservience rather to his read-ers than Virgil is explicit in his “Epistle to the Reader” where, like Dryden, he declares allegiance to English literary laws: “I care not what the Laws of Translation are; I am a Free-born Subject of England, and will not be put in Fetters, but by the Laws of the Kingdom.”

From the first lines of his History, Crowne undermines traditional heroic imperatives by highlighting the arbitrariness of epic’s political superstructure:

The wealthy Cities insolently bomb’d,The Towns in their own ashes deep entomb’d;The Lands made desolate, to People graves,Or worse, the Galleys to supply with Slaves;All that by Royal Boutefeu’s command,His Vassals flatter with the name Le Grand;Have some Revenge from proud Parisian Dames,Who ruin Paris, by their wanton Flames. (1)

Through the vagueness encompassing “wealthy Cities” bombed and “Towns” entombed in their own ashes, Crowne mocks the epic premise of empire building in historical time. He also deplores mil-itary devastation in the way that the author of The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor does in 1682 and that Dryden does with his gra-tuitous violence in the “war” books of the Aeneis and in Fables. This destruction-bearing commander, who flatters his lackeys, and is controlled by women, furthermore, shares the wholly selfish aims of the many warriors in Aeneis IX–XII and Agamemnon in Fables, who wants only to satisfy his pride: “Shall I release the Prize gain’d by Right, / In taken Towns, and many a bloody Fight” (200–201).24



Crowne similarly uses the heroine of his title to highlight the unrealistic limitations of the heroic. The Parisian lady emulates Dido in her concern for her virtue and her standing in society; the poem, however, questions her integrity:

But, Oh! the Wonder! the whole Town sh’embrac’dHotly in Thought, yet she in Fact was chast.Vast numbers sought her Love, and she sought theirs;Spread for ‘em and receiv’d ‘em in her Snares,But lodg’d not one, or in her Arms, or Heart;Held by Religion to her great desert.She thought her Beauty cou’d not be deserv’d,So by her Pride, her Honour was preserv’d. (2)

This “Dido” bears a closer resemblance to Aphra Behn’s Angelica Bianca in The Rover (1677) than to Virgil’s majestic queen. The humor resulting from the discrepancy between the epic heroine and this flesh-and-blood (and compelling) character is the essence of the mock-heroic poem. Yet, Crowne questions the whole notion of hero-ism or what qualities make one worthy of attention and literary sta-tus: this charismatic lady is surely more intriguing to sophisticated London readers than her classical predecessor. At the same time, however, the source of the original Dido’s chastity is thrown into doubt. The Parisian lady preserves her honor “by Pride,” but isn’t the same true of the original Dido? What, in turn, does that say about paradigms of great virtue thwarted?

Crowne’s story of a noble lady and her opera singer lover exem-plifies the operatic fare that replaced Virgilian “whole” visions. The literary developments manifest in these minor poems and the Aeneis constitute the first genuine attempts to place classical litera-ture in a contemporary English scene that was no longer secondary to ancient wisdom and perfection. As Pope and the eighteenth-cen-tury novelists bear witness to, the struggle to appropriate the best of the Ancients while abrogating what was anachronistic or downright useless was to continue well into the next century.25 For Dryden, as the uneven nature of the Aeneis indicates, the literary shifts took some coming to terms with. By Fables he was able to give them full acknowledgment and expression.

The role of Fables as harbinger of eighteenth-century literature is revealed as much by the terms in which it is discussed as by its actual content. From the eighteenth century, the vocabulary used in critical analyses of the miscellany is that used of eighteenth-century


Virgil, 1688–1700 133

literature. Joseph Warton, who felt that Dryden would “owe his immortality” to Fables, claimed of its poems, “the warmth and mel-ody of these pieces, has never been excelled in our language, I mean in rhyme.” Warton was touched not by the moral or political acumen of the works but by the depth of its passions. For him, the “picture of Arcite in the absence of Emilia,” for instance, “is highly expressive of the deepest distress, and a compleat image of anguish” (Essay 12–13). Still in the early nineteenth century, Upali Amarasinghe comments, even “the more radically Romantic members of the new generation of poets and critics were drawn toward [Fables], and Wordsworth, for example, once declared that he considered Dryden’s Fables the ‘most poetical of his works’ ” (23). When critics lauded the sublimity and pathos of the poems, moreover, Amarasinghe notes, they meant “not so much the ‘sublime’ of Milton as the ‘sublime’ of Burke” (24). The praise does not alter in the twentieth century, as Cedric Reverand II notes (2–3).

Yet, the emphasis in Fables on poetry, passion, and psychology per-fects work begun in the Aeneis. As two studies of the Virgil transla-tion as a whole conclude, Dryden’s inability to hang national glory and goals on Virgil’s epi-structure led him to render his Aeneis a series of stories and vignettes of human passions, fortunes, and misfortunes.26 Just as Ovid in his Metamorphoses celebrates a multitude of voices and perspectives in its proposed account of western history from “the world’s beginning to our own days,” so for Dryden in the 1690s more than ever before the process itself of translation revealed something permanent in human nature. In order to find that permanence or universality it was necessary to abandon the old paradigms involving divine history or civic virtues to engage with poetic voices from the past on any number of topics.27 The tale of Cymon and Iphigenia in Fables exemplifies both the parallels between Dryden’s last two great works and the fulfillment by Fables of tentative experimentation in the Aeneis.

Dryden’s rendition of Boccaccio’s Decameron tale of Cimone and Ephygenia is about love’s refining powers and a celebration of love. The nobly born but stupid Cymon is inspired to elevate his mind and lifestyle when he falls for the beautiful Iphigenia. His initial encoun-ter with her has the lyrical power of the passage from Aeneis, Book 1, quoted above, as classical motifs enhance natural and human beauty:

By Chance conducted, or by Thirst constrain’d,The deep Recesses of the Grove he gain’d;



Where in a Plain, defended by the Wood,Crept through the matted Grass a Chrystal Flood,By which an Alabaster Fountain stood:And on the Margin of the Fount was laid(Attended by her Slaves) a sleeping Maid:Like Dian, and her Nymphs, when tir’d with Sport,To rest by cool Eurotas they resort.The Dame herself the Goddess well express’d,Not more distinguish’d by her Purple Vest,Than by the charming Features of her Face. (Works 7: 515–16; 86–97)

Just as in the Aeneis, where he endows Virgil’s Dido with a more complex psyche, Dryden is also interested in the human mind. Along with Cymon’s mental improvement, we witness Iphigenia’s thinking as she is tossed between rival lovers:

Sad Iphigene to Womanish ComplaintsAdds pious Pray’rs, and wearies all the Saints;Ev’n, if she could, she would repent,But since she cannot, dreads the Punishment. (7: 523; 349–52)

Yet, also as he does in the Aeneis, Dryden uses every opportunity to address contemporary politics. His description of Cymon’s hostile recep-tion in Rhodes during his attempt to regain Iphigenia from his rival, for example, is a disguised attack on William III’s standing army:

The Country rings around with loud Alarms,And raw in Fields the rude Militia swarms;Mouths without Hands; maintain’d at vast Expence,In Peace a Charge, in War a weak Defence. (7: 525; 399–402)

The difference between this translation and the Aeneis, is the absence here of genuine debate over political legitimacy or illegitimacy. Dryden’s focus remains sharply on universal human experiences—on the “Vain hopes and empty Joys of human Kind” and on the swift-ness with which Fortune’s wheel turns and prizes like Iphigenia are “lost and won” (7: 522 and 525). Never does the poem lose sight of its announced subject: “When Beauty fires the Blood, how Love exalts the Mind” (7: 514; 41). The poet of the Aeneis does not achieve the same degree of transcendence of the particular; there, the urgency of political passages curtails poetic flights. Though the political insta-bility and moral ambiguity of Cymon’s world resembles Dryden’s


Virgil, 1688–1700 135

own, the poet is here intrigued by the ongoing nature of humanity’s struggles, and their universality is everywhere stressed.

The “exemplary” nature of Dryden’s politics in the Aeneis also has its fulfillment in Fables, where there are numerous different politi-cal and moral types. The real hero of the collection is the apolitical though politically astute Parson in Dryden’s rendition of Chaucer, “The Character of a Good Parson.” While warning, as the narrator does in Absalom and Achitophel, that “Worse might, and often did from Change ensue,” the Parson is unable to commit himself to either Jacobite or Williamite claims about kingship. He uses the example of Richard II to debunk divine-right monarchy: “A King can give no more than is his own: / The Title stood entail’d, had Richard had a Son,” yet he is equally cynical about entitlement by “Conquest, an odious Name” or the “senseless Plea of Right by Providence” (Works 7: 509; 112–17). The Parson turns instead to the “Cure of Souls” as he wanders through the land “like a Primitive Apostle” (7: 510; 128). This newly demonstrated interest on the part of poet in the indi-vidual rather than the nation marks Fables as an inherently modern work, one akin to popular literature of the next century.

While addressing individual passions, however, Dryden also recognizes in Fables through the diversity of stories and voices he invokes, the importance of ongoing engagement with human his-tory. Earl Miner comments of Dryden’s works in general that they give readers a “rich sense of [Dryden’s] engagement with those who have mattered, and have continued to matter, in western culture” (Literary Transmission 1). In his final works this engagement is more obvious and urgent. As Dryden composed the Aeneis, he consulted a wide range of sources, working, as Paul Hammond comments of all Dryden’s classical efforts, “from as many different editions as he could buy or borrow” so that “his sense of the Latin poems was coloured by the work of previous commentators, and by the transla-tions and imitations which various skilled hands had produced” (147). Unable to rely on Virgil alone to address contemporary issues, that is, Dryden invoked within his Aeneis, through allusion and echoes, a range of other Western poets from ancient times to the present; he relied particularly upon Denham, Homer, Milton, Ovid, and Spenser. This insistence on plurality is a defining feature of Fables as well; and, as he rejects the old hierarchies of literature, he renders the Ancients no more than “other voices.” Homer sits cheek by jowl with Chaucer, Ovid with Boccaccio and Dryden himself. Their offerings are equally valuable to readers.



EpilogueBetween the Aeneis and Fables can be traced the major differences between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century notions of the social and historical function of literature, attitudes toward genre, and employment of classical literature. As Dryden embarked upon his translation of Virgil’s oeuvre in the 1690s, he indicated through his reiteration of Augustan heroic ideals that he believed still in a Spenserian-style holistic and imperial view of history and its advancement in literature. Yet, his struggles, in his translation, over the incompatibility between the problems of his age and the ideals of traditional neoclassical and monarchical doctrines led him grad-ually to Fables, where poetic wit and spiritual commerce across the ages flourish in spite of rather than in aid of history. The literary and political revolutions of the 1690s hammered home for Dryden and his fellow writers the fact that times and readers had changed: what worked in the past no longer held guaranteed currency, especially where the Ancients were concerned. The wide-ranging audience that would be reading, say, Fielding’s novels in the eighteenth century was established by the 1690s, and writers were already responding to its mixed competence in and patience for the classical traditions that had so recently been the foundation of English letters. Dryden, at least, came to admit that these changes were inevitable—that they were merely part of the Ovidian metamorphoses of literature and the worlds it reflected.28 In his Secular Masque (1700), he farewells a mode of thinking and writing as he reflects on the preceding cen-tury’s pointless wars and “untrue” lovers before declaring “ ’Tis well an old Age is out / And Time to begin a new” (Works 16: 273; 90–91). Writers of the new age, as Dryden apprehends in his final works, would push the Ancients gradually to the margins of literature as native talents and traditions gained prestige and readers demanded situations and characters with which they could identify.


CHAPTER 4

VIRGIL, 1700–1760: REDEFINING NEOCLASSICISM

Prologue

In his “Author’s Preface” to The Mythology and Fables of the Ancients, Explain’d from History (1739), Abbé Banier argued that the ancient world and its literature were a ubiquitous

presence in eighteenth- century life. Pointing to the profusion of relics from ancient times—from poetry to monuments to curios—he claims, “we are daily conversant in the Works of Greeks and Romans, in those of their Poets especially, which we should often be at a loss to understand, were we not acquainted with the Fables to which they are eternally alluding” (v). Believing, therefore, that “ ‘tis far from being unnecessary to know the History of the Pagan Gods and Fables,” Banier undertakes to supply forgotten details (v). Pope assumes the same currency of the Ancients and their authority. Most famously, his staunchly neoclassical An Essay on Criticism (1711) admonishes potential poets to “Know well each Ancient’s proper Character” and to pore over Homer and Virgil as the pinnacle of human achievement (1: 252; 119):

Be Homer’s works your Study and Delight,Read them by Day, and meditate by Night,Thence form your Judgment, thence your Maxims bring,And trace the Muses upward to their Spring;Still with It self compar’d, his Text peruse;And let your Comment be the Mantuan Muse. (1: 253–54; 124–29)

The authority of Virgil, the Mantuan Muse, like that of Homer, as Pope then explains, derives from a communion with and representation of Nature:

When first young Maro in his boundless MindA Work t’outlast Immortal Rome design’d,



Perhaps he seem’d above the Critick’s Law,And but from Nature’s Fountains scorn’d to draw:But when t’examine ev’ry Part he came,Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. (1: 254–55; 130–35)

Underlying Pope’s exhortation to fellow writers to heed the examples of the supreme poets is a dismissal of those “Grub Street” writers he so scorned. This position of supremacy shapes his Dunciad, in which the narrator also looks down from Parnassian heights as he laments the defilement of ancient literature and culture by the poetasters who would profit from their stillborn aspirations. The first lines of the Dunciad, with their simultaneous invocation of Virgil and the “Smithfield Muses,” sum up the ostensible premise of the poem: the refuse pouring from Grub Street and environs thwart the heroic endeavors of eighteenth-century Virgils and Homers. In addition to the proclamations of Pope and other neoclassicists, tributes to Pope himself as a contemporary Homer and to Joseph Addison as “our English Maro” indicate that ancient spirits persisted in contemporary letters and that the age had its own Virgils and Homers (Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue 126).1

As critics have recognized, however, eighteenth-century culture is characterized by the gradual alienation of the classics that indeed gave rise to Banier’s work, and shaped by the new concerns and the powerful new class of writers to which Pope responded. The osten-sible bulwarks of classical values themselves reveal the demise of the classical structures they celebrate. Banier’s demystification, in Mythology and Fables, of ancient history and literature, actually high-lights the strangeness of that world to contemporary readers, while as early as 1969 Kelsall found evidence that “The Dunciad may be skepti-cal of its own ideals” (359). Even the initial response to Pope’s Essay on Criticism suggests that readers were not falling over themselves for his advice: early sales were slow and the so-called third and fourth editions suggest an attempt to encourage interest in the poem.2

There are several competing theories as to the reasons for anti-classical (or simply nonclassical) impulses. Best known, perhaps, is Weinbrot’s study of the ways in which growing British nationalism ousted classical authority. He illustrates, for example, the ways in which, say, Pope’s Windsor-Forest and The Messiah emphasize “the termination of classical fiction in the face of Christian reality” and the rise of British nationalism. Another example he gives is Addison, who worries over both English regard for “Greek and Roman history


Virgil, 1700–1760 139

as relevant to their own” and the imposition of “Greco-Roman paradigms upon the very different British ‘Religious or Civil Constitution’ ” (Britannia’s Issue 146, 386). Trevor Ross challenges Weinbrot’s conclusions, subordinating the new sense of British nationhood to a “reorientation of belief about the function of culture in a society increasingly driven by economic exchange.” According to Ross, the displacement of civic humanism by commercial humanism in the eighteenth century engendered the notion of “pure poetry,” for “the new human relations fostered by commerce and the arts functioned to polish the subject’s ‘manners’ rather than to promote an active public virtue” (“Pure Poetry” 440–43). In an environment where, aesthetic theorists argued, “the enriching effects of art or literature were to be discerned through certain innate mental fac-ulties of taste or judgment,” both classical literature and classicists were guilty for failing “to respect poetry’s distinctive value by essen-tially using their writing as a mechanism of social representation and symbolic exchange” (Ross, “Pure Poetry” 444, 451). Hunter’s study of the “Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction,” meanwhile, focuses on the “taste for the strange and surprising,” which “meant an undue confidence in one’s own talents as well as a lack of reverence for tradition, insensitivity to the humanist heri-tage and code and a refusal to honor crucial categories and make fine distinctions” (Before Novels 16).

Behind all the cultural shifts addressed by these and other critics are changes in reader expectations—changes that Voltaire acknowl-edged in the early eighteenth century, when, like his countryman Perrault before him, he found the mighty works of Homer and Virgil alien and even distasteful to contemporary readers. In his “Essay on Epick Poetry” (1727), he points to the importance of reader tolerance when he declares, “there is scarce one to be found, who ever read the Iliad, with that Eagerness and Rapture, which a Woman feels when she reads the Novel of Zaïda” (48–49). The emperor’s naked-ness is now exposed: “as to the common Mass of Readers . . . few have been able to go through the whole Iliad, without strugling against a secret Dislike, and some have thrown it aside after the fourth or fifth book.” Noting that “Homer hath so many Admirers, and so few Readers,” moreover, Voltaire candidly states that common read-ers are “struck” rather with “the Fame of Homer” than with “his Beauties” (49). Voltaire was not against epic per se; this essay was a preface to his own on the civil wars in France. He simply recognized, as few were willing to do, that a broad new reading audience was



demanding material that was far removed from the exalted world of the Ancients.3

Central to Voltaire’s analysis here of the reading public is his recognition that cultural and temporal differences shape literary composition and consumption. Thomas Blackwell too demystified the Ancients about the same time by positing their achievements as the product of place and time. In contrast to the starstruck Rapin and Bossu, whose theories still circulated widely, Blackwell insisted in his Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) that “Homer’s Poems are of Human Composition; inspired by no other Power than his own natural Faculties, and the Chances of his Education” (4). Whatever heights Homer—or any other poet—reached were due to his experience, for “what [the poet] felt and saw, that he described; and that Homer had the good Fortune to see and learn the Grecian Manners, at their true Pitch and happiest Temper for Verse: Had he been born much sooner, he would have seen nothing but Nakedness and Barbarity: Had he come much later, he had fallen in the Times either of wide Policy and Peace, or of General Wars, when private Passions are buried in the common Order, and established Discipline” (Blackwell 35). The greater majesty of Virgil’s poem is likewise owing to the circumstances under which it was composed. Having consid-ered the courtly splendors that Virgil had seen and attributed the “Decency” of his work to the court atmosphere, Blackwell concludes that even the notion of imperium sine fine, which endows the poem with such seriousness and dignity, derives from the Augustan Roman mindset: “The Eternity of a Government, the Forms of Magistrature, and Plan of Dominion (Ideas to which Homer was a Stranger) are familiar to the Roman Poet” (325). He further reflects that “Virgil’s Poem was to be read by a People deeply disciplined; whose early Necessities had taught them political Forms . . . [and] forced them into Publick Virtue” (327). The “natural Greek, in Homer’s days,” by con-trast, “covered none of [Virgil’s] Sentiments. He frankly owned the Pleasures of Love and Wine” (327). In other words, there is nothing at all divine about the greatest epic poets; their works are simply the result of their response to their times and cultures.

From the opening of the century, many writers were convinced of the essential equality of the Ancients and the Moderns, despite the ubiquity of Bossu and Rapin’s neoclassicism and despite Swift’s assumption of ancient supremacy in his derision of Dryden, in his Battle of the Books, for daring to emulate Virgil. Many, therefore, who deliberately eschewed classical precepts were aware that readers


Virgil, 1700–1760 141

often preferred native works over the now alien classics. Virgil’s place in English literature by the early eighteenth century, in short, resembled Shakespeare’s. He was celebrated as a figurehead, a cen-tral player in English literary heritage, but homage to him, in its vari-ous forms, paid as little attention to the essence of his poetry as the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee did to the content of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare had the advantage, however, of being English, and as his influence grew, Virgil’s rapidly declined. When he was called upon, it was as an honorary English subject. Swift may well have sneered at Dryden’s epic translation, but, as Stuart Gillespie observes, quoting Frost, Dryden’s English version of Virgil and the other classics was the basis of any understanding of them: “For the generation of Pope (born 1688) and Richardson (born 1689), it is hardly too much to say that Dryden’s conception of satire was satire, that Dryden’s Virgil was Virgil” (Gillespie 16).

By the first decades of the eighteenth century, the accomplishment of the translator—the native English writer—has eclipsed that of the ancient poet, just as James Harrington prophesied in 1659 when he reflected that one day “the English Reader may sufficiently judge of like translations, without referring himself unto the Originals” (Virgil’s Æneis A4). So influential were the English versions of ancient works that, Thomas Warton complained, “the original not only begins to be neglected and excluded as less easy, but also to be despised as less ornamental and elegant. Thus . . . the genuine model is superseded, and gradually gives way to the establishment of a more specious, but false, resemblance. Thus, too many readers, happy to find the readiest accommodation for their indolence and their illit-eracy, think themselves sufficient masters of Homer from Pope’s translation” (Gillespie 16; Warton 1807: 1.197–98). Yet, as illustrated below, the mammoth “Virgil” of Thomas’s brother, Joseph Warton, and Christopher Pitt further alienated the original despite being the major verse translation of the period and ostensible evidence of continued ancient sway.

Behind writers’ neglect of the classics was their new enthusiasm for “pure poetry,” as Ross describes it, and the popularity of Boileau’s Longinus. As Gillespie remarks, the impact “on English perceptions of the canon” of Boileau’s text, “translated into English in 1680 and again in the early 1710s,” was “profound” and “can be traced in the progressively more marked application to Shakespeare of the terms of Longinus’ praise of Homer, and in the ‘application’ of Longinus to examples of historical English literary texts and authors—notably



Shakespeare—in the course of the translations of Longinus by Leonard Welsted and William Smith published in 1712 and 1739 respectively” (8). Under the scrutiny of Longinus, the “sublimities” of Homer and Shakespeare are on equal footing. Even Pope unwit-tingly highlights the shift in emphasis from the civic to the poetic, as he remarks in his “Observations on the First Book” of his Iliad translation that it “is something strange that of all the commenta-tors upon Homer, there is hardly one whose principal Design is to illustrate the Poetical Beauties of the Author . . . Hence it comes to pass that their Remarks are rather Philosophical, Historical, Geographical, Allegorical, or in short, rather any thing than Critical and Poetical” (7: 82). In puzzling over this concern until now with the cultural background to Homer rather than his poetics, Pope betrays the imperatives of his own time, where zeal for the sublime overshadowed the historical and political relevance of literary works. The result for Virgil, as this chapter will stress, is that any rendition of the once supreme poetic authority subjects him to English crite-ria, which effectively means measuring his poetic sublimities on the terms that make English poems pleasing.

Even where classical authority seemed still to reign supreme, it was on English terms. The outstanding example is Horace whose various works were taught in schools and published continuously in the orig-inal and in translation throughout the eighteenth century. Horace’s persistence in English culture, however, was owing to his essential “Englishness.” Even in the mid-seventeenth century, one translator at least felt it better to “present not Horace to thee [Reader], in his native lustre, nor Language” but in such a way as would highlight in his Odes that “Moralitie touched, and Vertue heightned with cleareness of Spirit, and accuratenesse of Judgement” (Holyday A2). His palpable morality made Horace so appealing to the eighteenth century, and as early as 1680, when playwrights began to retaliate against the licentiousness of the previous decade, Edmund Waller highlighted what Horace had to offer an English audience. In his note “Of This Translation and of the Use of Poetry” prefacing the Earl of Roscommon’s translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry (1680), Waller stressed that Horace’s moderation and chasteness could help to polish English letters:

Brittain, whose Genious is in Verse exprestBold and sublime, but negligently drest;Horace will our superfluous Branches prune,


Virgil, 1700–1760 143

Give us new rules, and set our Harp in tune,Direct us how, to back the winged Horse,Favour his flight, and moderate his force;. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Chast moral Writing we may learn from henceNeglect of which no wit can recompence.

Waller here argues that English writers should emulate the ancient example, yet Horace’s appropriateness lies in the essentially English qualities he has to offer, as critics have often noted. Calling Horace the “quintessential eighteenth-century gentleman” and the “arche-type of gentlemanly behavior,” M. Elaine Dolan Brown remarks that he “tells the truth with a smile; the smile in turn makes his criticism more palatable” (97). This English politeness accounts for Matthew Prior’s reputation as the “English Horace,” according to Nicolas Nelson, who quotes George Sherburn whose description of Prior is equally applicable to Horace: the Englishman wrote, says Sherburn, “with both lightness and a noble urbanity, with elegant ease and a deft and imaginative use of classical patterns” (Nelson 19; Sherburn “Restoration” 909). Also reflecting on Horace’s eloquence and his “quintessentially English nuances,” E. J. Kenney sums up his appeal: “Horace’s popularity as a school author is not difficult to account for. His poetry, especially, the Odes, comes in manageable instalments; he excels in pithy and memorable expression; and he is, particularly, when judicious selection is practised, an improving writer, a copious source of easily digestible moral instruction urbanely imparted. Until modern scholarship seriously got to work on him, it was the accessi-bility and urbanity of his poetry, taken at face value, that dominated his reception by English readers . . . ” (189). In other words, Horace’s Englishness (couched as ancient authority) rather than his ancient precepts accounts for his omnipresence in eighteenth-century culture.

The question that remains, then, concerns the role of the tradi-tionally most esteemed Ancient in an age still considered “neoclas-sical.” This chapter examines the relatively wide-ranging spheres in which Virgil appeared in the eighteenth century, showing that in each, even in the translations of his works, his authority took a back seat to domestic imperatives. His politics, as Weinbrot and Harrison have established, were problematic at best, and with his political authority went his role as prophet.4 As Dryden intuited, in the ways described above, the notion of history’s divine progress was not viable



in a society where history was the object of empirical scholarship, a study involving “the systematic collection and critical study of manuscript remains” (Lawson and Silver 170). Even in schools, Virgil was neglected along with his fellow Ancients as new more practical institutions and curriculums appeared. To be sure, in the traditional grammar schools, Virgil was the main author in a course of study founded on the “Greats.” This privilege, however, served further to designate him and the classics in general to an exclusive realm that existed in theory at the center but in reality on the edges of society. Translators similarly viewed Virgil as the mouthpiece of a purer but limited time and place. More and more often, his poems repre-sented a quaint world of antiquarian interest rather than universal characters and lessons. So, when writers like Addison and Fielding sketched classical paradigms and hinted at Virgilian ethical codes in their own works, they were in most cases not, as critics continue to wonder, judging the present by the standards of a golden age, for that golden age had already been consigned to heritage museums of the mind. Rather, in employing the Ancients, writers lent authority to their works and acknowledged England’s literary heritage while consciously (in some cases flamboyantly) building new genres and themes on, but away from, the old.

Virgil and PoliticsWhere Virgil’s chief attraction to seventeenth-century England lay in the political import of his poetry, particularly the Aeneid, his poli-tics were all but ignored in the eighteenth century. When the subject arose, it was treated with embarrassment or contempt. Weinbrot points out that the disgust felt for Virgil and his fellow sycophants is epitomized by Pope’s self-composed epitaph:

Heroes, and Kings! your distance keep:In peace let one poor Poet Sleep,Who never flatter’d Folks like you:Let Horace blush, and Virgil too. (Augustus Caesar 120)

Augustus’s reputation and Virgil’s along with it, Weinbrot shows, declined at the same pace as political Augustanism. Indeed, as Harrison demonstrates, in attempts to redeem Virgil, eighteenth-century writers worked to uncover his “overt or implicit Republican sentiments” (“English Virgil” 5). The stigma of propaganda aside,


Virgil, 1700–1760 145

however, there are two practical reasons why Virgil’s poetry could not function politically in the same ways it had in the seventeenth century. The first concerns different notions of allegory. Now that the Aeneid no longer mapped out divine history, it became a source of analogy rather than allegory, and Virgil’s world usually seemed too far removed from that of eighteenth-century readers even to offer use-ful examples. The second reason involves changed notions of poetry’s relationship to history and society. In accordance with its lost status as an instruction book of empire and heroic codes, Virgil’s Aeneid, with its perfect hero and now alien notions of personal conduct, had little to offer audiences eager for entertainment or advice about everyday life. Even to meet eighteenth-century aesthetic standards, Virgil’s epic had to be made over, as the last part of this chapter demonstrates. There was, too, a third, less germinal but still undeniable, factor in Virgil’s metamorphosis for English readers: the surreptitious impact of Dryden’s 1697 Aeneis on the way eighteenth-century commentators and translators handled Virgil’s Augustan politics.

Probably the last serious effort to use Virgilian Augustan proph-ecy to bolster Stuart monarchy is The Golden Age from the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil, &c. Printed in the Year 1703, a poem for a long time attributed to William Walsh.5 Both editions of the poem, one of six pages and one of eight, are full with what A. J. Sambrook calls “Tory High Flier” sentiments as they attempt to establish the reign of Queen Anne within the divine historical arch that links David’s Israel, Augustus’s Rome, and Tudor and Stuart England (324). The poem is set on the same foundation as Dryden’s Astraea Redux: with Anne’s ascendance to the throne “Now Banish’d Justice takes its Rightful Place, / And Saturn’s Days return with Stuart’s Race.”6 As in Jupiter’s prophecy in the Aeneid, and Astraea Redux’s echoing promise of “White Centuries,” history is rolling along its providen-tial course: “Behold the mighty Months Progressive Shine! / See ‘em begin their Golden Race in thine” (3). The monarch is semidivine, and her virtue and example absolute: “The Life of Gods the Monarch shall partake, / Belov’d by Gods and Men for Virtues sake, / As She from Heroes sprung brave Acts prefers. / And Heroes Copy out their Fame from Hers” (4).

Even more than Dryden in Astraea Redux, however, the poet unravels the Augustan myth he employs. Transparent allegory, like that of Richard Blackmore, thwarts the mythical dimension of The Golden Age by situating the poem too deeply in the transitory pre-sent. While Dryden alludes freely to contemporary events as he



establishes his mythical-historical framework, he mentions the names of only two major players in the English dimension of his epic drama: King Charles and General Monck. For both he attempts to establish mythic status. Yet, the author of The Golden Age lists an array of Elizabethan courtiers, discovering their counterparts in a list of Tory politicians. Such specificity disallows the transcendence of the particular so crucial to seventeenth-century Augustanism. Furthermore, having established these precise parallels, the poet then jumps from Elizabeth I’s reign to hail Anne, completely omit-ting the reigns of Charles I and Charles II. Later, there is a prophecy that “Churchmen with Dissenters shall combine, / To pay the Tribute due to STUARTS Line,” yet the poet’s failure to acknowledge the cen-tury of English Augustanism that culminated in the civil war and Glorious Revolution undermines the myth he draws on. Ultimately, the Virgilian paradigms of the poem are as fully discredited as they are in Pope’s Windsor-Forest and Addison’s The Campaign. In each case, Virgil’s traditional value is recognized but his traditional sway debunked.

While such demystification of Augustan history and allegory goes a long way to account for Virgil’s decline in status after 1700, another significant but overlooked factor is simple exhaustion of the heroic, once seen as a bulwark of national literature.7 Just as in the Restoration, a number of vibrant mock-heroics draw attention to subject matter and codes that are now exhausted.8 Two early eighteenth-century examples that counter platitudes by using Virgil as a pure jeu d’esprit are “The Battle of Pygmies and Cranes: A Poem Written Originally in Latin by Mr. Addison” (1716) and Mother Gin: A Tragicomical Eclogue, Being a Paraphrastical Imitation of the Daphnis of Virgil. “The Battle of the Pygmies and Cranes” appears in Miscellaneous Translations from Bion, Moschus, Ovid, and Mr. Addison, with an Original Poem on Bowling, published in Oxford in 1716, but sold in London. Ostensibly the work of a group of elite young men—university wits—the collection begins with the supposed transla-tion from Latin of Addison’s mock-heroic “Battle of the Pygmies and Cranes,” a poem immediately linked to Virgil through the epi-gram from Aeneid 1: “Bella, horrida bella.” The poet expresses plain weariness with the old political themes:

Who has not heard of swift Achilles’ Fame,Of brave Æneas’ Toils, or Nassaw’s Name?Or who’s untir’d with reading Pompey’s Fate,


Virgil, 1700–1760 147

And how Thebes suffer’d by Fraternal Hate?Exhausted Themes! My daring Muse declaresA wond’rous Series of uncommon Wars:New Camps, new Heroes. . . . (4)

The material for these novelties will come from England’s own political expansion:

Where happy India reddens with the RaysOf Phoebus rising from the Eastern Seas,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .A Lordly People had an EMPIRE fram’d,From its Inhabitants PYGMEAN nam’d. (5)

Like Pope in his Rape of the Lock and eighteenth-century novel-ists, the poem capitalizes on taste for the exotic, allowing novelty to supersede the classical. Virgil’s ancient paradigms are now too limited and too yawn inducing.

In Mother Gin: A Tragicomical Eclogue, Virgil’s pastoral scene is explicitly replaced by one that the setting of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) will later resemble: contemporary London lowlife and its shady politics. Virgil’s original (on the left-hand pages) is printed oppo-site the “imitation” (on the right-hand pages). Instead of encourag-ing the reader to trace the origins of the modern work, however, this juxtaposition underscores the main point of the “imitation”: the gaping chasm between Virgil’s Menalcas and Mopsus, and the gangster heroes of this poem. Like Macheath and his gang, Malden and Morgan are escapees from Newgate and Fleet prisons respec-tively. Their lives are entangled in the disputes of Grub Street and the playhouses, the social problems wrought by “Old Mother GIN,” and class confrontations. There is no connection with Virgil’s pasto-rals except that this poem is new pastoral and Virgil’s is old pastoral. Like much of the “Shakespeare” seen in London’s playhouses, that is, this “Virgil” is merely a hanger on which to place, under an authori-tative name, conspicuously modern politics. The new genre, which Gay will establish as Newgate pastoral, displaces its ancient ancestor rather than parading a heritage. The heritage is clearly superficial.

Virgil’s longtime association with absolute monarchy and the Stuart regime could not be forgotten overnight, however, and both Weinbrot and Harrison have mapped out the struggles of eighteenth-century writers, who wished, as Harrison puts it, “to reconcile an



acceptance of Virgil as one of the greatest of all poets with the fact that he not only flourished in ‘monstrous’ or ‘tyrannical’ times, but was one of the chief propagandists of the ‘tyrant’ ” (“English Virgil” 4). At the center of the problem, Weinbrot and Harrison explain, is the eighteenth-century love of liberty that made any hint of absolut-ism anathema and Roman republicanism the correct ancient model. Weinbrot points to early eighteenth-century praise for George I, which contrasts his preservation of liberty with Augustus’ tyranny. Such condemnation of the emperor meant condemnation of his chief poet (Augustus Caesar 126).9 Still at century’s end William Hayley was disgusted by Augustan sycophancy, casting Virgil and Dryden in the same mold. Speaking of ages that supported “the arts of refined flattery,” Hayley remembers that “the Roman Bard is supposed to have drawn a flattering portrait of his Emperor in the character of Æneas, and that the English Poet has, with equal ingenuity, enwrapt the dissolute Charles the Second in the Jewish robes of King David” (125). Yet, in his An Essay on Epic Poetry in Five Epistles (1782), where he makes this condemnation, Hayley acknowledges Dryden’s final emphasis on Virgil’s aesthetic rather than political importance.

Critics never note that Hayley’s disapproval of Dryden and Virgil is consigned to a footnote of his Essay. In the main text, he associ-ates the sublimities of Dryden’s poetry with those of Milton, a habit that, as the final part of this chapter will show, became commonplace among eighteenth-century commentators on Dryden’s Aeneis. In “Epistle V,” he declares that “MILTON’S Verse, and DRYDEN’S Rhyme, / Are proof alike against the rage of Time” (108), and he praises Dryden’s imagination and sublime in the eulogy of “Epistle IV”:

Tones yet unheard, with touch divine, he draws,The melting fall, the rising swell sublime,And all the magic of melodious rhyme.See with proud joy Imagination spreadA wreath of honor round his aged head! (65–66)

Hayley is typical of eighteenth-century critics in looking for eighteenth-century poetic criteria in seventeenth-century poetry. His overwhelming approval of the Aeneis, however, indicates that diver-sion of attention away from the political begins with Dryden. Yet, Dryden also made Virgil palatable to the next century by addressing the political element in comparative terms. As the ensuing discussion illustrates, those sections of Dryden’s Dedication where he struggles


Virgil, 1700–1760 149

with Virgilian Augustanism are cited with startling frequency by eighteenth-century commentators who felt the need to exonerate the ancient poet. Yet, never do these later writers give Dryden credit for their discoveries.

Perhaps the most typical eighteenth-century apology for Virgil’s politics is in Joseph Spence’s Polymetis Abridged, or a Guide to Classical Learning; Being an Inquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Ancient Artists (1765). Leaving politics till last, Spence decides his “Appendix shall be closed with our author’s opinion, that the Æneid is a political poem, in support of the new establishment” (163). He speaks on behalf of eighteenth-century audiences as he considers that this “monarchical form of government must naturally be apt to displease the people, and Virgil seems to have laid the plan of his poem to reconcile them to it” (163). He finishes by “speak[ing] plainly: Virgil wrote in the service of the new usurpation on the state; and all that can be said in his vindi-cation, is, that the temper and constitution at that time were such, that the reins of the government must have fallen into the hands of some one person or another, who might possibly be less indulgent than Augustus was at the time” (164). This dubious summary is a compressed version of Dryden’s reflection on Aeneas’s illegitimacy, discussed in chapter 3, and of the concession he makes for Augustus: “that this Conquerour, though of a bad kind, was the very best of it . . . [that the Poet] concluded it to be the Interest of his Country to be so Govern’d” (Works 5: 281).

Samuel Cobb in his Clavis Virgiliana: Or New Observations upon the Works of Virgil (1714) allows his paraphrasing of Dryden to become unacknowledged appropriation of whole passages. He employs Dryden’s “best of a bad kind” theory as Virgil is again made accept-able to an eighteenth-century audience in a speech Cobb has him make to Augustus: “The Change of a Popular into an Absolute Government has generally been of very ill consequence: For betwixt the Hatred of the People, and Injustice of the Prince, it of Necessity comes to pass that they live in distrust and mutual Apprehensions. But if the Commons knew a just Person, whom they entirely con-fided in; it would be for the Advantage of both Parties, that such an one should be their Sovereign” (1–2; italics reversed). As Spence and others were to do, Cobb has taken Dryden’s sense of the poet having “maturely weigh’d the Condition of the Times” and his equal sense that since “an entire Liberty was not to be retriev’d” the only course was to accept a leader who is the “very best” of a “bad kind” (5: 281).



Later in the text, Cobb turns a reflection on the Italian civil wars into an attack on tyranny that uses Dryden in an eighteenth-century cause. Beginning with Dryden’s comment that “Virgil was no arbi-trary Man” Cobb quotes in full (with no acknowledgment of his source) his predecessor’s lengthy consideration of Aeneas’s false title (“Æneas could not pretend to be Priam’s heir . . . ”) and arbitrary gov-ernment (“what was introduc’d by Force, by Force may be remov’d”) (Cobb 8–9; Dryden, Works 5: 283–84).

In the Prefatory Dedication of his and Pitt’s The Works of Virgil in English Verse (1763), Joseph Warton also appropriates Dryden’s “best of a bad kind” mentality. “Virgil,” he claims, “believed it would be the best service he could then do his countrymen, to endeavour to soften their minds towards so mild and gentle a master as Augustus, out of whose hands it was impossible for them to extort the power he had usurped.” This “mild and gentle” Augustus is that “Conqueror” of Dryden’s Dedication to whose “Bounty” Virgil’s estate was owing and under whom “the Arts of Peace flourish’d”—a man who was alto-gether the “very best” of a “bad kind.” Warton also follows Dryden in turning the didactic element of epic to Virgil’s favor, presenting him as repaying Augustus “with good Counsel, how to behave himself in his new Monarchy, so as to gain the Affections of his Subjects, and deserve to be call’d the Father of his Country.”10 For Warton, Virgil could be excused on the grounds that he was “tacitly and delicately instructing the emperor himself in the duties of a good governor and hinting that if he should reign alone, he should reign like an Aeneas” (Works 1: vii, 2: 4).11

Joseph Trapp, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, also felt compelled to consider Virgil’s politics and he too silently invoked Dryden in the task, even as he emphasized “Invention, Fire, and Judgment” as “all the Requisites of an Epic Poem” (Preface xi). He initially has Dryden following the path of Bossu; he claims that Virgil’s “End” “was to con-ciliate the Affections of the Roman People to the new Government of Augustus Caesar; upon which Bossu, and after him Mr. Dryden, have largely, and excellently discoursed” (xxi). Trapp’s notion of “concil-iation,” however, has to come from Dryden, for Bossu merely sees Virgil as fulfilling epic’s didactic function: “He ought,” Bossu feels, “to instruct Augustus as the Founder of a great Empire, and to inspire into him as well as his Successors, the same Spirit and Conduct which had rais’d this Empire to such a Grandeur” (27). Still more important for Trapp was the Republican spirit he found in Virgil: “It appears from many . . . Passages that Virgil was a Republican in his Heart, as


Virgil, 1700–1760 151

all honest men among the Romans then were; because a Republic was the ancient establish’d Form of their Government. But because he found That Government utterly overturn’d, he wisely endeavour’d to conciliate the affections of the People to That of Augustus” (Aeneis 2: 880). Even this typically eighteenth-century perspective has a basis in Dryden’s Dedication in which he ventures the opinion that Virgil was “still of Republican principles in his Heart” even after “the two Battles of Philippi, gave the decisive stroak against Liberty.” Dryden goes so far as to attribute Republican guilt to Augustus: “For his Conscience could not but whisper to the Arbitrary Monarch, that the Kings of Rome were at first Elective, and Govern’d not with-out a Senate: That Romulus was no hereditary Prince . . . that the last Tarquin was Expell’d justly for Overt Acts of Tyranny, and Male-Administration” (Works 5: 280–81).12

In defending Virgil’s reputation, eighteenth-century commenta-tors furthered Dryden’s subconscious push away from the political Virgil. The success of Dryden’s efforts to replace politics with an emphasis on poetic flights is best documented, however, in the criti-cism of his Aeneis for its mistranslations—criticism that reveals that eighteenth-century writers could not fathom Virgil as a vehicle for disguised political commentary. In the most extreme examples, whole books were written to correct Dryden. In 1724 and 1725, William Benson published translations of Georgics II and I respectively. These translations were accompanied by the Latin texts and the Dryden translations; the declared purpose of the production was to vindicate the “Injustice” done to Virgil by Dryden and to make amends for the damage resulting from “his perfect Ignorance of the Subject which Virgil treats of.” The same anger drives Luke Milbourne’s Notes on Dryden’s Virgil (1698). Though an onlooker in the political struggles Dryden incorporated in his translation, Milbourne fails to see the most obvious allusions—evidence that Dryden’s immediate contem-poraries were sometimes blind to the literary political disguise that already belonged properly to an earlier age.

Certainly by the eighteenth century, as Benson’s indignation sug-gests, critics disinclined to look for partisanship or politics in Virgil were baffled by Dryden’s egregious “mistakes.” Focused on the verse of Dryden, whom he acknowledges, in typical eighteenth-century fashion, as “the great Refiner of our English Poetry, and the best Marshaller of Words that our Nation had then, at least produced,” Trapp, for one, is blind to the Jacobite politics of, for example, the opening lines of the 1697 Aeneis with their emphasis on displacement.



He consequently criticizes them for their “Tautology” (“there are two Adjectives [Expell’d and Exil’d] with the same Signification”) as well as their omission of key Virgilian words (Preface xlix).13 Trapp finds himself torn between his rage and reluctance to speak ill of the mighty poet: “Mr. Dryden’s is, in many Parts, a noble and spir-ited Translation; and yet I cannot, upon the Whole, think it a good one; at least for Mr. Dryden.” His biggest objection is that “besides his often grosly mistaking his Author’s Sense; as a Translator, he is extremely licentious” (xlix). Oblivious to Dryden’s cynicism over the divine purpose to history that is manifested in his occasional mock-ing of Virgil’s deities, Trapp expresses horror at his presentation of Apollo “at one of his own Festivals”:

“Himself, on Cythus walking, sees belowThe Merry Madness of the sacred Show.”

Virgil says, He walks on the Top of Cynthus; That’s all: The rest is Mr. Dryden’s. And it is of a Piece with a Passage in the Third Georgick; in which, without any sort of Provocation, or the least Hint from his Author, He calls the Priest the Holy Butcher. If Mr. Dryden took delight in abusing Priests, and Religion; Virgil did not. (lii)14

Equally offensive to Trapp for the same reasons is Dryden’s trans-lation of the following Latin lines, where, Trapp notes, Jupiter acts after Iarbus’s prayer to him in Book 4:

Talibus orantem dictis, arasque tenentemAudiit omnipotens; oculosque ad moenia torsitRegia, & oblitos famæ melioris amantes.

Trapp reflects on the beauty of Virgil’s lines: “What could be more well-mannered, more delicate, and truly Virgilian . . .” (lii). He refuses to “transcribe” Dryden, who wrote:

His vows, in haughty terms, he thus preferr’d, And held his altar’s horns. The mighty Thund’rer heard; Then cast his eyes on Carthage, where he found The lustful pair in lawless pleasure drown’d, Lost in their loves, insensible of shame, And both forgetful of their better fame.

Trapp dismisses Dryden’s rendition of Jove’s response as lines “totally his own.” He laments that “the Sweetness, and Softness of that


Virgil, 1700–1760 153

remote insinuating Expression, oblitos famæ melioris amantes” become, in Dryden’s hands, a moment that is “very nauseous” (lii). So Dryden’s deliberate modernization of Virgilian epic and implicit rejection of sacrosanct politics is lost on Trapp, who is intent upon poetry, as he puts it in the opening lines of his Preface, “as the very Flower of human Thinking, the most exquisite Spirit that can be extracted from the Wit, and Learning of Mankind” (i).

Spence, in his Polymetis Abridged, is equally oblivious to Dryden’s purpose and has the same objection: “As Dryden in some places gives the deities attributes that do not belong to them, so he misrepresents their actions and attitudes in others. Thus when Virgil speaks of Tesiphone as sitting alone, the translation represents her as a ghost walking at the head of others. Instead of Juno’s flying to the earth, Dryden makes her descend to hell” (157–58). This inability to con-sider a political purpose in Dryden’s lines and the bewilderment over his treatment of deities is due to the increasing separation, in the eighteenth century, of poetry and politics. Also lost to eighteenth-century commentators was the allegorical “mystery” of Virgil, with the result that wherever politics were perceived in the Latin original, they had to be fully elucidated so that their analogical utility could be maximized. A whole separate genre, the Virgilian “Keys” conse-quently arose to ensure that what was too far buried in Virgil’s time could be accessed by present and future readers.

The KeysFor the Medieval and Renaissance period, Virgil was shrouded in prophetic mystery. This mystery continued, as the previous chapters have shown, in the Augustan endeavors of the Stuart era, but conviction in Virgil as historical and political forecaster drastically declined. By the eighteenth century, Virgil lacked any status as prophet. Yet, it was widely felt that his works, particularly the Aeneid, contained an extended com-mentary on contemporary Roman politics and personalities. Assiduous detective work was therefore necessary to uncover his rational allegory. The products of this scholarly discourse were the numerous “Keys” to Virgil that embody the eighteenth-century approach to the Ancients as inhabitants of an exotic “other” world and constitute a form of anti-quarian endeavor at the moment when antiquarian studies took off. For, as Rosemary Sweet reflects, “Artifacts or ‘antiquities’ were ‘facts’ which when properly assembled would yield historical truths which would com-pensate for the ‘deficiency of antient records,’ ” and the primary function



of these Keys was to offer similar access to the distant past (187). These decodings of Virgil also have implications for the history of translation theory. For Dryden and other seventeenth-century theorists, the major task of the translator was to invoke the spirit of the original in updated material. The eighteenth-century tendency to see the Ancients as an exotic “other” resulted in a reversal of this theory: the translator’s goal in presenting a work from an alien time, place, and language was to achieve a rendition as close to the original as English would allow. The letter rather than the spirit was to be recreated.

Cobb, in his Clavis Virgiliana (1714), is typical in his rationaliza-tion of mystical or obviously political passages. He presents the fall of the elusive Troy, for example, as an allegory for early Roman his-tory, and explains the appearance of Aeneas’s mother to him early in the Aeneid as an astronomical phenomenon: “Besides, this [Virgil] points at many remarkable Passages of History under feign’d Names, the Destruction of ALBA and VEII under that of Troy. The Star Venus, which VARRO says guided ÆNEAS in his Voyage to Italy, in that Verse, Matre Dea monstrante viam” (3). Typically, too, for Key writ-ers, he points to historical figures in Virgil’s allegory. The image of dead Priam, for example, seems “originally made upon POMPEY the Great,” while the “railing Eloquence of CICERO in his Philippicks, is well imitated in the Oration of DRANCES; the dull faithful AGRIPPA, under the Person of ACHATES” (4–5).

Perhaps picking up Cobb’s assertion here, William Beare, a mid-century fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, applied his scholarly skills to a dissertation entitled Turnus and Drances: Being an Attempt to Shew, Who the Two Real Persons Were, that Virgil Intended to Represent under Those Two Characters (1750). Unlike Cobb, Beare lays out his purpose in his opening lines:

It is doubtless the Opinion of everyone, which diligently peruses the Greek and Roman Poets, that the principal Beauties of many Passages in their several Productions are entirely lost to us, from our Ignorance of particular circumstances, to which such Passages allude; that not only the most exquisite and refin’d Strokes of Satyr, but the most deli-cate Turns of Flattery and Address, have escap’d our Notice, merely for want of some Information concerning the Characters of Persons, to which they are apply’d. (3)

This idea that readers can only appreciate Virgil’s beauties if they know to whom and what his poetry alludes was, as Cobb’s Key indicates, a common one. Beare goes so far as to suggest that


Virgil, 1700–1760 155

Had the whole History of Augustus been lost, all Records and Memorials of the Transactions of his Time been obliterated, the greatest Beauty, nay the principal Design of the Æneid, had been scarce noted or attended to: whereas by the Advantage of such Light as we draw from the concurrent Testimony of Historians, we can now, without the Gift of much Penetration, discover that Emperor shadow’d out under the Person of Æneas . . . . (4)

Beare is not interested in reviving the issue of Augustan propaganda; rather, he believes, like Blackmore, that if a poet employs allegory then the allegory should be transparent. Consequently, Beare envies Virgil’s contemporaries: “Men, who liv’d in the same Age with those Authors, were Struck at first Sight with a thousand Beauties in the course of their Reading, to which we are utterly insensible; and cou’d trace out a Likeness or Resemblance in particular Descriptions, of which we, at this Distance of Time, can have no idea” (3). The main aim of Beare’s text, accordingly, is to allow his readers an experience as close as possible to that of Virgil’s readers. This means explicat-ing characters in the Aeneid; so Beare discovers in Aeneas’s “chief Rival,” Turnus, “no other than Mark Antony,” and he argues exten-sively to support this claim (6). Drances, meanwhile, represents “the Character of Cicero,” for his speeches “breathe” the “very Spirit” of Cicero’s famous Philippics (15, 23). Beare’s admiration for Virgil lies ultimately in the precision of his allegory:

Now if we can discover the same good and bad Qualities, the same Habits, the same Passions in Turnus, which Historians ascribe to Antony; if we can make it appear, that the very same Circumstances of Life, Situation, and Fortune, attended them both, it is impossible for us to doubt, whether or no the Poet intended to represent to us this Hero under that Character. (8)

To post-Romantic sensibilities, such examination of Virgil deprives him of his poetry, yet Beare takes the new empirical approach to his-tory: parallels between periods provide readers with useful examples, but they are no more than examples. Above all, in his antiquarian stance, Beare relegates Virgil to an exotic, emphatically non-English world.

Another example of these critical impulses is Reflections on the Character of Iapis in Virgil: Or, the Character of Antonius Musa, Physician to Augustus (1740), by F. Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, and pub-lished posthumously. Like Beare, Atterbury declares that readers’



ignorance of Virgil’s real-life models for his works detracts from the pleasure they can afford: “The Manner in which Virgil repre-sents those feigned Persons, has something in it, that shews them to have been copied from living Originals; and therefore, beauti-ful as those Images are, we lose half their Beauty, by not knowing who sat for them” (1). Also like Beare, Atterbury is full of admira-tion for Virgil’s realistic portraits. Quoting Latin lines relating to Nisus and Euryalus, he asks, “can any one read those Lines, without judging immediately, that Virgil must have had two Romans in his Eye when he wrote them, whose Character, Friendship, and Fate is described under that of Euryalus and Nisus?” (3). Starting with commentator agreement that “Augustus sate for the Character of Æneas,” Atterbury moves to the main point of his dissertation, demonstrating that “the Character of Iapis in the twelfth Æneid” represents “Antonius Musa the Physician of Augustus” (5). Atterbury feels strongly, moreover, that “Musa deserv’d to be thus honour’d by the Pen of Virgil; for he was eminent in his Faculty beyond all his Contemporaries, as Iapis is said to have been, Phoebo ante alios dilec-tus” (6). For Atterbury, this “most moral, beautiful, and perfect” portrait of Augustus’s physician augments the moral of the Aeneid: “Of all the Motives that could determine a Man to the Study of Physick preferably to other Arts and Sciences, sure the worthiest and best is that of filial Piety. ‘Tis what distinguishes the Character even of the Hero of the Aeneid . . .” (11).

As a subgenre, then, the Keys elucidate the history embedded in Virgil’s literary masterpiece, allowing readers access to the author’s world, the better to enjoy his masterpiece. The mode is not so far removed from that of the Servian Virgils of earlier centuries, a model adopted by Ogilby, who filled the margins of his translations with copious information. The purpose of the Keys, however, is quite different and has an unwitting precedent in Ogilby, whose desire to parade his learning led him inadvertently away from Augustanism even in his Royalist productions. Deftly sidestepping Augustan pro-paganda, these eighteenth-century scholars produced their Keys in order to demystify Virgil, their emphasis on the practical and their concerns reflecting contemporary desire for realism in literature—a feature that is primarily associated with that distinctly eighteenth-century literary achievement, the novel. Indeed, the Keys reveal lit-erary tastes pinpointed by William Congreve when, in his Preface to Incognita, he first made explicit the appeal of the earliest “Novels”: they “are of a more familiar nature; Come near us, and represent to


Virgil, 1700–1760 157

us Intrigues in practice, delight us with Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unpresidented, such which not being so distant from our Belief bring also the pleasure nearer us” (32–33). As Cobb, Beare, and Atterbury indicate in their practical treatment of Virgil, readers now prefer literature and allegory that is down-to-earth, and eminently accessible.

Authors of the Keys also unintentionally highlight changes in theories of translation. In both the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-turies, writers and critics express a desire for “proximity” to Virgil, but they mean different things by it. For Dryden, as translator, recre-ation of the spirit of the original was all-important. As he declares in his Dedication, “I have endeavour’d to make Virgil speak such English as he wou’d himself have spoken if he had been born in England, and in this present Age” (Works 5: 330–31).15 In other words, trans-lations should, wherever possible, create English approximations of Roman politics and personalities so that Virgil might address his English audience on its own cultural terms. For the eighteenth cen-tury, as these Keys demonstrate, proximity to Virgil meant enter-ing a bygone age and culture, to which only scholars could provide access through their explications of Augustan poetics and culture—and language. The declared aim of the author of another Key, Clavis Virgiliana: Or, a Vocabulary of All the Words in Virgil’s Bucolics, Georgics, and Æneid (1742), was to come “as near” the essence of the original “as the Nature of the English Language will admit.”16 Consequently, the task of the translator too was to recreate a reading experience as close as possible to that enjoyed by the first audiences; and these searches for the essential Virgil culminated, in 1743, in the first prose translation, The Works of Virgil Translated into English Prose. Like the author of the 1742 Clavis Virgiliana, this translator promises in his subtitle a work “As near the Original as the different Idioms of the LATIN and ENGLISH LANGUAGES will allow.”

Consciously or not, the authors of the Keys strove to make per-tinent the erudite. In so doing, they contributed to debates over the relevance of even the most revered ancient authors, particularly with regard to school curriculums. The composers of the last two Keys discussed, for example, are conscious of their role in educating a new generation. Both also announce their intended audiences on their title pages: the prose translation is “For the Use of Schools as well as of Private Gentlemen” and the Clavis Virgiliana is intended for “the Use of Schools, And the Improvement of those who have made but a small Progress in the Knowledge of the Latin Tongue.”



As these efforts suggest and as John Locke argued explicitly in the 1690s, Latin was still deemed “absolutely necessary to a Gentleman” (qtd. by Kenney 179). Indeed, as John Lawson and Harold Silver dem-onstrate, Virgil remained a staple of the traditional boys’ grammar schools. Conversely, Locke continued, there was no need at all for those destined for “Trade and Commerce and the Business of the World” to attend the grammar schools, but if you asked their fathers why they continued to send their sons to these places, “they think it as strange a Question, as if you should ask them, why they go to Church. Custom serves for Reason, and has, to those who take it for Reason, so consecrated this Method, that it is almost Religiously observed by them, and they stick to it, as if their Children had scarce an Orthodox Education, unless they learned Lily’s Grammar.”

Clearly, as Kenney remarks after citing this passage, fear over change in an area so fundamental to society as education was largely responsible for maintaining “Orthodox Education” in Great Britain, and Lilly’s Latin Grammar reigned supreme “still a century and more” after James Boswell too remarked, “I am always afraid of new schemes of education” (Kenney 179). The absurdity of the old schemes, nonetheless, was not lost on one late nineteenth-century victim of such an education, whom Kenney also quotes: “depend on it, if there were no virtue in birching, caning, Latin verses and Greek what-ye-may-call-‘ems, they would not have held their ground so long amongst a practical people like ourselves. So Johnny is sent to the Town Grammar School, and returns in due time with as much honey of Hymettus on his legs, as his father before him. And meanwhile, the great, time-honoured Gerundstone turns, and will turn to the last syllable of recorded time” (180). Yet, as Lawson and Silver imply by citing actual numbers attending these revered schools, despite the relentless turning of the “Gerundstone,” only a small percentage of the population was exposed to the classical curriculums at a time when schooling became a possibility for an ever-larger cross section of society. Concluding that as “the classics became vocationally ‘use-less’ so they increasingly became the symbol of the gentleman’s edu-cation, for gentlemen by definition did not have to work for a living,” Lawson and Silver sketch the diversity of the many new practical schools and curriculums that sprung up across the country (198–99). In these ways, the time-honored classics retreated ever further from the center of English cultural life. Whereas late seventeenth-century writers had tried to incorporate Virgil into popular literature, by the eighteenth century the Ancient was of interest to a few scholarly


Virgil, 1700–1760 159

men and a tiny elite class theoretically at the center but really on the margins of society.

Virgil among the Poets and Literary CriticsCharles Gildon begins the final part of The Complete Art of Poetry (1718) with a poem that rehearses the truisms on which The Dunciad is founded:

Heroic Poems have a just PretenceTo be the highest Reach of humane Sense;A Work of such inestimable Worth,There are but two the World has yet brought forth,Homer and Virgil; with what sacred AweDo those mere Sounds the World’s Attention draw! (267)17

The poet acknowledges the work done by Bossu in promoting the vir-tues of Homer and Virgil, but claims that “Had Bossu never writ, the World had still, / Like Indians, view’d this wond’rous Piece of Skill” (268). As he pinpoints Bossu’s greatest contribution, Gildon also perpetuates the idea of ancient insight into cosmic mysteries: “But he, disclosing sacred Mysteries, / Has shewn where all the mighty Magick lies” (268). He concludes with the equally venerable notion of ancient supremacy: a modern epic poet must be “Virgil-like,” must “above Milton’s lofty Flights prevail, / Succeed where Spenser and Torquato fail” (268). According to Gildon, the stature of ancient poets and the pertinence of epic have suffered little diminishment, despite Restoration indictments of the heroic and Dryden’s uncertain epic.

For all his proclamations, however, Gildon feels compelled to acknowledge the chasm between theory and practice and to admit the limitations of the genre:

The value of Heroic Poesy (assum’d Laudon) is yet more exalted by the Matter, and by its End, than by its Form. All it considers, all it discourses of, is of Kings and Princes; and the Lessons it gives, are the Great Men to govern the people, setting before them the Idea of a much more perfect Pattern of Virtue than History can afford. (271–72)

Gildon’s practical sense of his readership, competes with his desire to trace a poetic continuum back to the Ancients. In this, he was typical of his time. More decisively than their seventeenth-century



counterparts, eighteenth-century writers rejected ancient precepts even as they evoked them; they also unequivocally preferred English modes and characters to classical ones. In practice, poets, transla-tors, novelists, and critics were ultimately wary of clinging to the past, sensing, as Voltaire warns in 1727, that “Our just Respect for the Ancients, proves a meer Superstition, if it betrays us into a rash Contempt of our Neighbours and Countrymen. We ought not to do such an Injury to Nature, as to shut our Eyes to all the Beauties that her hands pour around us, in order to look back fixedly on her former Productions.” Voltaire does then acknowledge that “ ‘Tis a Pleasure, no doubt, and a great Improvement of our Mind, to survey all the Epick Writers in their respective Countries, from Homer down to Milton” (46). Yet, his own subsequent comments about readers being “rather awestruck with [Homer’s] name than his beauties” is an accu-rate assessment of a period when scholarly and nonscholarly readers alike were truly more interested in “Neighbours and Countrymen” than in the Ancients. Henry Fielding’s ubiquitous allusions to classi-cal epic, for example, like Gildon’s celebration of epic achievement, suggest the continued relevance of epic models and Virgil’s authority in particular. Yet, Fielding was no less aware than Gildon of Virgil’s limited usefulness. The most telling indications of the demise of the Ancient’s authority, however, lie in the eighteenth-century translations.

Leading scholars remained as committed to Virgil as writers seemingly did. Yet, from Alexander Strahan’s and Trapp’s blank verse translations to the massive rhymed undertaking of Warton and Pitt, translators too were not particularly interested in the essential Virgil. Devoted, instead, to the “Beauties that [Nature] pours around us” and the expression of those beauties through poetic flights, they strive to discover in their original examples of the sublime—which is often, necessarily, forced upon Virgil rather than derived from him. Indeed, Virgil’s “sublimity and pathos, and the passages of natural description,” as Harrison comments, “saved parts of the Aeneid from an almost total destruction” (“English Virgil” 87). This chapter is concerned not with more examples of these sublimities, but the process by which Virgil was made worthy rather than called upon as an ancient authority, a process that depended heavily upon Dryden. Neither seventeenth- nor eighteenth-century critics artic-ulate Dryden’s shifts from an Augustan poetics belonging properly to an earlier age to literary modes that would characterize the next century, yet constant imitation of Dryden’s late poetics, particularly


Virgil, 1700–1760 161

his preternaturally modern Aeneis, facilitated a continuity of English poetics.

The diminished interest in Virgil in the eighteenth century is nowhere more evident than in the conspicuous absence of efforts to popularize him, as writers had done in the Restoration. One attempt, Love and Honour: A Poem Taken from Virgil in Seven Cantoes by Thomas de la Mayne (1742), shows clearly the difficulties faced by writers in making Virgil pleasing to a contemporary audience. In the dedication of the poem to Philip, Earl of Chesterfield, de la Mayne struggles both with Virgil’s mode and his material. For a start, he dis-tinguishes between the seriousness of political duty and the frivolity of writing such a poem. He apologizes to Chesterfield for waylay-ing him: “Certain I am, Your Country can allow Your Lordship to be detain’d on a Poem, much less a Piece of Criticism.” Despite the Caroline-sounding title, Love and Honour, there is no trace here of political activity through communion with the Augustan poet.18 De la Mayne also refuses to be “confined to the Rules of a Translator” on the grounds that Virgil’s mode is too limiting: “Virgil is barren, as to Persons: Nor have the Loves of Dido and Æneas Matter sufficient, or are They enough fill’d with Incidents, to form a Plan with that Variety and Surprise expected in Dramatick Writing.” Having set-tled on an imitation aimed at “the Fair,” the author feels it “necessary to drop the Machinery; and whatever belongs to Custom, or dark Antiquity.” Virgil, has become “other”: an inhabitant of a musty past that must be thoroughly revised if it is to have any current appeal.

In the manner of Shakespeare’s adapters, de la Mayne transforms Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas tale into a poem bearing little resemblance to the original. The sparseness of Virgil’s plot and cast is remedied by the addition of a complicated subplot introducing more characters and intrigues. Entwined with the Dido/Aeneas love story, the subplot of Love and Honour involves a medley of other characters and spot-lights jealousy, which is just a sidelight in Virgil. The result is an eigh-teenth-century melodrama, interspersed with songs. Aeneas closely resembles Dryden’s Antony in All for Love, a play that remained in the repertory throughout the century. Like Antony and many novelistic heroes of the time, Aeneas lacks any real conviction in the gods, and the speech emphasizes his private struggle rather than his sense of public duty.19 Weeping over Dido’s kindness to him, he cries,

What can I do? Can I a feeble ManCope with the Ministries of Heav’n? Or dare



Its Will oppose?—Twere Ruin to Us both.Yet why may’nt Heav’n be satisfy’d, that IShould here lay down My toilsome Load; and nearThose Springs of Love fix my Abode of Rest. (137)

This supremacy of the private is evident throughout. In the fashion, too, of the so-called sentimental plays of the early to mid-century, the poem ends with a moralizing homily:

To the rash Fair Her [Dido’s] vanquish’d Glories prove;A Woman’s Honour may be lost by Love:Hence then, Ye Fair, Love’s dang’rous Parley shun,By which Your unsuspecting Breasts are won.And if engag’d to Continence, revereWhat to the honour’d Dead, and Heav’n You swear.Such Votaries, as wed to Virtue’s Text,Improve this Life, and meditate the next. (175–76)

De la Mayne’s poem is as tailored to a contemporary audience as Nahum Tate’s 1678 play, Brutus of Alba: Or the Enchanted Lovers. It lacks, however, Tate’s apology for the liberties of adaptation. Gone is the need to pay homage to Virgil, even as his name adds the weight of “a Latin author.” The classical codes and ideals about nationhood that had once made Virgil a touchstone for English writers are com-pletely submerged in present-day imperatives, and even the epic mode lacks authority.

Similarly, the irrelevance to contemporary culture of Virgil is highlighted in the works of Fielding, the eighteenth-century novelist who most frequently evoked the ancient poets. His constant use of the epic journey motif suggests he took the classics very seriously, and Nancy Mace has documented the profusion and types of Fielding’s classical allusion, noting that “two of the three authors Fielding refers to most often are Homer and Virgil” (64). Mace argues that Fielding’s sources indicate a much broader target audience (including classical experts) than has previously been allowed (43). His actual uses of Virgil, however, reveal that while Fielding is everywhere con-scious of England’s literary heritage, he also strongly advocated relin-quishing the past where it had no practical value for the present.20 The Veroniad and a short poem, “From the First Æneid,” in his 1743 Miscellanies, Fielding’s two outright parodies of Virgil, exemplify his refusal to subject contemporary literature to anachronistic ancient standards.


Virgil, 1700–1760 163

The Veroniad begins like a traditional adaptation of Virgil for British purposes:

Arms and the man I sing, who greatly boreAugusta’s flag to Porto Bello’s shore,On sea and land much suffering e’re he won,With six ships only, the predestined town;Whence a long train of victories shall flow,And future laurels for Augusta grow. (Complete Works 37)

A piece of party politics, the poem responds, as Jacob Fuchs puts it, “both to a national triumph—Admiral Edward Vernon’s vic-tory over a vastly larger Spanish f leet at Porto Bello in 1739—and, as Fielding saw it, to a national disgrace: the Walpole administra-tion’s failure to send Vernon timely reinforcements with which to push on against Spain in the West Indies” (34). As Fuchs also argues, had Fielding been so inclined he could have presented Vernon as an outright Augustan hero. But he did not. Instead of continuing the appropriation, Fuchs observes, he chooses “to abrogate, to mock and deride” epic premises and epic charac-ters (35). There is no promise of future imperial glory, the rai-son d’être of Jupiter’s speech in Book 1 of the Aeneid, and the gods are the careless drunkards sometimes depicted in Dryden’s Aeneis. Mammon’s speech to the fickle Juno portrays an arbitrary world:

And as for Jove, he troubles not his head;But on his throne sips nectar, and then nods,And leaves the earth to us, his demy-gods:Cares not the affairs of wretched men to know,Indifferent where I plunder, or you blow. (53)

Far from bringing classical authority to bear on contemporary issues, the poet pokes fun at that authority. In his first note, which glosses the title, the poet mocks eighteenth-century antiquarian enthusiasm for lost works: “This poem is certainly of very great antiquity, and there is sufficient reason to believe it no other, than the Cercopes of Homer, which hath been for so many ages imagined entirely lost” (37). The sneer at “very great antiquity” becomes one at pedantic scholarship, for the note provides a lengthy explanation of Pope’s account of the supposed poem, its historical origins according to the commentators,



and Virgil’s “borrowings” from it. The other notes are similarly focused on dull scholarship. Later in the poem, for example, Fielding imitates Milton only to add a note claiming that “Milton seems to have had this [passage] in his eye, where he describes Satan in the same posture” (39). The note is a sly glance at the numerous commen-taries that measured Virgil against Milton. The ultimate butt of this mock-heroic poem, in other words, is not so much the heroic itself, though that is certainly part of it; rather Fielding scorns those whose time and learning are devoted to pedantic details of an ancient realm that no longer has direct relevance for readers.

In his “A Parody from the First Æneid,” he underscores the arbi-trary nature of classical interpretation and imitation. The entire poem reads as follows:

Dixit; et avertens Rosea Cervice refulsit,Ambrosiæque Comæ divinum Vertice OdoremSpiravere: Pedes vestis defluxit ad imos,Et vera Incessu patuit Dea.—She said; and turning shew’d her wrinkled Neck,In Scales and Colour like a Roach’s Back.Forth from her greasy Locks such Odours flow,As those who’ve smelt Dutch Coffee-Houses, know.To her Mid-Leg her Petticoat was rear’d,And the true Slattern in her Dress appear’d. (Miscellanies 80–81)

The English poet takes full advantage of the vagueness of Virgil’s terms: “ambrosial locks” become “greasy” ones as the poet imagines a kind of divine dreadlocks, while the “godly odor” Venus emits is rendered in terms of eighteenth-century divine smells—those of cof-fee shops. In deliberately exploiting the gap between the original and the imitation, Fielding highlights the subjective nature of any attempt to apply classical literature to contemporary life.

The novel in which Fielding most consciously imitates the Aeneid further demonstrates the author’s repudiation of classical codes. George Sherburn was first to investigate Fielding’s own claim in The Covent-Garden Journal for Tuesday, January 28, 1752. Here, the author calls Amelia “my favourite child,” the one on whom “I can truly say that I bestowed a more than ordinary Pains in her Education.” He then asserts, surprisingly, that he “followed the Rules of all those who are acknowledged to have writ best on the Subject . . . neither Homer nor Virgil pursued them with greater Care than myself, and the can-did and learned Reader will see that the latter was the noble model,


Virgil, 1700–1760 165

which I made use of on this Occasion” (65). Seeing “ ‘ high-brow’ seriousness in [Fielding’s] imitation of the classical epic,” Sherburn remarks on the frequency of classical allusions in Amelia (“much more frequent” than in his other works) and concludes that this novel is “a newer tradition of the epic in prose”—a tradition that, he concedes, is one of “private history done with fidelity to the facts of everyday life.” Not entirely clear in Sherburn’s argument is just why this history “in humble prose” should “in its structure, its organizing themes, and in its pictures of domesticity, recall at least remotely the masterpiece of Vergil” (“Fielding’s Amelia” 147–48).

Lyall Powers builds upon Sherburn’s argument, first outlining much more explicitly the fundamental parallels between Fielding’s novel and Virgil’s epic: the twelvefold division of each; similarities between Virgil’s Dido tale and the situation involving Fielding’s “Other Woman” plot and his hero Booth; the flashback account of each hero’s history and his military background; the “other world” episode and encounter with the spurned mistress; correspondences between specific scenes in the Virgil’s “war books” and specific scenes in Booth’s “battles”; and the imminent duel at the end of both works. For Powers, the key to Fielding’s use of Virgil lies in the pointed “absence of the expected duel,” which Booth faces (as Aeneas does) but then avoids (335). Powers points out that it is Booth’s conversion to Christianity following “his reading of Barrow’s sermons (the final, supremely important event)” that finally facilitates his escape from the duel. The novel in this way concludes “with a peculiarly Christian triumph” (335). In portraying the capriciousness of life from start to finish, it also exceeds the conventions of epic, which is founded upon national and moral certainties.

Yet, the novelist’s rejection of epic even as he evokes it begins long before the conspicuously absent duel episode. The narrator’s asser-tion at the end of Chapter 1 stresses the novel’s concern with personal responsibility and with the lessons of life’s mishaps: “as Histories of this kind, therefore, may properly be called models of Human Life; so by observing minutely the several incidents which tend to the Catastrophe or Completion of the whole, and the minute Causes whence those Incidents are produced, we shall be instructed in this most useful of all Arts, which I call the Art of Life” (20; Chapter 1). In beginning with “Fortune,” Fielding evokes the opening of the Aeneid, where Aeneas is, above all, the “fugitive from fate” (fato profugus) destined to found a world empire, and his great suffering is a direct result of Juno’s wrath. Like the parodies discussed earlier that object



to divine justification of tyranny and war in the heroic, Fielding, in Amelia, mocks the subordination of personal responsibility to divinely guided national destiny. The narrator declares the moral at the start: “To retrieve the ill Consequences of a foolish Conduct, and by struggling manfully with Distress to subdue it, is one of the noblest Efforts of Wisdom and Virtue” (16; Chapter 1). This moral is demon-strated through the hero Booth, who believes firmly, until the end of the novel, that while Fate does not shape lives, each person is ulti-mately controlled by forces greater than the will: “poor Booth imag-ined, that a larger Share of Misfortunes had fallen to his Lot than he had merited; and this led him . . . into a disadvantageous Opinion of Providence . . . he did not believe Men were under any blind impulse or direction of Fate, but that every Man acted merely from the force of that Passion which was uppermost in his Mind, and could do no otherwise” (32; Chapter 3). As Robert Oakman comments, Booth “comes to think life is ruled by indifferent and purposeless Fortune” (481). Unguided by a goddess mother, providential signs, or under-world visions of a glorious future, Booth’s struggles parody those of an Aeneas and his errors are more recognizably human. Caught in a corrupt society, he must face problems alone. The novel in these ways starkly differs from the Aeneid where Aeneas’s private struggles are transformed through the help of the gods and confidence in the future into the foundations of a new generation.

Fielding further stresses the need to pay attention to actual social and personal circumstances by stipulating in his opening sentence that this work is a “history.” This explicit categorization of a work containing parallels with Virgil’s epic implies that history is more useful than the fables of epic. Fielding would make such a distinc-tion explicit in the Preface to his last work, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. In itself a Petronius-style mock-epic voyage through sickness to “the nastiest city in the world,” the work begins with the author’s confession that “I should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poems that have so justly collected the praise of all ages” (224, 125). Similarly, the author’s interest, in Amelia, in exposing “some of the glaring evils, as well public as private, which at present infect the country”—an aim he makes explicit in the dedication—results in sat-ire. As in the case of Dryden’s Aeneis, the satiric content serves to expose the idealism of the epic structure it both infiltrates and sub-verts. The processes at work in Fielding’s Amelia (and less so in the other novels), where an epic background is evoked as the epic’s codes


Virgil, 1700–1760 167

are subverted or dismissed, add another important dimension to crit-ical discussions of the rise or emergence of the novel. For, Fielding is much less revolutionary in his direction of literary forces if his use of the classics is seen as a culmination and reflection of changes that have evolved steadily from the 1650s.

When it came to translation, serious eighteenth-century efforts to render Virgil English (as the wave of Keys discussed above indicates) were essentially scholarly, the scale of the productions suggesting the magnitude of Virgil’s place in English letters. No less than in popular literature, however, the translators’ appropriation of the Ancient, to borrow Fuchs’s terms, essentially meant abrogation, whether atten-tion was on Virgil’s poetics or on his cultural significance. The age’s greatest scholars who produced the mammoth “Virgils” were unwill-ing to turn their back on an authoritative tradition. Yet, the nature of the multiple appendices, no less than the notes and the style of the translations themselves surreptitiously shifted authority away from Virgil and onto his eighteenth-century English replacements.

In 1718 and 1720, Trapp published his translation, The Æneis of Virgil. As Kelsall observes, at this time he also vacated his chair as inaugural Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a position he had held since 1708. Kelsall suggests that his translation is, there-fore, a kind of valediction to the university; at the very least, it is encompassed by an aura of what Kelsall calls “the highest academic authority” (Trapp, Preface iii). Over the next decade Trapp contin-ued to work with Virgil, producing in 1731 a comprehensive trans-lation, the title of which exudes scholarly endeavor: The Works of Virgil Translated into English Blank Verse: With Large Explanatory Notes and Critical Observations by Joseph Trapp D. D. The translation went through two more editions in the 1730s and another in 1755. Two decades later, in 1763, Joseph Warton outdid Trapp’s scholarly addenda as he reproduced Christopher Pitt’s 1740 The Aeneid of Virgil Translated by Mr. Pitt in Two Volumes. Under Warton’s direction, Pitt’s translation swelled to a four-volume edition that included work by eminent classical scholars and bore an even weightier title than Trapp’s: The Works of Virgil in English Verse, the Aeneid Translated by the Rev. Mr. Christopher Pitt; The Eclogues and Georgics, with Notes on the Whole, by the Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton; with Several New Observations by Mr. Holdsworth, Mr. Spence, and Others; Also, a Dissertation on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, by Mr. Warburton, On the Shield of Aeneas, by Mr. Whitehead, On the Character of Iapis, by the Late Dr. Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester; and, Three Essays on Pastoral, Didactic and Epic



Poetry, by the Editor; in Four Volumes. Rather than pointing up Virgil’s significance to English letters, however, the scholarly discourses included here (like the separately published Keys whose method-ology they adopt) serve to highlight the now alien nature of the Ancient. In his “Advertisement” to his and Pitt’s translation, Warton draws immediate attention to the Ancient’s “otherness” by envying “the late Mr. Holdsworth” for his better understanding of Virgil due to his “residing many years in Italy, and . . . making Virgil his constant companion in his travels” giving him “opportunity of being very exact in his observations on his favourite author.” Of these, many “that are local, and relate to the soil, the climate and customs of Italy, will I believe be found extremely curious and useful” (Works 1: xxi). Employing the language of an antiquarian, Warton recognizes, as Blackwell had done in 1735, that Virgil was the product of a particu-lar place and time, not the source of ur-codes of Western imperial-ism or great poetry that should be followed (as Pope suggests in his Essay on Criticism) by would-be English poets. In line with Warton’s antiquarian outlook, the rationalization of Virgil’s “difficult pas-sages” was fundamental to the design of his project. Accordingly, the Warburton, Whitehead, and Atterbury essays on the mysteries of Book 6, the shield of Aeneas, and the character Iapis, respectively, provide pillars for the huge text by stripping Virgil’s poem of any residual mystery as they lay bare the Ancient’s allegory and allow readers an entrance into his Rome.

Believing, as Abbé Banier did, that the “Treasure of History” lay “hid under the Disguise of Fable,” the three scholars seek to unravel the historical circumstances disguised in the more puzzling episodes (Banier vi). Atterbury’s conviction that Virgil’s Iapis was modeled on Augustus’ chief physician, whose commitment provided an outstand-ing example for posterity, has been discussed above. Whitehead, meanwhile, having observed that Virgil’s “description of the shield in the eighth book of the Æneis, has been very generally esteemed for its poetical beauties,” concerns himself with why, when the “his-tory of [Virgil’s] country was a series of great events; and every name on record, that of a demigod, or a hero,” why “therefore would he confine himself to the more doubtful transactions of the earlier ages?” (Warton, Works 3: 321–23). The answer he provides is simple. First, Virgil does not omit any great events: “we find there is scarce an occurrence in history which has not found a place in some part of the poem: scarce an hero of note, who has not somewhere or other an opportunity of appearing” (3: 323). Second, the whole purpose


Virgil, 1700–1760 169

of the shield description was to show that “Rome was to be carried gradually to perfection, and rise from its lowest beginnings to that solid grandeur which it actually enjoyed under Augustus Caesar” (3: 324). Virgil therefore had to illustrate its humble beginnings; at the same time, though, he was forced to ignore the most unsavory truths: “The story of the Asylum was what Virgil was unwilling to mention. It would have been deriving the original of the best families in Rome from robbers and murderers” (3: 325). Whitehead here draws atten-tion to poets’ manipulation of history in the way that Dryden does in his Dedication when he points to the fugitive status of Aeneas’s companions on his departure from Troy. Swift makes the point more bluntly in his parade of dubious Roman ancestry in the episode of Gulliver’s Travels also discussed above. Gone completely, in other words, is any notion of the Virgilian prophecy that Gildon celebrates in his Art of Poetry. Whitehead’s discussion is grounded wholly in his-torical detective work. So too is Warburton’s investigation of Aeneid, Book 6, the former seat of Virgilian mysticism.

Warburton’s historian’s approach is apparent in his opening sentence: “The purpose of this discourse is to shew, that Æneas’s adventure to the INFERNAL SHADES, is no other than a figurative description of his INITIATION INTO THE MYSTERIES: and particu-larly a very exact one of the SPECTACLES of the ELEUSINIAN” (3: 1). Warburton contends that Virgil’s greater sophistication “compelled him to depart from that simplicity in the fable, which Aristotle, and his best interpreter, Bossu, find so divine in Homer” (3: 3). He then yokes the Aeneid’s “religion” to its “civil policy,” arguing that a “divine interposition is in the very spirit of ancient legislation” and showing how Virgil draws on both Greek and Roman law elsewhere in his epic. When Aeneas visits Evander in the eighth book, for example, he encounters “the king and his people busied in the celebration of an annual sacrifice” (3: 4). Virgil’s intention is “to introduce into this political poem that famous institute of Cicero in his Book of Laws, designed to moderate the excess of labouring superstition, the ignotæ ceremoniæ, as he calls them, which at that time so much abounded in Rome” (3: 5). Having proven that “the Æneis is in the style of ancient legislation,” Warburton proposes that “Virgil was to represent a per-fect lawgiver, in the person of Æneas” and that the principal reason “was, that AUGUSTUS, who was shadowed in the person of Æneas, had been initiated into the ELEUSINIAN mysteries” (3: 10–11). Warburton now draws upon Greek writers, such as Euripides and Aristophanes, to illustrate the Eleusinian bases of earlier literary descents into hell.



By the time he returns to Virgil’s sixth book, he has established a full Mediterranean literary and historical heritage from which to offer straightforward explanations—at one point consciously trying to outdo Abbé Banier—of such mysteries as Virgil’s Sybil and the golden bough she instructs Aeneas to take with him to the under-world (3: 19). Like Banier’s, his efforts to rationalize human endeavor are typical of eighteenth-century writers and historians.

His literalist approach is also typical of eighteenth-century translators. Alexander Strahan best sums up the theory behind the translations when he condemns Dryden in the Preface to his own translation, The First Six Books of Virgil’s Æneid: Translated into Blank Verse by Alexander Strahan (1753). Like Trapp, whose objections are noted above, Strahan reprimands Dryden for giving “us now and then his own Thoughts, instead of those of his Author: as if he intended to make amends for what he omitted, by what he inserted in the Room of it.” He feels that this “a Freedom not to be allowed to any but to great Masters; and tho’ they may do well, even when they indulge themselves in it, yet they certainly do better when they forbear it.” Doubtless because Dryden took too many liberties in his efforts to make Virgil speak the English of 1690s England, Strahan completely ignores his translation theory as he launches his own. He looks for rules to “the learned Huetius, in his Dialogue de optimo genere Interpretandi.” Huetius’s basic principle is quoted first: “this is the best Method of Translation, when first the Translator most strictly adheres to the Sense of his Author, and after that even to his very Words, if the Genius of each Language will admit of it.” There are, Strahan concludes, still citing Huetius, “in all three Things nec-essarily requisite to obtain the Praise of a true Translation; strict Adherence to the Sense; Fidelity to the Words; and the most careful Observance of the Manner. Without these Three, all the Endeavours of Translators are vain, and vain their Industry.”21 Due to emphasis on correspondence between “Sense and Words,” blank verse was considered most appropriate. Strahan’s translation, accordingly, is very literal, following the Latin syntax and vocabulary where elegant English permits.

Just as in the Keys and the essays prefacing the Warton- Pitt trans-lation, such literalism stresses the gulf between Roman and British history: any English translator is a latecomer looking back on and attempting to delineate the poetic and cultural significance of the original. This approach contrasts with Dryden’s claims, as late as 1697, that he would invoke Virgil’s spirit in material that just needed


Virgil, 1700–1760 171

updating. Since the 1690s, that is, notions of what is important in poetry, particularly epic poetry, had so metamorphosed that it is no wonder that Pope marveled in 1715 that prior commentators on Homer had been interested in only the “Philosophical, Historical, Geographical, Allegorical” (7: 82). Indeed Pope’s own concern with “the Poetical Beauties of the Author” has a parallel in Warton’s “Advertisement” to his Virgil, which opens by pledging, “The design of the following volumes is to give a poetical translation of all Virgil’s works, illustrated with explications of the difficult, and observations on the beautiful passages.” Both promises, the explication of the difficult and illustration of the beautiful, reveal Warton’s typically eighteenth-century interest in poetry’s effect on the reader rather than in its regard for precepts. Yet, the imperatives of the Warton-Pitt Virgil can be traced back to Dryden and his struggles with the discrepancies between Virgil’s Augustan heroic and the realities of late seventeenth-century English life and readership.

No more than his contemporaries could Warton just ignore the Augustan politics that for at least two centuries had defined Virgil’s English importance. Forced to consider the Ancient’s propaganda, however, he assumed Dryden’s “best of a bad kind” stance toward Augustus, as mentioned above, remarking that the ancient poet “intended to delineate in the person of Æneas, the character of a wise lawgiver and a just monarch; and artfully threw several features into the piece, that induced his readers to apply this amiable portrait to Augustus.” Since the Romans “had not virtue enough to be free,” reflects Warton, “and since they must needs have fallen into the hands of one governor, the happiest circumstance they could meet with, was undoubtedly that this one governor should be a mild one, and bind their chains with a tender hand” (Works 2: 4).

As Warton and Pitt open their Aeneid, however, the political seems forgotten. The translation of the first lines is elegant and close to the Latin, while the first note, which dominates the page, draws atten-tion to eighteenth-century poetic decorum: “It is allowed at present, says the Rambler, that the proemial lines of a poem, in which the general subject is proposed, must always be void of glitter and embel-lishment. The first lines of Paradise Lost, says Mr. Addison, are per-haps as plain, simple and unadorned, as any of the whole poem, in which particular the author has confirmed himself to the example of Homer, and the precept of Horace” (Warton, Works 2: 23). The imme-diate emphasis here is on poetics and authority on the epic poetry is granted to Milton, Addison, and that most “English” Ancient,



Horace, as well as the sublime Homer. Virgil is ignored, even as the subject is his opening lines. Dryden too is ignored. Yet, the emphasis on poetry that directs the Warton-Pitt Virgil from the start itself has roots in Dryden, whose language Warton appropriates in as whole-sale a fashion as he did his predecessor’s political stance.

As Warton reflects on “the fable of the Æneid,” for example, he declares that “even the least portions of the piece and the slightest decorations must be of the epic kind; all things must be grave, majes-tical and sublime: nothing of a foreign nature, like the trifling nov-els, which Ariosto, and indeed Tasso and Voltaire, have inserted in their poems” (Works 2: 6). Warton acknowledges Addison here, but his language comes directly from Dryden’s 1697 Dedication, which opens by drawing an analogy between an “heroick Poem” and “a firm Building” (5: 267). The smallest details, Dryden insists, “[e]ven the least portions of them must be of the Epick kind; all things must be Grave, Majestical, and Sublime: Nothing of a Foreign Nature, like the trifling Novels, which Ariosto and others have inserted in their Poems” (5: 267). The references, explicit and implicit, to Homer’s supremacy over Virgil, which Warton and Pitt weave into the fabric of the translation, can also be traced to Dryden.

By the time he came to compose Fables, Dryden preferred Homer to Virgil (“the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet”), and expounds upon the original genius of the former, to the cost of the latter:

Virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper; Homer was violent, impetuous, and full of fire. The chief talent of Virgil was propriety of thoughts and ornament of words. Homer was rapid in his thoughts and took all the liberties, both of numbers and of expressions, which his language and the age in which he liv’d allow’d him. Homer’s invention was more copious, Virgil’s more confin’d. So that if Homer had not led the way, it was not in Virgil to have begun heroic poetry. (Works 7: 28)

In this passage, Dryden supplies the terms for eighteenth-century discussion of ancient epic. Pope, for example, in the Preface to his Iliad offers a much longer comparison of Homer and Virgil, but the grounds of it lie in Dryden’s remarks. Here is a passage from Pope’s version:

Homer was the greater Genius, Virgil the better Artist. In one we most admire the Man, in the other the Work. Homer hurries and transports us with a commanding Impetuosity, Virgil leads us with an


Virgil, 1700–1760 173

attractive Majesty: Homer scatters with a generous Profusion, Virgil bestows with a careful Magnificence: Homer, like the Nile, pours out his Riches with a boundless Overflow; Virgil like a River in its Banks, with a gentle and constant Stream. (7: 12)

In ultimately preferring Homer (in the case of Fables) and in employ-ing language of the sublime, which came to be associated rather with Homeric epic than Virgilian, Dryden’s late works consolidate shifts in the rhetoric surrounding and the values associated with great poetry. In so doing, they opened the way to eighteenth-century abandonment of the whilom Prince of Poets and to the displace-ment of ancient authority by modern wisdom and native values. The impact on eighteenth-century poets of this process, Dryden’s subtle turn away from politics and toward the timeless in “pure” poetry, is evident in Pitt’s translation. The examples outlined below demon-strate how Dryden inspired Pitt, who embellishes and renders into eighteenth-century terms his predecessor’s work.

When the reader first encounters Aeneas, for example, Dryden simultaneously imbues Virgil’s passage with 1690s significance and endows it with a universal appeal, which Pitt develops. As Aeneas gives his men a pep talk after they wash up on a Carthage beach in Aeneid, Book 1, Dryden presents him, at first, as menacing, one of his many attempts throughout the translation to depict the destined leader as William III. The harshness of the one word describing Aeneas’s pain, the emphasis on the literal heartlessness of the sol-dier’s words, and his disguised face present the leader as unloving and unloved as England’s Dutch king: “These Words he spoke; but spoke not from his Heart; / His outward Smiles conceal’d his inward Smart” (Works 5: 351; 291–92). Just as Dryden is unable in his trans-lation to sustain either an indictment of Williamite politics or an endorsement of Jacobitism and presents a fragmented hero through-out, so this episode splinters, turning Aeneas into a concerned leader less than a dozen lines later: “Above the rest, Æneas mourns the Fate / Of brave Orontes, and th’uncertain State / Of Gyas, Lycus, and of Amycus” (Works 5: 351; 304–06). Pitt, clearly influenced by Dryden’s translation, deepens the humanity he sees in his predecessor’s hero and eliminates the element of coldness: “So spoke the Chief, and hid his inward smart; / Hope smooth’d his looks, but anguish rack’d his heart.” This “anguish” enables Pitt to intensify Aeneas’s mourning: “Apart the pious chief, who suffer’d most, / Bemoans brave Gyas and Cloanthus lost . . . ” (Warton, Works 2: 42). For Pitt, just as it



had, finally, for Dryden, Virgil’s universality lies in his example of a compassionate leader, not in the translation of Rome onto London.

Dryden’s unwitting introduction of an eighteenth-century brand of sublime is more evident in those passages where he strives to achieve transcendence of historical particulars so as to express con-fidence rather in poetry’s timeless powers than in the course of west-ern history. His description of Neptune calming the waters in Aeneid, Book 1, for instance, fuels Pitt’s translation. In Dryden’s hands the passage is redolent with Stuart iconography:

Mean time Imperial Neptune heard the SoundOf raging Billows breaking on the Ground:Displeas’d, and fearing for his Wat’ry Reign,He rear’d his awful Head above the Main:Serene in Majesty, then rowl’d his EyesAround the Space of Earth, and Seas, and Skies.He saw the Trojan Fleet dispers’d, distress’dBy stormy Winds and wintry Heav’n oppress’d. (Works 5: 348; 176–81)

The Neptune described here who is “Serene in Majesty” but “Displeas’d,” and fearful for his “Wat’ry Reign” closely resembles Charles II in Annus Mirabilis, where Dryden supplies an Augustan framework by drawing upon both Virgil and the traditional associa-tion of Stuart monarchy with naval power expressed through classi-cal mythology.22 Ultimately, however, the power of this vignette, as Pitt recognizes, is in its portrayal of the divine manifested in nature. He again uses Dryden as his starting point:

Mean time th’imperial monarch of the mainHeard the loud tumults in his wat’ry reign,And saw the furious tempest wide aroundWork up the waters, from the vast profound.Then for his liquid realms alarm’d, the godLifts his high head above the stormy flood,Majestic and serene; he rolls his eyes;And scatter’d wide the Trojan navy spies,Opprest by waves below, by thunders from the skies.(Warton, Works 2: 33–34)

Where Dryden’s interest is in the serene majesty of Neptune amidst turmoil that has political underpinnings, Pitt employs his predeces-sor’s language to enhance the sublime aspects of a cosmic scene. His


Virgil, 1700–1760 175

interest in wild nature intermingled with the divine caters to the kind of sensibilities expressed by, say, Warton when he praised the sublimity of nature and the divine in Pope’s The Messiah, exclaiming, “What images, how various, how thick sown, how sublime, exalted with what energy . . . .” Like Pitt’s at this moment, Warton’s enthu-siasm is for nature, the supernatural, and the majestic: “the cedars of Libanus, the shades of the departed kings, the king of Babylon” (Essay 1: 18).

In his reluctant abandonment of the Augustan paradigms in which Virgil’s authority had been so long entwined, that is, Dryden released the Aeneid from its ties to history and politics, turning attention to Virgil’s poetry by means of language and scenes that would come to be seen as sublime. So effective was Dryden’s unwitting shift of the English Virgilian paradigm that the most Augustan passages have little obvious importance to history in the Warton/Pitt version, even when the translation captures the majesty of the Latin. The best example perhaps is Jupiter’s crucial speech in Aeneid, Book 1, prophe-sying the glory of Roman accomplishment and “empire without end” (imperium sine fine). Pitt’s deity comforts his daughter, Venus:

Daughter, dismiss thy fears; by doom divineFixt are the fates of your immortal line.Your eyes Lavinium’s promis’d walls shall see,And here we ratify our first decree.Your son, the brave Æneas, soon shall rise,Himself a god; and mount the starry skies.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No limits have I fixt, of time, or place,To the vast empire of the godlike race.Ev’n haughty Juno shall the nation love,Who now alarms earth, seas, and heav’n above;And join her friendly counsels to my own,With endless fame the sons of Rome to crown,The world’s majestic lords, the nation of the gown.(Warton, Works 2: 47)

Unlike Dryden, whose late skepticism about sacred history led him, in ways described above, to mock Virgil’s gods and so to produce an uneven translation, Pitt ensures his rendition is dignified through-out. Here his passage might be a tribute to any residual Renaissance notions of translatio imperii and fertile ground to plant analo-gies for growing British imperialism. Yet, Warton’s commentary



has already highlighted the alien nature of such machinery to an eighteenth-century audience:

The greatest of the ancient poets seem to have held, that every thing in the moral as well as the natural world, was carried on by the influ-ence and direction of the supreme being. It was Jupiter that actuated everything, and in some sense might be said to do everything that was done. This universal principle of action they considered, for their own ease, as divided into so many several personages, as they had occasion for causes. Hence every part of the creation was filled by them with deities; and no action was performed without the assistance of some god or other, for every power to man they called by that name. (2: 26)

This rational approach to Jupiter’s resonant speech directs atten-tion away from the Augustan element. Glossing Jupiter’s assurance that “The age [shall] grow mild,” furthermore, Warton praises Virgil for not being as strident in his propaganda mission as he might have been: “Here it might have been expected that the poet should have enlarged upon Augustus; whom it was his great business to praise. So an ordinary poet would have done. But Virgil is so far from it, that he does not say one word about him; hints at his reign, but says nothing of his person” (2: 49). His next note is equally effective in stripping Virgil’s allegory bare and so denying the mystery of sacred Augustan history. Of Virgil’s reference to the strife that would pre-cede peace (“Within the fane dire fury”), Warton remarks, “the ancients enjoyed no small privilege above us, in knowing the per-sons hinted at in several of their authors” (2: 49). A little later too, as Aeneas awakes and sets out to explore the land on which he has been shipwrecked, Warton ensures that attention is rather on Virgil’s sub-lime scenes than the Augustan problem of a prince looking for guid-ance for his people: “This is a most entertaining and delightful scene. A great prince thrown by a tempest upon a strange coast, doubtful of its inhabitants, nay doubtful whether it has any Inhabitants or no, is wandering in a wood; meets a person whom he knows not, but who appears to be a beautiful virgin. (He supposes her a nymph or a goddess in that lovely romantic dress)” (Warton, Works 2: 51).

As Dryden inadvertently redirected readers and translators of Virgil, he was responding primarily to political and historical forces. Yet, Joseph Addison’s prefatory “Essay on the Georgics,” included in Dryden’s 1697 Works of Virgil and subsequent editions, reveals how literary values were, by the 1690s, metamorphosing independently of the historical realm. Clearly, Addison was not consciously carving


Virgil, 1700–1760 177

out a new poetic theory, one designed to transform the way Virgil and the Ancients were perceived. Nor was he prophetic. Rather, his interests demonstrate changed notions of didacticism and, conse-quently, of the function of elevated forms of poetry.

In his “Essay,” Addison immediately confronts the didacticism of the Georgics but in a way that yokes the moral to the pleasing. He describes how the “Precepts of Morality” operate upon the reader: “this kind of Poetry I am now speaking of, addresses itself wholly to the Imagination: It is altogether Conversant among the Fields and the Woods, and has the most delightful part of Nature for its Province. It raises in our Minds a pleasing variety of Scenes and Landskips, whilst it teaches us: and makes the dryest of its Precepts look like a Description” (Dryden, Works 5: 146). Exercise of the mind through delightful scenes, particularly those of nature, is at the heart of Addison’s notions of poetry’s benefits, as his admiration now makes clear:

Virgil . . . loves to suggest a Truth indirectly, and without giving us a full and open view of it: To let us see just so much as will naturally lead the Imagination into all the parts that lie conceal’d. This is won-derfully diverting to the Understanding, thus to receive a Precept, that enters as it were through a By-way, and to apprehend an Idea that draws a whole train after it: For here the Mind, which is always delighted with its own Discoveries, only takes the hint from the Poet, and seems to work out the rest by the strength of her own faculties. (5: 148)

From this viewpoint, even representations of love have a didactic element; in Addison’s judgment of the third Georgic, the “force of Love is represented in Noble Instances, and very Sublime Expressions” (5: 151–52). Here Addison achieves the separation of poetry from politics that Dryden moved toward in his conflicted translation. Warton, in his “Reflections on Didactic Poetry,” which echoes Addison’s 1690s “Essay” in its language and ideas, illustrates that this separation was the norm for the eighteenth century.

Warton’s “Reflections on Didactic Poetry” constitute one of the many scholarly discourses that embellish the 1763 Works of Virgil. Appearing in Volume 1, this essay too focuses on the Georgics. Warton claims that the “PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION are, in their very nature, a most proper and pregnant subject for a didactic poem.” Like Addison’s, his interest is in reader appreciation; accord-ingly, he considers the poet’s “glowing and animated style, his lively



and picturesque images; the graceful and harmonious flow of his numbers; or the noble spirit of poetical enthusiasm, which breathes through his whole work” (Works 1: 331). Assuming that such “poetical enthusiasm” existed only in the eighteenth century, Mark Thackeray claims that Pope dictates Warton’s critical stance in his Virgil, for Pope “set the precedent for Warton with his critical positivity and his continual exposure of invention and imagination in Homer” (333). Doubtless Pope’s Homer did influence Warton, yet discussion of Virgil in the language of poetic enthusiasm begins with Addison’s “Essay” and Dryden’s Aeneis. The other major Virgil translation of early mid-century, Trapp’s, exhibits the same values as Addison and Warton do.

Initially, Trapp’s prefatory essay seems to perpetuate traditional notions of epic. Rapin and Dryden both appear in his opening para-graphs: “An Heroick Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform. These are the first Words of Mr. Dryden’s admirable Dedication of his English Æeneis . . . They are translated indeed from Monsieur Rapin.” Trapp now quotes Dryden at length on such platitudes as the mind being formed “to Heroic Virtue by Example” (Preface ii). In rehearsing standard neoclassical precepts, he provides a fine example of why critics see neoclassicism as remaining unchanged throughout the eighteenth century. Trapp’s acknowledgments, however, are lip service rather than true homage. His own notions of poetry’s affective power quickly dominate his essay. He rounds up his citations from Dryden with a conclusion that is pre-Romantic in nature: “An Epic Poem then is the same to all other Kinds of Poetry, as the Primum Mobile is to the System of the Universe, according to the Scheme of the ancient Astronomy: That great Orb including all the heavenly Bodies in its Circumference, and whirling them round with its own Motion.” This Coleridgean concept of a poetic soul, akin to “that Anima Mundi, that Soul of the World” and “diffusing Life and Spirit thro’ the whole Frame” generates the language for his consideration of the first epic poet. Homer, he says, “arose like Light at the Creation”; such was “the Fire, and Vivacity of his Spirit; the Vastness, and Fecundity of his Invention; the Majesty, and Sublimity of this Thoughts, and Expression” (iii–iv). For this he earns the “greater Glory.” Virgil, however, inevitably improved upon him even as he imitated so that his is “the best Poem.”

What Trapp finally reveals is that for him the power of an epic poem has nothing to do with the instruction inherent in “heroic Virtue.” Rather, it emanates from what he sees as “all the Requisites


Virgil, 1700–1760 179

of an Epic Poem”: “Invention, Fire, and Judgment” (xi). Moreover, even though Trapp concedes supremacy to Virgil as maker of “the best Poem,” his excitement over Homer’s sublime “Thoughts, and Expression” betray which poet was, for him, truly uplifting. In this way, he discloses in this 1731 work poetic preferences that Harrison attributes to “the latter half of the eighteenth century [which] exalted the Homeric poems above the Aeneid” (“English Virgil” 80–81).

Nowhere is Trapp’s lack of true enthusiasm for Virgil more evident than in the limited nature of his praise of the poet, which focuses on his avoidance of Homer’s pitfalls thanks to hindsight. The same can be said of Warton’s discussion of Virgil. Both critics laud Homer because in him enthusiasm and the sublime have an outlet. Treatment of Virgil, by contrast, barely extends beyond the usual comparison with Homer; there is no excitement over what Virgil has to offer the eighteenth century. In Warton’s “Reflections on Didactic Poetry,” in the Pitt/Warton Virgil, Virgil himself becomes buried in the discus-sion of georgic delights. Contemplating the lowliness of the subject matter, Warton goes on to cite three successful examples, conclud-ing exuberantly, “In short, this author hath evidently shewn, that there is no subject but what is capable of being exalted into poetry by a genius” (Works 1: 331). Yet, Warton does not draw his example from Virgil. He instead quotes “Dr. Armstrong” whose “numberless poeti-cal images” are “truly admirable” and evidently better able to make Warton’s point than Virgil (1: 329).

Ultimately, however, the supreme epic poet was not Homer but Milton. Employing the same criteria he had in his “Essay” prefaced to Dryden’s Aeneis, Addison, in his series of Spectator papers on Paradise Lost mapped out not just the achievements of the English poet but those qualities in which he trumps the Ancients. The conclusion of Spectator #369 (1712) sums up Addison’s aims in these papers:

I have endeavoured to shew how some Passages are beautiful by being Sublime, others by being Soft, others by being Natural, which of them are recommended by the Passion, which by the Moral, which by the Sentiment, and which by the Expression. I have likewise endeavoured to shew how the Genius of the Poet shines by a happy Invention, a dis-tant Allusion, or a judicious Imitation; how he has copied or improved Homer or Virgil, and raised his own Imaginations by the use which he has made of several Poetical Passages in Scripture. (3: 392)

While Addison acknowledges that Milton has “copied” Homer and Virgil, he is more interested in where the poet “improved” upon his



ancient predecessors. The critic’s admiration for Milton’s beauties is unquestionable, but he can be confident in his subordination of ancient authority to modern because of the reputation Milton enjoyed by the early eighteenth century. Strahan, in The First Six Books of Virgil’s Æneid: Translated into Blank Verse (1753), for instance, points to the principal guide for eighteenth-century translators of Virgil when he praises Nicholas Brady’s and Joseph Trapp’s transla-tions. According to their example, “Milton’s Manner, under proper restrictions, was the only true Method of succeeding in a translation of Virgil” (Strahan Preface). Trapp’s sense that Milton can speak to audiences more powerfully than Virgil leads him to quote Milton—not Dryden’s Virgil, nor his own Virgil—when, as Kelsall observes, “he wishes to give the feel of the Virgilian sublime” (Trapp, Preface xxx, vi). Warton similarly saw Milton as the leading authority on epic as it should now be composed, says Thackeray, who showed him negotiating “the triangle of the Scriptures, Virgil, and Milton” (336).

Various factors are involved in Milton’s eclipse of Virgil as an epic poet, not least the English writers’ rediscovery, beginning with Dryden’s Fables (1700), of native stars. As Ross demonstrates, however, Milton’s literary prowess also testifies to the sway of fashion during the period. In this case, a highly successful “campaign of canoniza-tion” saw Addison “consecrate” Paradise Lost in a series of eighteen Spectator papers in 1712. According to Ross, “Addison’s essays, reprinted more often than any other work on Milton, became a major influence both in forming opinion on the meaning of the poem and in making it respectable for all fashion-conscious readers to acknowledge their esteem for the work of a modern English writer” (Making 213).

Whatever the reason for Milton’s poetic ascendance, Pitt and Warton imitate him in their translation. Most obviously, they seize “sublime” moments in Dryden and use them to demonstrate, in Addison’s terms from the Spectator and Warton’s from his reflections on Pope, that “true poetry” emanates from “Nature and Passion.”23 The passage most representative of this communion with the “Sublime,” the “Soft,” the Passionate,” and the “Natural,” as Addison puts it, is that in which Dryden, according to Van Doren, mapped out eighteenth poetry (see page 127 above). Here is Pitt’s rendition of the grotto scene from Aeneis, Book 1:

Far in a deep recess, her jutting sidesAn isle projects, to break the rolling tides,


Virgil, 1700–1760 181

And forms a port, where, curling from the sea,The waves steal back, and wind into a bay.On either side, sublime in air, ariseTwo tow’ring rocks, whose summits brave the skies;Low at their feet the sleeping ocean lies:Crown’d with a gloomy shade of waving woods,Their awful brows hang nodding o’er the floods.Oppos’d to these, a secret grotto stands,The haunt of Nereids, fram’d by nature’s hands;Where polish’d seats appear of living stone,And limpid rills that tinkle as they run. (Warton, Works 2: 36)

This is Dryden’s passage again (see page 127 above):

Within a long Recess there lies a Bay,An Island shades it from the rowling Sea,And forms a Port secure for Ships to ride,Broke by the jutting Land on either side:In double Streams the briny Waters glide.Betwixt two rows of Rocks, a Sylvan SceneAppears above, and Groves for ever green:A Grott is form’d beneath, with Mossy Seats,To rest the Nereids, and exclude the Heats.Down thro’ the Cranies of the living WallsThe Crystal Streams descend in murm’ring Falls.(Works 5: 349–50; 228–38)

In the name of the sublime, Pitt “considerably strengthens,” as Thackeray puts it of other passages in his first book, “Dryden’s personification of natural phenomena.” An element of foreboding is also introduced in order to heighten the impact. As Thackeray con-cludes of Pitt’s approach in such scenes, he is “clearly influenced by the kind of assimilation of Virgil’s descriptive language made obvi-ous in Thomson’s Seasons” (333–35). Warton’s note draws attention, if more were needed, to the visual power of the scene, comparing it to the fine arts: “This is a most beautiful and picturesque descrip-tion. Poussin never painted a more solemn scene.” Here, as in many key passages, Virgil is made to reflect eighteenth-century English notions of aesthetic power, which have stronger ancestral ties to Dryden than to the Ancient.

Warton and Pitt also approach Virgil’s characters from the per-spective outlined by Addison in Spectator #321 (1712), when he



described the pleasing nature of Milton’s chief characters:

. . . there is scarce a speech of Adam or Eve in the whole Poem, wherein the Sentiments and Allusions are not taken from this their delightful Habitation. The Reader, during their whole course of Action, always finds himself in the Walks of Paradise. In short, as the Criticks have remarked, that in those Poems, wherein Shepherds are Actors, the Thoughts ought always to take a Tincture from the Woods, Fields, and Rivers. (3: 171)

Virgil’s actors are not shepherds, yet Warton and Pitt ensure that their thoughts and actions often “take a Tincture” from their sur-roundings. They also try to supply the new kind of hero that Voltaire deemed necessary when he declared that “none of Homer’s Heroes is interesting to us . . . Achilles is too boisterous to inspire us with tender conscience for him.” Of all those blustery “Warriours, the courageous, the tender, and the pious Hector, deserves most of our Affections. He hath the best Character, though he defends the wrong Cause; and he is so betray’d by the Gods, though he hath so much Virtue” (51–52). As the following examples illustrate, the efforts to produce not just more aesthetically pleasing but also kinder, more likeable, and more identifiable heroes resulted in a translation that bears hallmarks of the novel.

When Warton and Pitt’s Aeneas first appears, he is engulfed in a scene of delightfully sublime horror. He also behaves like an eighteenth-century gentleman:

In horror fix’d the Trojan hero stands,He groans, and spreads to heav’n his lifted hands.Thrice happy those! Whose fate it was to fall(Exclaims the chief ) beneath the Trojan wall.Oh! ‘twas a glorious fate to die in fight,To die, so bravely, in their parents’ sight!Oh! Had I there, beneath Tydides’ hand,That bravest hero of the Grecian band,Pour’d out this soul, with martial glory fir’d,And in that field triumphantly expir’d . . . . (Warton, Works 2: 31)

Employing caesurae and syntax to steady the action, Pitt ensures Aeneas’s response to sudden chaos is a measured one. In a marginal note, Warton quotes Trapp’s gloss on Aeneas’s “horror” to reinforce the propriety of his reaction: “The objections of those critics, who


Virgil, 1700–1760 183

from this passage arraign Æneas of cowardice, are most weak and frivolous. All fear is not cowardice, as no fierceness is true courage. Æneas is afraid of the gods, and for his country: both which are consistent with the truest magnanimity; nay, there can be no true magnanimity without them” (2: 31)

Warton now encourages readers to contextualize the Roman hero:

There is a very remarkable passage in a letter of Pope to the duke of Buckingham, which this subject puts me in mind of. “I can tell your grace, no less a hero than my lord Peterborow, when a person compli-mented him for never being afraid made this answer; “Sir, shew me a danger that I think an imminent and real one, and I promise you I’ll be as much afraid as any of you.” A braver answer was never made by any one of the ancient heroes whatever. (2: 31)

The Aeneas presented here provides an ideal example of that “true Greatness of Soul” supposed by The Tatler No. 43 ( July 19, 1709) to constitute “the True Sublime.” The paper claims that the “high-est Act of the Mind of Man is to possess it self with Tranquility in imminent Danger, and to have its Thoughts so free as to act at that Time without Perplexity.” It deems ancient descriptions of forti-tude decidedly lacking: “ancient Authors have compar’d this sedate Courage to a Rock that remains immovable amidst the Rage of Winds and Waves; but that is too stupid and inanimate a Similitude, and could do no Credit to the Heroe.” Unsurprisingly, it discovers the best expression of the virtue “in a few Lines in a modern Poem”: “the Sublime Image that I am talking of, and which I really think as great as ever enter’d into the Thought of Man, is in the Poem call’d, The Campaign.” The appropriate lines are now cited in which “great Marlbro’s mighty Soul” is proven “Amidst Confusion, Horror, and Despair” (310–11).

Warton and Pitt’s pains to make Aeneas’s first appearance sub-lime in an ostentatiously eighteenth-century sense, are typical of contemporary rejection of classical insights in favor of more modern ideals. The aesthetic pleasure of their storm lies in Pitt’s English flights; the scene also enables a celebration of Lord Peterborough as the sine qua non of courage. Whatever moral Virgil intended is by now irrelevant. The Ancients must take a back seat in the antiquar-ian approach to the ancient world that has replaced, even in transla-tion proper, seventeenth-century classical emulation and the notion of Roman culture transferred to England.



Such reshaping of the Ancients, even in translations claiming to make them accessible, explains the recognizably “novelistic” elements of the Pitt-Warton production. The problem facing translators of Virgil and Homer, even when the intended audience is a scholarly one, is addressed indirectly in Tatler No. 7 (April 26, 1709), which suggests that heroes without human fallibility would be intolerable: “Man is a Creature very inconsistent with himself: The Greatest Heroes are sometimes Fearful; the Spriteliest Wits at some Hours Dull; and the Greatest Politicians on some Occasions Whimsical” (61). For Warton, accordingly, the appeal of Virgil lay in the pathos of his characters: “the art of Virgil is never so powerfully felt, as when he attempts to move the passion, especially the more tender ones. The pathetic was the grand distinguishing characteris-tic of his genius and temper” (Works 4: 305–06).24 Yet, Dryden is proba-bly more responsible than Virgil for those scenes that Warton admired, for Pitt employs many of his predecessor’s examples.

Pitt’s usual strategy, as in the scene discussed above, is to fol-low and then exceed Dryden in emphasizing Aeneas’s humanity. When Aeneas surveys Carthage’s mural depicting the Trojan war, for example, Pitt creates a man unafraid of showing his feelings. He maximizes Virgil’s pathos as Aeneas regards the disasters of Troy: “Thus while his soul the moving picture fed, / A show’r of tears the groaning hero shed” (Warton, Works 2: 57). Dryden, by contrast, here tones down Virgil’s passion: “He said, his Tears a ready passage find, / Devouring what he saw so well design’d; / And with an empty Picture fed his Mind” (5: 364; 650–52). Elsewhere, when Pitt and Warton cannot cater to contemporary taste, they excuse ancient inhuman-ity. Pitt is unable, for instance, to alter the fact that when Dido begs Aeneas not to leave, “He stands inflexible to pray’rs and tears, / For Jove and Fate had stop’d the heroe’s ears” (2: 223). Yet, Warton’s mar-ginal note explains to an indignant eighteenth-century audience that “This behavior is surely perfect heroism; though not according to the rules of modern honour and gallantry. The poet nobly instructs us, to break away, at all events, from an improper and vicious passion.”

The love affair of Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid, Book 4, offered the best opportunities for portraying passions, and Pitt and Warton employ notes where faithfulness to the letter restricts the transla-tion. Despite his interest in Dido’s emotions, for example, Pitt is limited in his expression of them:

Once more she flies to pray’rs and tears, to moveTh’obdurate prince; and anger melts to love;


Virgil, 1700–1760 185

Tries all her suppliant female arts againBefore her death;—but tries ‘em all in vain:Sister, behold, from every side they pourWith eager speed, and gather to the shore. (Warton, Works 2: 222)

Warton draws attention to the psychological power of the piece: “Here is a fine turn of passion. Dido’s last speech was full of rage, anger, and indignation at her discovery of Æneas’ design to leave her: now she softens her style, and falls into all the humble and supplicating arguments she could invent.” Warton praises Virgil for making “the reader take notice of the change.” He then remarks, “How moving is that part of this speech, where she desires her sister to tell Æneas, that she now does not presume to detain him from his voyage . . . that she only begs him to stay a little longer at Carthage, till she had learnt in some measure to subdue her grief; and overcome the unexpected blow: and till her bad fortune was grown more familiar to her mind.” The wholly realistic details of Dido’s response intrigue Warton; he appreciates and, as interpreter, presents Virgil’s scene as the kind of exploration of the mind that is by now commonplace in popular literature and began with Dryden, as described above.25

Despite the insistence on faithfulness to the letter in eighteenth-century translation theory, then, the most eminent translators of the period felt compelled to adapt Virgil’s poetry, using Dryden as guide. The difference between Dryden and his successors was that Dryden strove, albeit unsuccessfully, to maintain the Augustan tradition that depended on and anchored Virgil’s authority in English letters. By the eighteenth century, this tradition is all but abandoned and with it Virgil’s authority. Yet, rejection of the Ancient was due to more than the redundancy of Augustanism and its heroic codes.

In what might be seen as the last stage of the battle between the Ancients and Moderns, Ross suggests, modern writers were attributed potential equal to that of ancient writers, and imita-tion was a potential impediment to genius. The loss of esteem for the Ancients on the grounds that they are ancient is summed up in Trapp’s Preface to his Virgil where he claims “I have a very great Honour for the Greeks and Romans; but ‘tis because their Writings are generally good, not because they are ancient” (x). As Ross suggests, however, Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) most clearly illustrates how, by mid-century, original genius held highest esteem. Young attributes veneration for the classics to “the perpetuating Power of the Press” (Ross, Making 196–206; Young 14).



He simultaneously delivers a fatal blow by claiming that “most of the Latin Classics, and all the Greek, except, perhaps, Homer, Pindar, and Anacreon, are in the number of Imitators,” for they are “acciden-tal Originals; the works they imitated, few excepted, are lost: They, on their Fathers’ Decease, enter, as lawful Heirs, on their Estates in Fame” (14–15). Young did not advocate dismissal of the classics. Warning that “illustrious Examples engross, prejudice, and intimidate,” he rather advised letting the classics “nourish, not annihilate” cre-ative impulses. “[I]mitate not the Composition, but the Man,” he exhorts, and let “us build our Compositions with the Spirit, and in the Taste of the Antients; but not with their Materials” (17, 21–22).

EpilogueIn his 1759 discussion of original composition, Young spoke of “two Luminaries in Literature, the well-accomplished Scholar, and the divinely-inspired Enthusiast.” The “First,” he felt, “is, as the bright morning star; the Second, as the rising sun” (54). The extent to which the scholar and the enthusiast shaped literature in the eighteenth century, as Young believed, is debatable. Yet, these two groups deter-mined Virgil’s role after 1700 and unintentionally pushed the clas-sics into the background of literary endeavor. For writers in general, as much as for Young, the “true Genius” crossed “all publick roads into fresh untrodden ground.” Young explicitly contrasts this genius with “he,” who, “up to the knees in Antiquity, is treading the sacred footsteps of great examples, with the blind veneration of a bigot saluting the papal toe” (55). While his colorful rhetoric overstates feelings about classical emulations, the critic puts his finger on the shift in literary values that took place between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even scholars, whose works Young pointedly distinguishes from those of the enthusiast, held the classics at arm’s length. As the “Virgils” of Trapp, Warton, and Pitt demonstrate, the examples and dictates of ancient writers were to be analyzed rather than followed, even when it came to what the whilom Prince of Poets had to say about epic.

Yet, Virgil’s traditional importance meant that these changes were not readily acknowledged even where they were most obvious. The undertakings themselves of eminent translators, like the con-stant repetition of Bossuan maxims and perfunctory invocation of Virgil’s name, suggest that the authority of the Ancient is undimin-ished, even as the best-intentioned homage to Virgil had concerns


Virgil, 1700–1760 187

other than the essence of his poetry and its application to English literature. Nor were prominent writers with a traditional classical education directed in their endeavors by ancient authority, as the disparate examples of Fielding and Addison demonstrate. Fielding’s novels make contemporary issues the focus where classical para-digms, particularly Virgilian motifs, seem to provide principles, and for all Addison’s citations of Latin tags, Virgil’s status in his essays and poems is rarely more than epigrammatic. The reverence Virgil still commanded, in other words, was owing to his traditional sway, not to what he had now to offer. New literary forms and values bore little resemblance to the old, which lay in the background rather than providing direct literary roots. In the half century spanning the works and days from Dryden’s Fables (1700) through Warton and Pitt’s massive translation of Virgil’s works, writers committed themselves to domestic concerns, and interest in the classical past was wholly academic, not intrinsic to literary developments. Quite simply, there was not a lot left for Virgil to do in eighteenth-century England.


CHAPTER 5

THE LEGACY: TRADITION METAMORPHOSED

Prologue

For obvious poetic and political reasons the British Romantic period is not associated with classical emulation or, where the Romans are concerned, even admiration. The

Restoration and early eighteenth-century poets’ commitment to imitation and refinement of the past gave way to self-sufficiency of the poet. As Marlon B. Ross puts it, “the romantics must find sources of strength within the self, and must find ways of making the sole self a sufficient focus of heroic action in a world enlarged and complicated by massive change” (24).1 To young poets in revolutionary times, fur-thermore, Augustan politics (both the classical and the English kind) with their adulation of empire and teleological history were anath-ema. Or they were plain irrelevant. Coleridge, for example, expresses his bewilderment that Wordsworth, in his attempted translation of the Aeneid, could suffer Virgil’s material. As he praises his friend’s rendition of Neptune calming the winds in Book 1, he reflects, “for the life of me I could never read [the original] even at School but as a Tom Thumb tragedy.” Over the speech that was so central to both Roman and English Augustan ideals, Jupiter’s prophecy of empire “without bounds in place or time” (imperium sine fine), Coleridge just shakes his head: “For myself, I wonder at your patience in wading through such a stiff Manes mortuum of Dullness! and that of the dullest sort, to wit, History in prosing narrative prophecy—with so ludicrously anachronical a familiarity of names and detail—old acquaintances of the last Platonic Sexmillenium!” (Wordsworth, Translations 164). While Coleridge easily dismissed the political aspect of Wordsworth’s undertaking, however, he could not forgive the poetic crimes his friend must commit. As Bruce E. Graver remarks in his edition of Wordsworth’s translation, Coleridge’s correspondence with Wordsworth over the Virgil becomes increasingly irritable (165).



The major bone of contention was Wordsworth’s attempt to recreate Virgil’s poetry for a contemporary English audience by composing as Latinate an English version as possible. Translation was a vain endeavor in any case, as one major Romantic poet declares: “it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.” In the same passage of his Defence of Poetry, Shelley urges that a new original poem grow from the old: “The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the curse of Babel” (7–8).

By late eighteenth-century Britain, that is, the poetry and the pol-itics of the Ancients belonged to another time and place. Two other major factors further alienated ancient writers. First, the genres they had perfected, particularly the heroic epic, had lost authority due to the steady decline (outlined in earlier chapters) of the old literary hierarchies and the increasing popularity, especially in the nineteenth century, of the novel and other experimental genres. Second, the individual authority of the two most prestigious ancient poets, Virgil and Homer, was, by now, minimal. Coleridge’s atti-tude toward Virgil and his epic in his responses to Wordsworth was typical of both the Romantic period and its aftermath. As Donald M. Foerster remarks, “Around 1800, the heroic tradition as a whole was under fire. Epics in general—at least the poems that everybody called epic—were variously described as artificial, primitive, dull, cumbersome, and wearying” (702). The pull of tradition and glory intimately connected with the classical epic lingered, as this chap-ter will show. Yet, Britons’ newly won sense of nationhood, which Linda Colley outlines convincingly and at length, meant that when nineteenth-century Britons thought of epic they looked, as Simon Dentith remarks, “to two widely differing traditions, broadly Celtic and Germanic” (69). To most writers eager to celebrate their land or history, only native culture and language could offer the seeds and soil for new plants; moreover, Dentith suggests, any new epic must be a “primary” one (69). As the author of a highly derivative epic and a servile Augustan one at that, Virgil had not much to offer, and Homer, as poet of primary epic, eclipsed him. But Homer was not native. Besides, doubt was thrown over his existence. When Robert Wood published his Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer in 1769, he inadvertently initiated, as Dentith remarks, “over two centuries of debate about the poet.” One crucial question that now arose was “whether the same poet composed the Iliad and the Odyssey


The Legacy: Tradition Metamorphosed 191

and whether, more radically, either poem was composed by a single author at all: ought they rather to be thought of as compositions made out of original shorter poems or lays?” (Dentith 16).

Dentith’s discussion reflects the larger shift in Britain from interest in individual ancient poets to classical ideals and exempla. In part what kept the ancient world alive in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England was the kind of fascination with primi-tivism that can be seen in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry: “In the youth of the world,” Shelley remarks, “men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a cer-tain rhythm or order,” and “[i]n the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry” (4–5). Such investigations, as Foerster puts it, into “the origin of language and of poetry” were common and affected ideas about the ancient epic poets: “Instrumental in bringing about a reinterpretation of the Homeric epic, [primitivism] was also responsible to some degree for the continued, though now milder, enthusiasm for Ossian, for the almost universal antagonism towards Virgil, and for the indiffer-ence expressed by many critics towards the epic of modern times” (692–93). Dentith, similarly, quotes from Wood’s 1769 Essay to explain how Homer, and especially his Iliad, continued to appeal to audiences after the mid-eighteenth century: “it is principally from him [Homer] that we have formed our ideas of that sameness in the pursuits and occupations of mankind in the Heroic ages, which is the genuine character of an early stage of society” (16). Furthermore, as Foerster observes, Homer’s poems were assumed to have origi-nated “in sincere and passionate feeling, in Homer’s desire to glo-rify his nation . . . Critics of every shade of opinion agreed about the spontaneity of Homer” (694). Because of its essential poetry, as revealed in Homer’s works, ancient Greece was the focus of British contemplation of the Ancients.

May Sinclair’s novel, Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), supplies evidence that this preference continued in the nineteenth century. The hero-ine, Mary, is captivated by the music of the ancient Greek language, and her first library is an indication, perhaps, of what appealed to bright young people: “She had taken the doll’s clothes out of the wooden box and filled it with books: the Bible, Milton, and Pope’s Homer, the Greek Accidence, and Plutarch’s Lives, and the Comedies from Papa’s illustrated Shakespeare in seven volumes, which he never read, and two volumes of Pepys’ Diary, and Locke On the Human Understanding” (82). Isobel Hurst points out that ancient Greece held



sway over school boys as well: “Dr Arnold emphasized Greek epic, prose history, and philosophy in the curriculum at Rugby School because the heroes in Homer and Thucydides exemplified ideals of masculinity on which his pupils could model their conduct” (19). Yet, the virtues and institutions of Rome had a poetry too. Hurst observes, for example, that T. B. Macauley’s massive poem, Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), was hugely popular and became a school clas-sic in the nineteenth century (40). As this chapter will demonstrate, Rome was particularly inspirational for the early denizens of the New World, who studied the Roman republic for civic and ethic models.

Despite the inspiration with which ancient Greece especially pro-vided poets, students, historians, and others who reflected on the past in Britain and America, however, the steady decline in real influence either in literature or society that Virgil Made English has outlined was even steadier after the mid-eighteenth century. R. M. Ogilvie highlights this dearth, remarking that “despite the real sway which Greece exercised over the minds of poets and artists during the years 1790–1820, and despite the homage which all men of taste and educa-tion paid with lip-service to the inspiration of ancient Athens, it is a remarkable fact that the new cult of Greece had practically no effect on English life” (82). Nor did the ongoing domination by the clas-sics of curricula in public schools (preparatory schools in America) and universities mean widespread currency in them. Hurst remarks that “Memorizing prose and verse texts—the ‘wholesale commit-ting to memory of books of the Aeneid, the odes of Horace, or even speeches of Cicero’—played a large part in the public school classical education; in many cases this feat of memory was all that was tested and no care was taken to check whether pupils could ‘construe accu-rately a single passage therein’ ” (18). Even worse, she observes, the tedious lessons in rote memorization killed the enthusiasm of many boys. Ogilvie makes the same point, adding that the universities contributed even less to a classical education. Richard West, he says, “described Oxford in 1735 as ‘a country flowing in syllogisms and ale where Horace and Virgil are alike unknown’ ” (41). The situation in America was similar, and, Caroline Winterer points out, critics ques-tioned the practical relevance of the traditional gentleman’s educa-tion that persisted for two hundred years. When writers on both sides of the Atlantic took inspiration from the classics, furthermore, they moved farther from the originals than their literary forebears.

This chapter, consequently, is about metamorphosis. Harold Bloom has delineated the extent to which tradition influences the



most original endeavor, and the iconoclastic writers who followed the so-called age of neoclassicism were no less conscious of the past. Yet, where the neoclassical authors discussed in the previous chapters respond directly to venerated genres and motifs, working from within, the Romantics and their successors openly adapted and metamorphosed those genres and motifs. Their endeavors were facilitated by the “growing tendency,” as Foerster puts it, “to regard literature not as static and unchanging, but as essentially organic and evolutionary,” the mentality that led to the loss of prestige for epic and condemned the Augustans, who “treated epic as a fixed genre, the laws of which, based on nature and reason, seemed as unalterable as the laws of the universe” (682). This survey of Virgil’s last stand in English letters ends by showing how after the mid-eighteenth cen-tury his poems still represented traditions fundamental to the evolu-tion of Western society but they were deemed useful only if they were transformed into works immediately pertinent to the present—new plants springing again from the seed, as Shelley urged. As the follow-ing discussion of Wordsworth, Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Barbauld, and some early American poets demonstrates, the pull of the epic in its heroic tradition was still strong, but new works born from it eluded offensive elements of the heroic and were adapted, to use Barrett Browning’s advice on the subject, for “this live, throb-bing age, / That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires . . .” (201; 5.203–4). Virgil’s georgic was most attractive to these later writers, as the sections here on female poets and the Americans point out. Through the georgic mode, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, for example, brings her predominantly lowly and female audience into direct con-tact with a revered classical tradition that, in her hands, responds fully to the hardships of everyday women’s lives while entertaining them. To Americans, the georgic offered a means of negotiating their relationship to the land, its challenges, and its future prosperity, so that the georgic mode provided, in effect, a form of heroic. In each example provided here, the literary processes transforming Virgil in particular and classical traditions in general continue those outlined in the previous chapters.

Wordsworth and ByronA testimony to the force of tradition even in an era that would shrug it off lies in the epic endeavors of two major Romantic poets. Neither was a success. Whatever Byron intended in Don Juan—and what he



did intend is contested, as demonstrated below—the poem is not generally acclaimed for its accomplishment. Wordsworth’s transla-tion of the Aeneid, meanwhile, is incomplete, remains little known, and was derided from the beginning by one of the poet’s greatest companions. Common to both undertakings, however, is a reticent acknowledgment of Virgil’s epic and an effort to turn his legacy into something meaningful in the present. While the poets moved in opposite directions, Wordsworth into a foreign past toward Virgil and Byron away from Virgil into the present, their poems are linked by the commitment of each to “truth” or “reality.” As Arthur Kahn notes, Byron follows Juvenal’s satiric attack on the epic tradition when he “claims that the superiority of his verse to that of the epic poets lies in its truthfulness” (145). In the first book of Don Juan, the poet declares,

There’s only one slight difference betweenMe and my epic brethren gone before,And here the advantage is my own, I ween . . . They so embellish, that it is quite a boreTheir labyrinth of fables to thread through,Whereas this story’s actually true. (2: 137; 1.202)

The weariness with clichéd and overwrought material is that of the 1680s parodies discussed in chapter 3. Rather than rejecting epic precepts like those poems, however, Byron claims kinship with his “epic brethren” and, like Fielding and other novelists discussed ear-lier, seeks to transform the old into something entertaining and per-tinent for a contemporary audience. Similarly, kinship with Virgil is a crucial if unstated element of Wordsworth’s translation that, again in keeping with the course already set earlier in the eighteenth century, sought to recreate the original sound and emotion of the Ancient’s verse and so revivify a poet who had been all but rejected.

While Wordsworth’s painstaking translation did attract the interest of at least two serious classicists, it was, by the poet’s own admission, a failure.2 In light of Coleridge’s observations reflect-ing what Foerster calls the “almost universal antagonism towards Virgil” (693) in the Romantic period, the failure is no surprise. Less explicable is why the poet of Lyrical Ballads would undertake such an ostensibly foolhardy project. The answer has, perhaps, less to do with Wordsworth’s desire to vindicate Virgil than with his poetic ambi-tion. Jonathan Wordsworth and Stuart Peterfreund demonstrate



that Wordsworth had poetic aspirations and that these aspirations were profoundly affected by his sense of tradition, even if that sense is not immediately apparent. Conceding M. H. Abrams’s notion, in Natural Supernaturalism, “that the Romantics possess a keen sense of genre,” Peterfreund argues that indeed the “keenly and ambitiously genre-conscious” (in Abrams’s view) Wordsworth “sets out and moves toward the composition of a visionary epic” (441–42). Such a journey, Peterfreund insists, involved the kind of poetic apprentice work central to ancient notions of epic endeavor: “The collective wisdom inherited by the Romantics is that rather than just breaking spontaneously into the epic strain, the aspirant to the genre works up to it, moving through a well-defined program of preparation and progress through the lesser genres” (442). Yet, Peterfreund contin-ues, Wordsworth distinguishes himself from his contemporaries in “combin[ing] the ideas of internalization and metamorphosis with the idea of the progression of genres.” In short, he comments, “Wordsworth conceives of writing a single poem which, in its very course, moves through the lesser genres to become, at the end, the visionary epic toward which the poet aspires. The poem in which this conception is embodied and illustrated is The Prelude” (442).

Where Peterfreund argues that “Wordsworth took the classical idea of the progression of genres and did something distinctly mod-ern with it,” Jonathan Wordsworth feels that the poet’s epic “fanta-sies” grew upon him as he worked his way through The Prelude (34). He begins by quoting an 1805 letter to Sir George Beaumont where Wordsworth expresses a desire, on completing The Recluse, “to write, further, a narrative Poem of the Epic kind,” whereupon he “shall consider the task of my life as over” (34). As the critic comments, Wordsworth seems to view the composition of an epic poem as the pinnacle of a poetic career (for how, he asks, “does ‘a narrative Poem of the Epic kind’ differ from an epic”) (35). If Jonathan Wordsworth is correct that an earlier letter of March 1804 to De Quincey also reflects the poet’s epic intentions, Wordsworth’s description of the subject matter for this, in his own words, “larger and more impor-tant work” is interesting: “it is a moral and Philosophical Poem, the subject whatever I find most interesting in Nature, Man, Society, most adapted to Poetic illustration” (34). There are, then, two com-mon and revealing elements of both Peterfreund’s and Jonathan Wordsworth’s analyses of the poet’s comments about epic. The first involves his “internalization” (to use Peterfreund’s term) of the poetic process anchored in classical tradition that leads to epic, which is the



greatest of all poetic achievements. The second concerns the poet’s recognition that a metamorphosis of ancient exempla is necessary to accomplish a modern epic. Indeed, Wordsworth’s plan to transform what is “most interesting in Nature, Man, Society” into an important “moral and Philosophical Poem” rings of the principles laid out in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads integrated into traditional epic framework. Equally plausible then is that, even if subconsciously, Wordsworth’s communion with Virgil through the process of translation was part of this apprenticeship on the road to the ultimate epic achievement, just as the engagement in a revered tradition, that of translation of Virgil was a part of his internalization of the epic mode.

Another explanation for Wordsworth’s undertaking of Virgil lies in the challenge of outdoing Dryden, the attempt at which would itself place Wordsworth firmly in the line of poetic brethren that Dryden so often called upon in the later part of his career. Where Wordsworth would accomplish what Dryden had not was in repro-ducing, as Graver puts it, “the genuine experience of reading Virgil’s Latin.” Just like earlier eighteenth-century commentators such as William Benson and Joseph Trapp, the poet expresses irritation over the way “Dryden always spoils the passage” in those places where “Vergil can be fairly said to have had his eye upon the sub-ject” (Graver, Translations 157). Semiconsciously, he attempts to wrest Virgil from the Augustans, to recreate the original poet that English audiences could long have enjoyed were it not for the intervention of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poets and their rocking-horse verse. In an 1808 letter to Walter Scott, Wordsworth reflects, “It will require yet half a century completely to carry off the poison of Pope’s Homer.” His own methodology will facilitate the process: “I ought to say a prefatory word about the versification, which will not be found much to the taste of those whose ear is exclu-sively accommodated to the regularity of Popes Homer. I have run the couplets freely into each other, much more even than Dryden has done. This variety seems to me to be called for, if anything of the movement of the Virgilian [metre del] versification be transferable to our rhyme Poetry” (160).

He would achieve this exorcism, moreover, by employing the Latinate language that so provoked Coleridge. Wordsworth’s goal, like that of first prose translators discussed earlier, was to get as close as possible to the original. According to Graver, the careful thought Wordsworth had given the principles of translation is revealed in a series of letters he sent to Lord Lonsdale, which suggests that he “may



have been planning a theoretical introduction to the work on the same scale as one of Dryden’s prefaces” (Wordsworth, Translations 156). Such an essay would doubtless have clarified the shift in transla-tion theory from Dryden’s goal of invoking the spirit of the original in updated material to faithfulness to the word (verbum pro verba). It might also have clarified just why the poet who had in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads stressed above all else “a selection of language really used by men,” committed the “unenglishisms” that enraged Coleridge (164). Graver offers an explanation in his two commentar-ies on the translation. He quotes two letters from Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale of February 1824 that highlight the language prob-lems. In the first, Wordsworth pinpoints one crucial problem with Dryden’s translation: “It was my wish and labour that my Translation should have far more of the genuine ornaments of Virgil than my predecessors. Dryden has been very careless of these and profuse of his own, which seem to me very rarely to harmonize with those of Virgil. . . . Had I taken the liberties of my Predecessors, Dryden especially, I could have translated nine books with the labour that three have cost me.” In the second letter he focuses, like his mid- eighteenth-century predecessors, on the affective: “I began my trans-lation by accident; I continued it with a hope to produce a work which should be to a certain degree affecting, which Dryden’s is not to me in the least. Dr. Johnson has justly remarked that Dryden has little talent for the Pathetic, and the tenderness of Virgil seems to me to escape him” (162–63). Graver sums up Wordsworth’s goal as he summarizes his approach in his translation: “Whether he was borrowing or offer-ing fresh poetic renderings, his aim is consistent: he was attempting to reproduce in English something he believed his predecessors had lost—the genuine experience of reading Virgil’s Latin” (157).

An early passage that well exemplifies Wordsworth’s attempt to come as close as English would allow to the stateliness and vibrancy as well as the cadence of Virgil’s Latin is the description of Venus disguised as a huntress when Aeneas first glimpses her in the Carthaginian woods:

The habit of a Virgin did she wear;Her aspect suitable, her gait, and air;—Arm’d like a Spartan Virgin; or of mienSuch as in Thrace Harpalyce is seen,Urging to weariness the fiery horse—Outstripping Hebrus in his headlong course. (195; 1.424–29)



These are Virgil’s lines:

Virginis os habitumque gerens et virginis armaSpartanae, vel qualis equos Threissa fatigatHarpalyce volucremque fuga praevertitur Hebrum. (Loeb 1: 262; 1.315–17)

Wordsworth selects English terms closest in sound to Virgil’s “virginis” (maiden), “habitum” (dress), and “os” (appearance or aspect), and he follows the original in repeating “virgin.” His “headlong course” captures the sense of speed and inevitability encapsulated in “praevertitur.” Coleridge, however, pours scorn on the lines: “I am sick of finding fault, the more discomfortably because my main feel-ing is that of faulting you for undertaking what compared with the original is scarce a possibility, & your name is such that in compari-son with Dryden, Pitt, Beresford &c &c stands you in poor stead.” He found Wordsworth’s literalness most offensive: “But I confess that I cannot read the compressed [dignified del] and sustained yet simple dignity of Virginis os habitusque . . . & not find the English weak—‘is seen’—suitable (aspect) gait, air,—mien—’—Arm’d like a Spartan Virgin— . . . “ (Wordsworth, Translations 195). He adds, fur-thermore, that “Urge to weariness is scarcely the dictionary mean-ing (me judice) of fatigat, at all events, not the poetic force—and the participles ing, ing, kill the rapidity of the movement.”

This quest to remain as true to Virgil and his Latin as possi-ble meant, at points, foregoing the kind of opportunities seized by Pitt to create an English majesty or sublime. When Pitt translates Neptune’s calming of the waters raised by Juno in Book 1, he ech-oes Dryden as he creates a scene full of awe at the power of nature and the god. The passage, along with Dryden’s, is cited in chapter 4 (pp. 180–81). Wordsworth’s version pales in comparison:

Meanwhile, what strife disturb’d the roaring seaAnd for what outrages the storm was free,Troubling the Ocean to its inmost caves,Neptune perceiv’d—incensed; and o’er the wavesForth-looking with a steadfast brow and eyeRaised from the Deep in placid majesty,He saw the Trojan Gallies scatter’d wide,The men they bore oppress’d and terrified;Waters and ruinous Heaven against their peace allied. (Wordsworth, Translations 186; 1.162–70)



Wordsworth’s alliteration of “r” and “s’ in the first two lines here feebly attempts to recreate the deep grumbling and hissing of the sea audible in the Latin:

Interea magno misceri murmure pontumEmissamque hiemem sensit Neptunus et imis. (Loeb 1: 250; 1.124–25)

Just as unfortunate, at least when contrasted with Dryden’s and Pitt’s “serene Majesty,” is Wordsworth’s use of “placid majesty” for “placidum caput” (Loeb 1: 250; 1.130). Coleridge’s response captures the stiltedness of Wordsworth’s storm: “And for what outrages—&c. Not translation . . . and Neptune perc. incensed—I can scarcely read, as part of a sentence. It seems to my ear as if I were repeating single words—perceived, incensed, admired—&c.—‘and terrified’ a rhyme to ‘against their peace allied’!” (Wordsworth, Translations 186). If Coleridge then praises his friend’s rendition of Neptune’s subsequent speech, his simultaneous reflection that he could never read the orig-inal “but as a Tom Thumb Tragedy” is a reminder of the futility of Wordsworth’s undertaking. Even where his translation pleases, only an exclusive audience can appreciate its achievement. To everyone else it is unappealing and pointless.

Byron, by contrast, aimed to be inclusive in Don Juan, his epic, like the eighteenth-century novel, concerning itself with ordinary people and familiar emotions if in exotic circumstances. That Don Juan could even be considered epic was due to the much more nebulous ideas about genre resulting from Romantic “indifference to plot and the purely formal elements [of poetry],” as Foerster remarks (703). As a result, “such different works as Don Juan, the Nieblungenlied, and the Columbiad were admitted into the more august company of the Iliad and Paradise Lost,” for the “hitherto aristocratic genre of the epic” had come to include “virtually every poem that was not eminently lyrical” (Foerster 703). Just like the question mark over Wordsworth’s translation, the mystery remains as to why such an iconoclast as Byron would attempt the epic mode. The answer again lies in the force of traditions that the Romantics would eschew.

Critics addressing Byron’s mode tend to label the poem an “anti-epic,” yet they disagree over the reasons for his sustained sub-version of recognizable epic features. As Brian Wilkie points out in his discussion of the palpable aimlessness of Don Juan, the poet him-self pauses toward the end of his lengthy poem to ponder why such a



work should be made public (193):

But “why then publish?”—There are no rewardsOf fame or profit, when the world grows weary.I ask in turn,—why do you play at cards?Why drink? Why read?—To make some hour less dreary. (3: 415; 14.11)

Why not, if it entertains a bored poet and a bored audience? This response is entirely in keeping with the facetious and elusive nature of the poem as a whole. It also contributes further to Byron’s undermin-ing of epic seriousness, for he punctures sanctimonious neoclassical notions about the moral and social function of epic. Still, twentieth-century critics have probed his poem for a more satisfying answer. John Lauber identifies in Don Juan numerous epic rules and features, demonstrating how each is deliberately destroyed as part of a “com-prehensive attack on the whole tradition of epic poetry—its style, its structure, and its values.” Byron’s purpose in this, he insists, was to prove that the epic genre “was moribund, no longer a real possibility for a modern poet” (607). Wilkie, however, points out that while the poem is “obviously unheroic,” it is “not simply mock epic” (188). Byron employs the epic framework so that his point “that life is aimless and the world a chaos” is not made “in a vacuum,” for “he is trying to evalu-ate, in relation to the myriad ideas and persons he opposes, the true nature of man and the true place of Byron’s own age in the continuum of human life.” He constantly evokes the epic tradition because epic is “a definitive vehicle for charismatic utterance concerning man’s place in the cosmos and the relationship between present and past” (194).

Donald Reiman and Arthur Kahn share Wilkie’s conviction that Byron’s ostensibly careless and cynical poem is, instead, founded upon a revered tradition that imbues it with meaning.3 Quoting Shelley, who comments in A Defence of Poetry of Dante’s Commedia that “a great epic poem”4 is a “bridge thrown over the stream of time,” Reiman contends that “in Don Juan Byron reintroduces aspects of the mode of the ‘Primary Epic’ as C. S. Lewis defines it in his Preface to Paradise Lost” (588). The key point Lewis makes is that in “Homer, its [primary epic’s] greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all the more tragic because there hangs over the heroic world a certain futil-ity” (Reiman 589; Lewis 29–30). Reiman further argues that Byron’s methodology in the poem also follows that which Erich Auerbach described in his analysis of Homeric epic, for the poet blurs the



“traditional hierarchies of ‘important’ or ‘momentous’ or ‘significant’ people, places, and things” (591). Kahn too maintains that Byron is rather transforming than mocking his classical models, and he points to several key passages where Byron evokes a scene from the Aeneid, in which he finds a “model of a transmutation of an Homeric epi-sode” (150). In transforming Virgil, who transforms Homer, Byron engages with his predecessors in a search for “truth.”

According to these compelling arguments, Don Juan appropri-ates even as it partially abrogates the epic tradition.5 So, Byron, in his metamorphic epic, shares with Wordsworth, in his epic ambi-tions, a profound desire to perpetuate a poetic mode that is part of the fabric of history—but only if that mode can be made to confront a troublesome present rather than exalt an idealized past. Just like Wordsworth’s plans for an important “moral and Philosophical Poem” about “Nature, Man, Society,” moreover, Byron’s turn, in an ostensibly amorphous poem, to the security of tradition offered by epic relates his poetic process to those set in motion in the 1650s and climaxing in Dryden’s late works. Indeed, from the opening of Don Juan, there are obvious parallels with works discussed in earlier chapters.

Byron’s poem famously begins,

I want a hero: an uncommon want,When every year and month sends forth a new one,Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,The age discovers he is not the true one. (2: 21; 1.1)6

The problem facing the poet, he immediately recognizes, is this: what now constitutes heroism? He explores the dilemma in the fol-lowing stanzas, where he reflects upon the elusive and ephemeral nature of national heroism:

Nelson was once Britannia’s god of war,And still should be so, but the tide is turn’d;There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar, ‘Tis with our hero quietly inurn’d;Because the army’s grown more popular,At which the naval people are concern’d:Besides, the Prince is all for land-service,Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis. (2: 23; 1.4)

The winds of change in politics affect who and what is consid-ered heroic, yet Byron highlights the same quandary that affected



Royalist translations of Virgil in the 1650s and 1660s. The lack of a clear hero, which was also Dryden’s problem as he drew Virgil into 1690s England, is solved here when the poet settles on a well-known popular figure: “I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan, / We all have seen him in the Pantomime” (2: 21; 1.1). This move allows Byron, like such eighteenth-century novelists as Fielding, to place a down-to-earth and fallible character against an authoritative epic backdrop. When the poet injects reality into obvious epic scenes, moreover, he is heeding Juvenal’s advice about avoiding epic unreality as well as following the example of French and English Restoration parodists, who, a century earlier, poured scorn on the fabrications of Virgil and other epic poets. As Kahn comments of Byron’s storm scene, for example, in “[r]ejecting heroics, he emphasizes the mis-ery and degradation in the catastrophe: the stampede of the terrified crewmen and passengers for grog and the devouring of Juan’s span-iel and then the cannibalism in the longboat” (150). Yet, by engaging in the epic tradition of storms, evoking both Homer’s and Virgil’s, Byron transforms the motif, rather than rejecting it as the parodists did. The effect is a positive one, as Kahn suggests: “By compiling information from several accounts of shipwrecks, Byron sought to arrive at the essential and general truths about such experiences” (150). Byron’s simultaneous engagement, in these ways, with tradi-tion and the present means that Don Juan, like Dryden’s Fables in 1700, facilitates a poetic discourse across the ages, perpetuating tra-ditions but releasing them from limiting rules and redundant ideals. Women poets felt even more keenly the pressure to familiarize clas-sical scenes as they were drawn to them thereby contributing to the transformation of a realm that was once the domain of men only.

The Domestic MuseFollowing Aphra Behn, women moved steadily into the world of literary publication. By the beginning of the nineteenth cen-tury, as Marlon Ross observes, they are “self-confident critics” and “constitute a sizeable part of the literary market, identifiable and extremely influential as a group” (51). Few, however, were drawn to the classics as inspiration and models. In the eighteenth century, facility in ancient languages and letters actually constituted a liabil-ity for women. The social stigma borne by women versant in the clas-sics is readily apparent in a 1779 story printed in the Lady’s Magazine, one of the new publications established for female readers. The



problem was, Jacqueline Pearson points out, quoting from this story, “The Unexpected Recovery,” that the classics were associated with a gentlemanly upbringing. A classical education, therefore, “may be dangerous for a woman, for it has taught her to despise female delicacy, and allow ‘liberties’ from men instead of keeping them ‘at an awful distance’ ” (69). Even Madame Dacier, the famous French seventeenth-century classical commentator, editor, and translator, is mocked in the Ladies Magazine, which, Pearson observes, “encour-ages female education [but] is ambivalent about classically educated women” (69).

Yet, biographical sources from the nineteenth century, as Isobel Hurst demonstrates, reveal that “the study of Latin and Greek was not only more widespread among women than previous accounts have suggested, but that those women who did study the classical languages were likely to become writers or be involved in reform-ing women’s education, or both” (3). As Hurst outlines how women earned and valued a classical education, finally being admitted to the universities to study, she demonstrates that frequently they achieved their training incidentally. Mary Shelley, for example, was depen-dant on her husband for instruction in Latin and Greek, a common situation (Hurst 59). Also typical were the cases of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charlotte Yonge, whose classical education only began when their brothers started to learn Latin and Greek (Hurst 63). Nineteenth-century novelists often suggest that families either still discouraged daughters from a classical training or regarded their learning differently, even when the girls’ achievements surpassed those of their brothers. In Sinclair’s Mary Olivier (1919), for example, the heroine is enchanted with the sounds of Greek when her brother reads to her and desperately wants to learn the language. She must wait for her brothers’ books, however: “Mark’s Greek books had been taken from her five years ago, when Rodney went to Chelmsted. And they had come back with Rodney this Easter” (125–26). Then she encounters a further obstacle: “She took the Iliad from its place and turned the torn, discoloured pages. Her mother looked up, annoyed and uneasy, like a child disturbed in the possession of its toys. ‘Mark’s books are to be kept where Mark put them,’ she said. ‘But, Mamma, I want them.’ Never in her life had she wanted anything so much as those books” (126). Finally, Mary is allowed the books but, while she has some instruction in German, she must teach herself Greek with some help from “the old arithmetic master” (146). One unexpected advantage of parents’ reluctance to educate girls in the same manner



as boys, as Hurst points out, was that girls were spared the “excessive repetition and grammatical analysis” that made “the classroom dull and sickening.” As a result, they had a fresher perspective on and greater enthusiasm for the classics: “they did not experience the kind of alienation from classical literature described by Byron, but could ‘feel,’ ‘relish,’ and ‘love’ poetry” (Hurst 12). Those few women who employed the classics sought, like Wordsworth and Byron, to trans-form what they found into material compelling and relevant to their contemporary audiences, emphasizing the lowly and domestic.

Sara Coleridge’s poem “Bees” from her Pretty Lessons (1845) appears tailor-made for an age in which women were granted some, but not too much, education in the classics. Selecting a lowly subject matter, Coleridge transforms Virgilian georgic into a pretty piece for ladies and children. The short poem begins:

In Latin apis means a beeAnd honey is call’d mel,And favus is the honey-comb,And cella is the cell.

In Latin cera means the wax,And alvear the hive,In which the Bees their food prepare,In which they live and thrive. (120–21)

The piece is entirely decorous, a little light learning in polite aspects of the ancient world. Yet, the poem ends in a tongue-in-cheek manner:

But little did the ancients knowWith what they feed their young;And Virgil called the queen a king,When of their works he sung. (122)

This female poet can correct the mighty Ancients in basic matters if she so desires.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, one of the best-known later eighteenth-century female poets, also converts ancient material into entertain-ing fare for ladies. To her brief poem “To a Lady, with Some Painted Flowers” she adds an epigraph from Virgil’s second Eclogue: “—tibi lilia plenis / Ecce ferunt nymphae calathis” (Look! The nymphs bring baskets full of lilies for you). Such an epigraph, as always, adds the authority of tradition to an original work, but it suggests too that this



is an updated version of Virgil’s lyrical poem, one more relevant for contemporary women. Barbauld also attempts a piece from Ovid, and selects one of his most domestic moments: an epistle from the exiled poet to his wife. Her poem, entitled “Ovid to His Wife: Imitated from different Parts of His Tristia,” focuses on domestic pleasures dreamed of by a sick aged poet separated from “the fond bosom of a faithful wife” and “scenes of old delight” (88–89). Nothing Barbauld does is new, however. As demonstrated in chapter 4, Addison and his contemporaries at the beginning of the century employed the Ancients in similar superficial ways. Dryden, too, having relin-quished traditional epic ambitions (see chapter 3), turned to Ovid’s love poems in the 1690s. Also, like the parodists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Barbauld gently mocks Virgil in her poem “Washing Day.” Unlike them, however, she simultaneously offers a constructive replacement for the Latin original. Her choice of mode for English lowly readers is appropriate: the georgic. She begins by pointedly rejecting elevated language and masculine subject matter:

The Muses are turned gossips; they have lostThe buskin’d step, and clear high-sounding phrase,Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse,In slip-shod measure loosely prattling onOf farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream,Or drowning flies, or shoe lost in the mireBy little whimpering boy, with rueful face;Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded Washing-Day.

This domestic muse outlines, humorously but earnestly, the impor-tance of this laborious task to all women “who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend.” Even the georgic theme of the vulnerability of human life to the elements is here placed in a very familiar context as the poet describes “anxious looks” at a “lowering sky,” and begs the heavens to “preserve us” from that “last evil,” a downpour that brings with it “dirt and gravel stains / Hard to efface, and loaded lines at once / Snapped short.” Unlike Swift’s dark poems, “A Description of a City Shower” and “To a Beautiful Young Nymph,” which fill Virgilian modes with cynical realities, this poem offers entertain-ment and a sense of community to an audience, for which every-day life really is as harsh as that of the farmers in Virgil’s Georgics. Barbauld’s insistence on the domestic is also entirely in keeping with emphases of her age. Her metamorphosis of Virgil’s georgic has a counterpart, for example, in James Grahame’s British Georgics



(1809), which utilizes Virgil’s mode to offer advice on such topics as (among items listed in his argument for “July”) “Virtue of honey as a medicine for man—Nature’s remedies the most simple—Fever—Cold affusion— Apostrophe to Dr Currie—Cold-bathing preven-tive of fever.” Grahame also composes an imitation Horatian ode, “Horace. Ad Virgilium Ode 12. Book 4,” into which he introduces Scots dialect:

The westlin wind, the Springtime’s cronyNow skiffs alang the sea sae bonny,And fills ilk sail. . . .

Horace’s original poem is a celebration of spring and new begin-nings addressed to Virgil. Yet, it is part of a book that, as Janice M. Benario argues, is “a very real piece of Augustan propaganda” with Ode 12 contributing to a vision of “peace, the far-flung empire and its future destiny” (340, 346). In selecting such a poem and making it thoroughly British with its rhyming couplets, Scots vocabulary, and mundane subject matter, Grahame rejects any Augustan ambition and makes as much of a nationalistic statement as Barbauld does in her English women’s georgic.

The same nationalism and preference for lowly modes and subject matter embedded in these classical remakes by a domestic muse are at the heart of Barbauld’s political poem, “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade,” where she comments on the Augustan heroic. Lamenting the “Negro’s chain” and “his deep groans,” the poet warns against falling back on Augustan visions of empire with their false promises of freedom:

The Muse, too soon awaked, with ready tongueAt Mercy’s shrine applausive peans rung;And Freedom’s eager sons, in vain foretoldA new Astrean reign, an age of gold:She knows and she persists—Still Afric bleeds . . . .

As Pope did implicitly in his mock-heroic Rape of the Lock, Barbauld further argues that perpetuating classical ideals of an “Augusta” decked with “rosy bowers” at the center of a world empire will result in the degeneration of British people: “By foreign wealth are British morals chang’d, / And Afric’s sons, and India’s, smile aveng’d.”7 A little known poet, Anne Grant of Laggan, issues a similar warn-ing about ambition and subservient classical imitation in her poem



Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen (1814). Grant reflects on Dryden’s “heroic notes” in his Annus Mirabilis and considers what he might have achieved were it not for his neoclassical mentality:

Ill-fated Poet! had’st thou flourished nowWhen bards no longer to vain patrons bow,But take their sanction from the public voice.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .What illustrious themes, what glorious views,Had called forth all the splendours of thy muse (19–21, 25–26)

Virgil too limited his glorious powers: “Virgil sung to one distin-guished throne, / And Roman bays encircled that alone” (350–51). Inspiring Grant is the nationalism outlined by Colley, which is founded in religion, a sense of British unity, and fear of a foreign other: “Our language, lineage, faith are still the same, / The torch that kindled Freedom’s holy flame / To light the western world, from British altars came” (71–73). Fortifying Grant’s poem, like Barbauld’s, is a refusal of ancient heroism.

Two other prominent nineteenth-century female poets, Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, are also conscious of heroic ideals from the classical past and reject them as they shape an English and feminine aesthetic. Versed in modern languages, Hemans filled her works with a Western European past. When she contemplates ancient Rome in The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy: A Poem (1816), however, her focus is on loss and decay. While she consoles “fallen Italy” that the restoration of its art works after Napoleon’s plunders will allow the land once more “to gaze / On the rich relics of sublimer days,” her emphasis is on its status as a “Land of departed fame!” (19; 13–14, 1). The “Muses of Etrurian shades” or “sacred Tivoli’s romantic glades” slumber, and “wild ivy shadows Virgil’s tomb” (19; 15–18). Typically of her epoch, Hemans is more attracted to the passions of Greece and the European Renaissance, and in her only apparent imitation of an ancient poem, “The Last Song of Sappho” (1831), she is inspired by the passion of a woman deserted by her lover.

The young Elizabeth Barrett, however, dreamed of being “the feminine of Homer” (Hurst 7). The closest she came was her Aurora Leigh (1857), which, Hurst points out, has invited comparison with the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Milton (124). Hurst sees the poem as “redefin[ing] epic by making it more like the novel, the pre- eminent genre for Victorian women writers” (123). Peter Bayne calls it a



“modern epic” that sings rather of “social problems and the woman” than arms and the man (107; Hurst 124). Like Byron’s Don Juan, Aurora Leigh pauses midway through the poem to consider what the age demands of its poetry. Having expressed a “hope” to “speak my poems in mysterious tune / With man and nature” and a fear that “our woman-hands should shake and fail,” the poet puts her trust in God: “Art for art, / And good for God Himself, the essential Good!” (197; 5.69–73). She refuses to believe those “critics [who] say that epics have died out / With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods” (199; 5.139–40). Yet, she recognizes that this revered genre must adapt to the needs of the age:

Nay, if there’s room for poets in this worldA little overgrown (I think there is),Their sole work is to represent the age,Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age,That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,And spends more passion, more heroic heat,Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles. (201; 200–207)

Like Don Juan, Aurora Leigh recognizes that human nature has not changed but that epic should. It must shift from past tense to present and it should take its subject matter from the bountiful everyday dramas of a contemporary audience. In telling the tale from the beginning (not starting, like classical epic, in medias res) of the life and passions of an ordinary girl—herself—Aurora Leigh achieves this metamorphosis of her chosen genre, just as Don Juan did. As Hurst concludes of the poem, it transforms ancient epic so as to demonstrate that “modern heroism lies in domestic life and in building up a new society by means of art, not arms” (129). Whether male or female, prominent or obscure, that is, British writers continued to be drawn to Virgil and his classical tradition even as they felt the need to transform ancient works into literature that read like it had been written for their contemporaries. On the other side of the Atlantic, shapers of the new republic drawn to ancient authority equally defied slavish imitation, producing metamorphoses of venerated models in their quest for American identity.

Early America and the ClassicsFor at least the first two hundred years following European settlement in America, the culture and literature of ancient Greece and Rome



were part of the fabric of politics, morality, and education in the new republic. The original committee that designed the Seal of the “United States,” for example, selected three Latin tags, including two from Virgil that still in the twenty-first century circulate ceaselessly on currency (Kelsall, Jefferson 64–67). The Roman figure, Cato, histo-rians agree, provided an ideal that shaped the daily conduct of George Washington. Indeed, the young general staged Addison’s Cato, a play lauding the stern morality of republican Rome, to boost his troops’ morale at Valley Forge on May 11, 1778 (Furtwangler 38).8 Phillis Wheatley, who was brought from Africa as a slave and later freed, sought acceptance as an American and authority in the debate about black intellectual equality in part by thoroughly acquainting herself with “the most important Latin classics, especially the works of Virgil and Ovid” (Bell 182). This early American tendency, “consciously” to imitate, as Everett Emerson puts it, “the grand style of ancient Greece and Rome” stemmed surely from nervousness: “Americans judged themselves inferior to their countrymen across the water because they lacked the culture and social life of the mother country” (11). Inspiring examples from the past would help Americans root the morality of the burgeoning nation. Carole Winterer observes, for example, that when Thomas Jefferson “designed the Virginia state capitol to resemble the Roman temple at Nîmes,” he “argued for the power of public buildings to transmit a political philosophy stating that they ‘should be more than things of beauty and convenience; above all they should state a creed’ ” (29). As Washington’s adulation of the morality in Addison’s Cato indicates, republican Rome provided the greatest source of inspiration. Winterer outlines its appealing features: “the Senate as guarantor of liberty and stability; the ideal of the cultivated, virtuous Ciceronian orator; and agriculture as the safeguard to civic virtue” (19). Republican Rome also provided writers (Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, Sallust) who could teach the needed morality and politi-cal ideals—who could, as Emerson puts it, teach Americans how to “become eighteenth-century Catos and Brutuses” (11). Emerson cites John Adams, who argues of Roman republicanism that it “introduces knowledge among the People, inspires them with a conscious dignity, becoming Freemen. A general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be gen-eral” (11).9 In particular, “Revolutionary Americans idealized Cicero (106–43 B.C.) as a model of eloquence and style and also as the ideal citizen whose incorruptible morals protected the Roman republic from tyranny” (Winterer 25).



Even more than Wordsworth, Byron, Barrett Browning, and their British contemporaries, shapers of the new American republic were wary of the tendency empires had to degenerate. Abigail Adams’s reflection on civic ideals in a letter to John Adams of 1774 is reveal-ing: “If we expect to inherit the blessings of our Fathers, we should return a little more to their primitive Simplicity of Manners, and not sink into inglorious ease” (qtd. by Emerson 10). As Emerson points out, “Americans asserted their independence of Britain in part to save themselves from what they saw as the evils of luxury and politi-cal corruption” (10). Even packaging of the classics for Americans conformed to this “primitive Simplicity,” as one Massachusetts translator of Virgil demonstrates. In the Preface to his Works of Virgil Translated into Literal English Prose with Some Explanatory Notes (1796), Caleb Alexander asks “Why should Americans be depen-dent on European translators and printers for the Latin and Grecian Classics?” He is proud that the “translation now presented to the pub-lic, claims the character of being literal” so as to “make the poetry of Virgil plain and easy.” That “the book may be cheap,” furthermore, “it is contracted as much as possible. The notes are few; the ordo is entirely omitted; and no index will be subjoined” (4; italics reversed). This translation will not “indulge in great liberties,” as the poetic ren-ditions of British translators necessarily did, for its purpose in being literal is entirely practical: “to assist the young in gaining a knowledge of the language” (3).

Reverence of republican simplicity and wariness of imperial ambi-tion, moreover, affected the generic choices of writers who employed the classics as models or inspiration. Most popular were lowly modes, particularly the georgic, that Virgilian farmer’s manual that cel-ebrates the bounties and virtues rewarding human toil in the earth and offers guidance in the human battle with the elements. While the tradition and glory associated with epic appealed to American writers, just as they had to Byron and Barrett Browning, the basic assumptions of Augustan epic were even more offensive, and Americans further transformed the genre. Celebration of the public voice rather than a hero or heroes of the age (as Anne Grant advised in her criticism of Dryden), for example, meant that an American poem with epic ambitions could not even have a hero. So emphatic was the need for new beginnings, even if they were inspired by the primi-tivism of old Rome, that American writers took no genre wholesale either from the Ancients or from their neoclassical imitators. The result was mixing of genres, a selection of the best and most useful.



The same selectiveness characterized American employment of the classics in the culture at large, where despite the ubiquity of ancient Greece and Rome, symbolism rather than sustained integration was the norm. By the nineteenth century, as Winterer shows, Americans even turned away from republican Rome, now more dazzled by “the art, literature, and landscape of Greece” (62).

The influence on the new republic of the Western classical tra-dition was strongest in education. As Winterer sums up higher American education in the first two centuries, from “the founding of Harvard College in 1636 to the 1880s, when colleges across the nation began to drop their Greek and Latin requirements, classical learning formed the core of college education in America” (1). Emerson points out that the model for curricula was taken from “the Renaissance tradition”: “at King’s College (later Columbia) in 1754, for instance, beginning students were required to know Cicero’s orations and the first books of Vergil’s Aeneid. The framers of the Constitution stud-ied Aristotle, Cicero, and Polybius; even the largely self-educated Benjamin Franklin freely quoted Vergil, Horace, and Xenophon” (11). The emphasis in colleges, however, as Winterer demonstrates using the example of Harvard, was on learning languages. Exercises that dominated a student’s time “included parsing, scanning, recita-tion, and translation.” Surprisingly, given the new nation’s apparent fascination with the ancient world, “history, literature, and antiqui-ties played a miniscule heuristic role” (29). By the latter half of the eighteenth century, the usefulness of such an education had come under question. Winterer points out that such “influential fig-ures” as “Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), Thomas Paine (1737–1809), Noah Webster (1758–1843)” attacked contemporary education, arguing “that the ‘dead languages’ were useless to farmers, mechanics, and merchants; that they wasted the most important, formative years of a student’s life in quickly forgot-ten grammatical niceties” (42). She further argues that the “expan-sion and transformation of the college curriculum after the turn of the nineteenth century stemmed from the large-scale shifts in American society, economics, and politics during this time” so that “John Quincy Adams stood last in the line of classically educated statesmen from the Revolutionary era” (45–47).

Those in the early period who did utilize their classical knowledge to comment on the new nation turned frequently to the pre- Aeneid, less blameworthy Virgil, or at least to the georgic mode he had shaped, the values of which were still anchored in that wholesome



republic whose end Virgil had witnessed. David Shields argues that Virgil’s georgic offered the ideal model to Americans in their efforts to create a great nation, an empire in effect that would not fall victim to the evils that had destroyed the Greek and Roman empires. After all, agriculture was, he claims, for Virgil

. . . the quintessential imperial act, for the imposition of control upon nature, upon the newly conquered or colonized lands, was the justification of Roman power. It was a heroic activity, a war with the earth, a reformation of nature’s fundamental forces to adhere to human design. . . . Southern planters understood Virgil’s message perfectly. . . . They were de novo creators, witnessing the imposition of design upon a seemingly chaotic natural profusion. (71)

While Emerson comments generally that the “new republican ideal dramatically affected how Americans thought about their land and themselves,” Shields is more specific in pinpointing the staple system, on which the New World economy depended, as providing fertile ground in which georgics flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, with Virgil offering models and Dryden translations (Emerson 11; Shields 18).10 British America’s georgics, Shields remarks, were closer to Virgil’s in their concern with “disturbance” and “Virgil’s war with the earth” than those of their British counterparts, who were more worried about “peace and plenty on the seas” (68). In each case, how-ever, challenges arose, the biggest being the immorality of slavery, which became central to agricultural success. Shields points out that one poet, in his Jamaica; a Poem, in Three Parts. Written in That Island, in the Year MDCCLXXVI, “called into question the heroism of staple agriculture in that island” (83). If slaves rather than virtuous farmers produced the sugar, the activity was hardly heroic in a georgic or any other sense. This problem of adapting American circumstance to a classical genre manifested itself everywhere in generic instability.

The best-known early American georgic, Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1794), exemplifies the fluidity of genre in the new republic as poets tried to produce a nationalistic verse that had the authority of tradition. President of Yale, Dwight was one of the so-called Connecticut Wits, a group that, William Dowling contends, cultivated a “Connecticut georgic,” an image of society that, on a moral level, provided “a model for the new American republic” (76). At the heart of this ideal was a vision of “the Virgilian swain . . . contentedly at work in his fields and vineyards, as he has been for eighteen



centuries, but now the clients at the gate are separated from him by three thousand miles of ocean” (Dowling 76). Dwight’s poem, like Virgil’s Georgics, is as much a celebration of both nation and the land as it is a warning against those evils always threatening both individual and nation. In Part II, which glorifies “The Flourishing [American] Village,” the poet delights in the rural “Sweet-smiling village” (2.74) where “the poor wanderer finds a table spread,” where “divine Religion is a guest, / And all the Virtues join the daily feast,” and where “sweet Competence” has “chang’d the scene” so that

In every hamlet, Learning builds her schools,And beggars’ children gain her arts, and rules;And mild Simplicity o’er manners reigns,And blameless morals Purity sustains. (2.101, 109–10, 157, 161–64)

Simultaneously, this poet has his eye on such threats as “foul luxury,” “invidious strife,” and that most troubling evil, slavery:

Ceaseless I hear the smacking whip resound;Hark! that shrill scream! that groan of death-bed sound!See those throng’d wretches pant along the plain,Tug the hard hoe, and sigh in hopeless pain!

There is no virtue in toil like this. Dwight stresses the necessity of constant vigilance, his wariness stemming, John Griffith argues, from the cyclical view of history that the poet shared with such con-temporaries “as John Adams and Charles Chauncy, who believed his-tory to be a long series of cycles in which nations and societies fall in apparently endless sequence” (236). Dwight’s ceaseless resistance to “the universal human tendency toward decay,” as it is manifested in this poem, Griffith argues, provides “the only ordering princi-ple in Dwight’s patchwork poem” (247). In his attempt to build an essentially American georgic, perhaps one that might teach citizens to avoid the pitfalls that led even the readers of Virgil’s Georgics on the road to ruin, Dwight seems to have trusted no single mode or form. He shifts, as Griffith points out, from “the topographical tra-dition of Cooper’s Hill and Windsor Forest” to imitation of The Deserted Village, to historical narration, to “moral and practical maxims” (247). Not even his verse remains constant, moving as it does from blank verse to heroic couplets to octosyllabic couplets, and even imitating Spenserian stanzas (Griffith 247).



Philip Freneau, in The American Village (1772), also refuses to adopt wholesale any established mode even as he obviously employs the georgic. Like Dwight too, Freneau rejects a full-blown heroic for his nationalistic poem, implicitly in his choice of genre and explicitly. The poem begins as an unabashed georgic: “Where yon-der stream divides the fertile plain, / Made fertile by the labours of the swain,” the poet announces, “ev’ry joy and bliss is there, / And healthful labour crowns the flowing year” (1–2, 6–7). Such an open-ing evokes both Virgil and the British georgic, providing an image of earth liberally offering up its bounty.11 The poet then calls upon Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), however, to suggest that his poem will offer a happy alternative to the tale of “Deserted Auburn” (8–9). Subsequent passages are pastoral in their retreat from a real world, but the poet, like Dwight, is also wary of imminent dangers to “New Albion.” “GREAT ROME,” he says, “who ow’d to ROMULUS her birth, / Fell to the monster LUXURY, a prey” (199–200). Carthage and Judea also “dy’d.” But “if America,” this farthest outpost of civiliza-tion also succumbs “to this decay, / The world itself must fall as well as she” (203–09). Freneau warns, accordingly, about the insidious temptations of the heroic. As he imagines a “LOVELY island” before European inhabitation, he remarks, “No loud applause there rais’d the patriot breast, / No shouting armies their mad joy confest, / For battles gain’d, or trophies nobly won, / Or nations conquer’d near the rising sun” (102–5).

These examples suggest that the georgic mode offered an early American heroic. Few poets attempted an epic in the mode of Virgil or Homer. The best-known American epic is Joel Barlow’s Columbiad, a poem that suffers the same fate as Blackmore’s epics: students of the period usually acknowledge it in passing, but dis-miss it as an unfortunate blip in literary history by a poet who should have known better. Like Wordsworth, Byron, and Barrett Browning, Barlow was doubtless drawn to the glory and tradition rooted in ancient epics as he undertook an epic-scale American poem that would glorify the new nation. Like his English predeces-sors too, Barlow transformed that once most-revered genre. As an American poet, he rejected the kind of heroic that posited warfare as the instrument of teleological history and placed a nation’s fate in the hands of a single hero. The pacifist principles on which he built his Vision of Columbus and then the Columbiad, which was a reworking of the former poem, are clearly laid out in A Poem Spoken at the Public Commencement at Yale College in New Haven, Sept 12, 1781.



In his opening, Barlow expresses weariness over the hardships of the revolution: “Thro’ seven long years hath war’s terrific power / Rang’d every town and crimson’d every shore” (Poem 1). A crucial part of his message is that “from each new realm, new arts extend,” and the poet advises the nation’s builders and would-be poets in the audience to abandon notions of the glory of war so readily found in ancient epic:

The soaring bard awakes the trembling string,Virtues and loves and heavenly themes to sing;No more of vengeful chiefs and bickering Gods,Where ocean crimson and Olympus nods,Or heavens, convulsing rend the dark profound,To chain fierce Titans to the groaning ground,But, fir’d by milder themes, and charms refin’d,His soul awakes the peace inspiring song,And life and happiness the strain prolong. (Poem 14–15)

This injunction to peace as the basis of a great new nation continues in The Columbiad, the object of which Barlow claims, as Dowling points out, “is to inculcate the love of rational liberty, and to discountenance the deleterious passion for violence and war” (Barlow, Works 382; Dowling 107).

In the Introduction to The Vision of Columbus, the “Author” con-fesses to have “at first, formed an idea of attempting a regular Epic Poem, on the discovery of America” (xxi). Like Dryden in the Preface to Annus Mirabilis (see page 28–29), however, he asserts that the his-torical matter he must address does not quite fit the “regular” epic mode. The “most brilliant subjects” of this poem “must be repre-sented in vision,” and sufficiently to protract this vision would “ren-der it disproportionate to the rest of the work” (xxi). The poet then, however, reveals a hero who would not work in a “regular” epic: a man of “desponding mind” who must be convinced “that his labours had not been bestowed in vain, and that he was the author of such extensive happiness to the human race” (xxi). When Book I opens, Columbus is right away presented as “the Sage” (a philosopher hero), and if he bears any kinship to ancient heroes it is to Aeneas in those moments of weakness that eighteenth British commentators dwelt on. Within the first page, Columbus “awakes” in his prison and laments “to the walls” those “deeply-felt sorrows of his manly breast” (1.1). But, as Griffith points out of The Columbiad, Barlow establishes “no single hero, on the order of Homer’s Odysseus or Virgil’s Aeneas,



upon whose adventures the poet can focus (Columbus does not do any-thing in Barlow’s poem; he just watches)” (239). As Griffith observes, Barlow is concerned rather with “a heroic spirit, which is embodied in a dozen figures populating the poem from its introduction to the concluding prose notes” (239). For the new American ideals this poet espouses, his failure to present a single hero is as fitting as his refusal to glorify war. The poem shares with its ancient predecessors a desire to glorify national ideals and to anchor tradition, but its content is entirely tailored to a nineteenth-century American audience.

EpilogueWhen Fielding’s Scarecrow walks into Bookweight’s shop, in The Author’s Farce, eager to make a few pounds from his “translation” of Dryden’s translation of Virgil (see page 1), he hopes to capitalize on the aura still encompassing the once mighty Ancient, while contrib-uting to contemporary literature another version of Virgil. In his unwitting recognition that the poet’s reputation has lasted while his original works have been all but abandoned, Scarecrow accurately pinpoints the poet’s place in English letters. As Virgil Made English has demonstrated, Virgil’s status by the early eighteenth century in Britain was also that of the classics in general in the formative stages of American culture. Enthralled by Virgil’s mystique (like Wordsworth, Byron, and women writers in nineteenth-century Britain), American writers were eager to establish their works within a venerated tradition, but only if that tradition could be rendered per-tinent to the needs and tastes of contemporary readers. Like the par-odists in the seventeenth century and the earliest English novelists, these early American writers raised the lowly by bringing unlikely heroes and situations into contact with the exalted traditions of yore. Also like their predecessors on the other side of the Atlantic, American writers employed the classics in their quest for an ongoing poetic discourse across the ages. For, poets like Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow followed Dryden in his Fables and Byron in his Don Juan in evoking a myriad of voices from the past to question, engage in, perpetuate, and metamorphose all that was best from the past. In refusing too, as Voltaire had, to honor the Ancients and their bloody heroes simply because tradition shouted their importance, American poets like Barlow in The Columbiad contributed to Virgil’s descent into near oblivion, a process facilitated by the eighteenth-century



antiquarian approach to the poet and his contemporaries—except for Horace, the honorary Englishman. The legacy of that deliberate neglect lingers, perhaps, in twenty-first century American English classrooms where the majority of students have never heard of Virgil, much less read any part of the Aeneid. Still vibrant, however, is Dryden’s legacy: when Virgil is praised, it is for the beauty of his poetry.


NOTES

Introduction 1. Dryden takes this opening of his 1697 Dedication of the Aeneis from René

Rapin’s Observations (1672), as editors of the California Dryden note. The seventeenth-century neoclassical commentators who preferred Virgil’s clear moral and selfless civic hero included Rapin, Bossu, Bossu’s English translator, and, in the eighteenth century, Voltaire.

2. Kallendorf cites Landino’s quotations in Latin and translates them. 3. For example, Webb, “Vergil in Spenser’s Epic Theory” (70) and

O.B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument (80–84). 4. Cited by Webb, “Vergil in Spenser’s Epic Theory” (72). 5. As James Nohrnberg puts it, “Spenser typically relates the epic themes

to his romance fictions by means of allegory . . . national consecration is an epic theme” (23).

6. “Itaque non ex ipsius naturae opere uno potuimus exempla capere, quae ex una Virgiliana idea mutuati sumus.” Translated and quoted by Bernard Weinberg.

7. The Whole Critical Works of Monr. Rapin was published in 1706, 1716, and 1731. The title of the first edition announced that the Works were “newly translated into English by several hands.” The title of the second and third editions read “Translated into English, by Basil Kennet, . . . and others.”

8. See page 139 below. 9. Mary Beth Gugler, for example, provides a medical analysis in her

“Mercury and the ‘Pains of Love’ in Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed.’ ” Ellen Pollak, meanwhile, sees the poem as part of Swift’s general misogyny in The Poetics of Sexual Myth (165). Responding to what he sees as the need in the poem for a “broadly materialist and broadly psychoanalytical response,” Brean Hammond employs narratives of Freud and Marx in his “Corinna’s Dream.”

10. For Hunter, “the quick flash of the present moment was to be the new focus of experience and the center that would control modes of thought, systems of value, and the content and form of literature” (109).

11. In his “Exemplary History and the Political Satire of Gulliver’s Travels,” Simon Varey discusses Swift’s use of “exemplary history”—the “lessons of examples” employed by “historian and satirist alike” for “effective moral purpose” (47).


220 Notes

Chapter 1 Virgil in the 1650s and 1660s: Dismantling Augustanism

1. Evelyn, in his diary entry for May 29, 1660, reveals his desperate need to believe that God’s hand still controls the course of English history: “This day came in his Majestie Charles the 2d to London after a sad, & long Exile and Calamitous Suffering both of the King & Church: being 17 yeares: This was also his Birthday, & with a Triumph of above 20000 horse & foote, brandishing their swords and shouting with unexpress-able joy . . . I stood in the strand, and beheld it, & blessed God: And all this without one drop of bloud, & by that very army, which rebell’d against him: but it was the Lords doing, et mirabile in oculis nostris: for such a Restauration was never seene in the mention of any history, anti-ent or modern, since the returne of the Babylonian Captivity, not so joy-full a day, & so bright, ever seene in this nation: this hapning when to expect or effect it, was past all humane policy” (246).

2. Kelsall highlights the substitution of Virgil’s religion and quasidivine heroes with epic “machinery” as the former became utterly implausible. As he comments, “Nothing could be more alien to the minds of French or English critics, both Christian and enlightened” than worship of Augustus and the hero’s communication with the gods (365–66).

3. The full title of Fanshawe’s collection of poems is Il Pastor Fido: The Faithfull Shepherd. With an Addition of Divers Other Poems.

4. Citation from the 1658 edition. The title page reads, “The Passion of Dido for Aeneas: As it is Incomparably Exprest in the Fourth Book of Virgil. Translated by Edmund Waller and Sidney Godolphin, Esqrs.” There are no page numbers.

5. Zwicker reminds us that “we would do well to imagine books and readers in a world haunted by coercion and fear; rent by religion and politics; wary, in the aftermath of civil war, of the directions in which jealousies and fears might drive a commonweal” (Lines of Authority 7).

6. Pocock reports that not only was Harrington a companion of Charles I but he “conceived an intense personal devotion to the King, and suffered so acutely at his death that for a long time he lived in withdrawal and melan-choly, which turned in due time to study” (Harrington, Political Works 4).

7. In other words, the kind of prince who would, as Rapin was to say in English in 1672, instruct “Princes and Grandees.” Rapin outlines the perfections of Virgil’s prince: the poet “makes a conjunction of all the virtues to frame his [hero]: he gives him Religion towards the Gods; piety, towards his Country; tendernesse and friendship for his Relations and equity and justice, towards all” (Observations 8, 22).

8. In 1656, Harrington published his utopian The Commonwealth of Oceana. Dedicated to “His Highness the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland,” Oceana is republi-can in its politics. Pocock calls Harrington “a classical republican,


Notes 221

and England’s premier civic humanist and Machiavellian,” describing Oceana as an explanation of “how a lightly fictionalized England has become a commonwealth of independent freeholders—a democracy in the sense that it consists of a Many rather than a Few—and second, how this commonwealth may be organized for government as a repub-lic.” Pocock also notes that it is “reported that Charles [I] and [Harrington] used to discuss political theory together, except that the King would not permit him to speak of republics” (Harrington, Political Works 4, 15, 43).

9. Dryden, as devoted to Charles II as Harrington was to Charles I, strug-gles with this same issue in Absalom and Achitophel, where he weighs up the alternatives to monarchy where the king is supreme and concludes,

If ancient Fabricks nod, and threat to fall,To Patch the Flaws, and Buttress up the Wall,Thus far ‘tis Duty; but here fix the Mark:For all beyond it is to touch our Ark.To change Foundations, cast the Frame anew,Is work for Rebels who base Ends pursue. (Works 2: 29)

10. So Lois Potter puts it in her discussion of translation as part of Interregnum Royalist codes (52).

11. William Sessions highlights this aspect of the Renaissance Virgil.12. The title page reads, Poems, viz. 1. A Panegyrick to the King. 2. Songs and

Sonnets. 3. The Blind Lady, a Comedy. 4. The Fourth Book of Virgil, 5. Statius his Achilleis, with Annotations. 6. A Panegyrick to Generall Monck. By the Honorable Sr Robert Howard.

13. The quote is from a letter from Mordaunt to Henrietta Maria in January, 1660.

14. Sowerby calls Denham’s translation a “version of quality.” This quality, he continues, “is particularly obvious when contrasted with his immediate predecessors, Phaer and Twyne (1558–84), Vicars (1632), and Ogilby (1647). He has poetic talent, and translates Virgil effectively into a modern idiom” (“Augustan Dryden” 58).

15. The first four editions of the collection include the original title page, dating the translation to 1636. By the fifth edition of 1709, the title page has disappeared, but the title introducing the poem includes the date 1636. This is the case for all subsequent eighteenth-century editions of Poems and Translations.

16. Lawrence Venuti discusses details from both the 1636 translation and the 1656 revision, showing how the language of the latter “endowed it with subtle allusions to English settings and institutions, strengthening the historical analogy between the fall of Troy and the defeat of the roy-alist party” (214).

17. As O Hehir argues, “Coopers Hill is not about the landscape: the landscape underlies and contains what it is about.” O Hehir sees the poem as embodying “the message written in the landscape in God’s


222 Notes

hieroglyphicks. Everything within that landscape, whether made by God or man—and the distinction is not always either clear or relevant—is a hieroglyph, impresa, or short emblem” (4, 20).

18. The centrality of this juxtaposition to the politics of the collection is reinforced by the fact that all editions of it, into the eighteenth century, continue to place the poems on facing pages. The more expensive fifth edition of 1709 even ends “The Destruction of Troy” and begins the Strafford poem on the same page.

19. On this basis, the whole passage can be seen as what Stallybrass and White call a “domain of transgression” (25).

20. Contrast Richard Fanshawe’s 1648 Royalist rendition of this passage. Fanshawe’s Aeneas, like Virgil’s, is enflamed with purpose by the god’s visit:

Æneas at the vision shakes with fright,His tongue cleaves to his jaws, his hair stands bolt upright.He is on fire to go, and flie that LandOf sweet enchantments, being skar’d awayBy no less warning than the Gods command.But (ah!) what shall he do? How dare t’assayWith words the am’rous Queen? (283)

Parry discusses Fanshawe’s 1648 collection, the full title of which is Il Pastor Fido: The Faithfull Shepherd with an Addition of Divers Other Poems.

21. Keeble outlines the expectations following the Restoration and Charles II’s failure to meet these (83).

22. According to Katherine Van Eerde, Dryden set the tone for condemnation of Ogilby with his MacFlecknoe (146).

23. In the 1649 edition, the page numbering begins at page 1 for the First Book of the Eclogues and runs consecutively through the Eclogues and Georgics. It then, oddly, begins at page 1 again for the Aeneid.

24. In her description of Ogilby’s life and works, Van Eerde claims that his big interest and life’s love was the production of the book (esp. 12 and 32).

25. McLaverty highlights the importance of the frontispiece that is accompanied by other prefatory materials in the 1717 Works of Mr. Alexander Pope: “A central role in the projection of the author is played by the frontispiece.” Like Ogilby’s Virgil, Pope’s early printing of his works, in collaboration with his publisher, Lintot, was intended to promote his own status as author. McLaverty observes of Pope’s 1717 Works, it was “dignified, decorative, and expensive . . . the boldest as well as the most beautiful of Pope’s books, proclaiming both the poet’s youth and his achievement with a confident flourish” (46, 62).

26. Ogilby’s sense of his own authorship of this fine work might be compared to that of Pope in his early Works, more than a half century later. As


Notes 223

McLaverty says of the 1717 Works, the “Volume gave Pope the opportunity to fashion a large book that was to represent the author himself” (56).

27. As Van Eerde notes, “Ogilby commissioned prints from some of the best artists then working in England, such as Francis Cleyn, Wenceslaus Hollar, and William Faithorne” (35). Dryden would reuse Ogilby’s engravings in the folios of his 1697 translation, dedicating them to his own patrons.

28. Knowles claims of the 1662 Entertainment that Ogilby’s design is deeply indebted to Virgil’s “schema.” As I shall argue, however, this is true of the 1661 Entertainment rather than the 1662 version that draws heavily upon a number of classical, especially Latin, writers in strategic places (Ogilby, Entertainment 21).

29. As McLaverty observes at the outset of his discussion of Pope’s printing trends, “looking is a necessary but not sufficient condition of reading” (7).

Chapter 2 Virgil in the 1670s and 1680s: The Emperor’s New Clothes

1. Harris says it “seemed to many contemporaries that ‘41 was come again” (Restoration 408).

2. This theatrical activity also reflects the rise and fall of Royalist strength, for, as Doug Canfield argues in an article on “Royalism’s last dramatic stand,” the early 1680s saw a revival of tragedies that “rigorously defend the old feudal aristocratic ideals” (235).

3. Keeble discusses Evelyn’s and Wren’s plans for “a neo-classical city, a new Rome” (204).

4. As Harrison observes, “H. T. Swedenberg’s study of epic theory from the publication of the essays of Davenant and Hobbes to the end of the eighteenth century shows clearly how the formalist theories, based on Aristotle, Horace and the French neo-classicists, survived with only minor variations well into the latter half of the eighteenth century when the ‘rules’ began to be thought of as obstacles to the production of genius . . . ” (“English Virgil” 1). The work referred to is Swedenberg’s Theory of Epic in England, 1650–1800.

5. Rapin’s treatise was enormously popular on its publication in 1672 (it went through two editions in that year alone) and by 1731 had been printed at least three more times as part of The Whole Critical Works of Monr. Rapin (London, 1706, 1716, and 1731). See note 7, page 219 above.

6. The quote is from Tristram Shandy, Book 3, Chapter 12. 7. So fierce was L’Estrange’s relentless polemic, Keeble argues, that it “was

the determination of L’Estrange, rather than the Licensing Act, courts or Stationers’ Company, which made press control during the 1660s so much more vindictive and partisan than anything experienced before” (153).


224 Notes

8. Benedict points especially to David Lewis’s 1726 miscellany that “appeals to both male and female readers,” offering “Latin verse, once accessible only to male readers” (149).

9. Benedict compares the “feast” offered by the miscellanies to the classical notion of the satura, or full plate (9).

10. While most readers did know the author of both MacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden was officially to maintain his anonymity as author until the publication of his “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” in 1692. There he talks about the “Character of Zimri in my Absalom” as an example of fine satire (Works 4: 71).

11. Benedict shows convincingly how the miscellanies both reflected and shaped the world of their readers. As she puts it, “miscellanies sold texts of choice and the choice of texts” (3).

12. In Astraea Redux Dryden captures both the idea of revolving centuries and the forward movement of history to a prophesied end. With the Restoration, “now times whiter Series is begun / Which in soft Centuries shall smoothly run.” Charles II is that “happy Prince whom Heav’n hath taught the way / By paying Vowes, to have more Vowes to pay! / Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone / By Fate reserv’d for Great Augustus Throne” (Works 1: 31; 318–21).

13. While Dryden presents the theory as his own, it has its origins in Denham’s discussion of translation in the preface to his “Destruction of Troy”: “Where my expressions are not so full as his, either our Language, or my Art were defective (but I rather suspect my self;) but where mine are fuller than his, they are but the impressions which the often reading of him hath left upon my thoughts; so that if they are not his own Conceptions, they are at least the results of them . . . ” (Works 160).

14. Tate too continued his Royalist activity after Brutus of Alba with a series of unsuccessful but earnest plays, including a version of Richard II that sympathetically portrayed the king striving to spare his subjects from civil war but was banned because its depiction of an unsuccessful usurper was untimely to say the least. His Ingratitude of a Commonwealth, another Shakespeare adaptation, presents the hero as recognizably idealized James, Duke of York, and is overtly Royalist in its politics, but the play was a failure (Corman 2003).

15. Steele, Richard, The Tatler No. 9 (April 30, 1709).16. Brean Hammond observes critical dissent over the mockery of the

heroic by mock-heroics when he quotes Ulrich Brioch’s study, The Eighteenth-Century Mock Heroic Poem. Brioch claims that the original poem “whether Horace or classical epic” is “never mocked,” for what-ever is done with that work “the poetic quality of the model is not impugned” (58–59). Hammond demonstrates that even Brioch is, finally, unable to sustain this argument and he concludes with him, “There is an ambivalence towards antiquity and towards the contemporary world


Notes 225

that results in a veneration for the epic at the same time as there is a growing conviction that the values epic represents have disappeared beyond recall.” The result is deliberate mockery by the mock heroics of both “contemporary classical-style epic” as well as by “pedantic neo-classical commentators” (Professional Imaginative Writing 106).

17. The editor of the Garland edition of Scarronides reports of the 1664 text that “though one cannot prove how many printed copies resulted from each setting of type, it is significant that the item was set three times in the first year of publication so that one is justified in claiming three editions for that one year. In 1665 a second and final part of his Scarronides, Aeneid, Book IV, appeared. By 1666, another edition, reis-suing the latest state of Book IV (1665) with a new setting of Book 1 reached the Bookseller; it may be labeled the first collected edition of the work” (5). In all, there were 24 editions of Book 1 and 21 of Book4.

18. A. I. Dust discusses at length the influences on Cotton in Chapter 2 of Charles Cotton’s Works.

19. “Arms and the Man, I sing”—the famous opening line of Virgil’s epic.20. Cotton’s Garland editor, A.I. Dust, notes the attacks on the poet for his

comparative lack of subtlety, defending him on the grounds that his satires does “go further” than the Frenchman’s (Cotton’s Works, 49–51). Dryden employed the metaphor of severing head from body while leaving the latter standing when he described his satiric purpose in Absalom and Achitophel in 1693 (4: 71).

21. Dust says explicitly that in calling Aeneas and his friends “mutton mongers,” Cotton resembles John Taylor, whose works he owned (Cotton’s Works, 21, 25).

22. Edwards makes the same point more obscurely when he claims that in “its bizarre, off-beat way,” mock-heroic “brings into the open the need for poetry, the need for change, and the need for the everyday” (63).

23. Tenney Frank neatly posits the “Augustan” impetus of Virgil’s historico-poetical vision: “The dramatic purpose of the descensus [the descent to the underworld] was of course to complete for Aeneas the progressive revelation of his mission, so skillfully developed by careful stages all through the third book, to give the hero his final commands and to inspire him for the final struggle. Then the poet realized that he could at the same time . . . [display] Rome’s great heroes presented in review by Anchises from the mount of revelations, for this was an age in which Rome was growing proud of her history” (189).

24. Stallybrass and White call the classical statue, at which “we gaze up . . . and wonder,” the memento classici.

25. Dustin Griffin claims that satire is by nature dialogical: it questions and probes values and norms. His argument is meant to counter the previous view of satirists as belonging to a cut-and-dry moral world; it is neatly summed up in his conclusion (Satire 185–98).


226 Notes

26. As Kelsall points out, “When Rapin praised the ‘exquisite Delicacy’ of Virgil he cited the line ‘tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento’ ” (369). The line is from Jupiter’s prophetic speech in Aeneid Book 1. Rapin’s words highlight the centrality of Virgil’s political vision to his poetic one: “What is there to be found in all Homer comparable to that Passage, which I have ever look’d upon as of exquisite Delicacy, in the sixth Aeneid, where Virgil is content to allow the Greeks the Glory of being a People of great Wit and Ingenuity, reserving to the Romans that of Authority and Power?” (Critical Works [1731], 2: 184).

27. The poem is inspired by an obscure note in Servius that casts doubt over Aeneas’s character.

Chapter 3 Virgil, 1688–1700: A Watershed of English Literature

1. This is Lady Mary Chudleigh’s tribute, cited by John Barnard (214). 2. Volume 5 of The Works of John Dryden prints the commendatory poems

on Dryden’s Virgil. 3. Barnard’s article explores the diversity of the subscribers to Dryden

and Tonson’s undertaking, concluding that this diversity enabled the translation to transcend politics.

4. There are no page numbers in the Preface. 5. Swedenberg suggests that Dennis was first in his enthusiasm for the

sublime (65). 6. Levine suggests that Dryden grew more conservative with the passing

years. 7. Zwicker discusses in detail the Jacobite implications of the passage just

cited (“Reading Vergil” 284). 8. Or, as Zwicker says of the Jacobite interests here, “Perhaps the idea of

Latinus as James II—gracious father to his people and sage parliamentarian—would have roused the scorn of much of Dryden’s audience, but who could have missed the analogy between Aeneas and William, the thrust of the end of this passage?” (“Reading Vergil” 286).

9. Sowerby argues that the terms Dryden chooses are a “shorthand summation of the classical legacy in both rhetoric and poetry more generally” and he takes for granted that Dryden upheld these principles in his translation as a whole (Augustan Art of Poetry 126–27).

10. In Time to Begin Anew, I discuss at length, in relation to Dryden’s Aeneis, the Bakhtinian notion of epic’s “absolute past” confronting novelistic “inconclusiveness” (esp. 142–44).

11. Michael Wilding sees both Hudibras and Paradise Lost as rejecting the Renaissance ethic of military glory and the type of heroism that attends it: “Both Milton and Butler recognize the ethical importance of literature and both are concerned that the false ethic of military heroism


Notes 227

should no longer be spread. Butler believes that both the message and the medium are unacceptable” (180).

12. Richard Kroll is more pointed than any other critic in arguing that Dryden takes a “plague on both your houses” stance in the 1690s (esp. 69).

13. Prior’s “Carmen Seculare, For the Year 1700: To the King,” for example, is an Annus Mirabilis-style glorification of William III as England’s destined hero. Likewise, his “Prologue, Spoken at Court before the Queen, on her Majesty’s Birth-Day, 1704” uses Virgilian language of peaceful empire following war (Works 161–81 and 215–16).

14. There are no page numbers in the preface.15. One wonders how Dryden, an admirer of Bossu, felt about W.J.’s

excessive praise of Blackmore in the preface to his translation of that critic.

16. Frost observes, “Dryden’s deities are . . . the lusty inhabitants of a kind of perpetual Olympian alehouse, whose walls re-echo with salty personal invective or loud roars of drunken mirth” (Dryden 65). Chapter 4 of my Time to Begin Anew also considers the almost mock-heroic element of the “war books” of Dryden’s Aeneis.

17. Jane Garrett discusses the presentation of William III as an instrument of Providence.

18. James D. Garrison argues that “In the century inaugurated by Dryden’s Fables, piety is gradually displaced by moral terms that express public engagement and social responsibility, dimensions of meaning once but no longer conveyed by pietas. . . . piety is a liability for reasons traceable to the basic conflict in history between its Classical and Christian, ancient and derived meanings: although its Classical associations connect it to an ethic that is public, rational, noble, even heroic, the adoption of the word by Christianity eventually lends it quite different associations with what is private, emotional, humble, meek, feminine, with what David Hume calls ‘monkish virtues.’ It is this latter cluster of connotations that ultimately prevails in English literature of the eighteenth century” (255).

19. The opening of Dryden’s Aeneis is discussed in Time to Begin Anew (105).20. This point is made in Time to Begin Anew (30).21. Bakhtin’s essay “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study

of the Novel” focuses on the processes whereby epic as a closed genre representing a hierarchical world fixed in a valorized past gives way to a novelistic spirit. Bakhtin sees Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire in particular as marking the moment of epic’s death and the novel’s ascendancy. Brean Hammond first observes that typically “the forms of the 1690s are mixed: tragicomic, sentimentalized drama and fiction that admits realistic elements” (Professional Imaginative Writing 105).

22. I argue this point in Time to Begin Anew (128). Chapter 3 there describes the Ovidian nature of Dryden’s Aeneis. The first two chapters on the


228 Notes

Georgics show how Dryden was feeling his way toward this methodology in those earlier translations.

23. At the heart of Jacob Fuchs’ argument about the “Postcolonial Mock-Epic” is the idea that the eighteenth century “abrogated” the classics on the grounds that they were distinctly “other” (27–28).

24. Reverand discusses the Fables passage (Dryden’s translation of Iliad I). In contrast to “Homer, Chapman, and Ogilby,” Reverand observes, “Dryden’s royal hypocrite . . . is much more concerned with what is due him as king” (17).

25. I borrow the key terms from Jacob Fuchs’ discussion of the postcolonial status of the classics.

26. My Time to Begin Anew argues throughout that the Aeneis should be seen as a united collection of fragments. The same point is made in Paul Hammond’s fourth chapter, “The Epic of Exile,” in his Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome. As Hammond observes, Dryden is exploiting the already “polysemic” “textual field” of the Aeneid (234).

27. Dryden’s search for permanence amidst change is the major focus of Paul Hammond’s third chapter “Mutability and Metamorphosis” and it informs his argument as a whole. Dryden’s translation theory and its resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s are also discussed in detail in the first chapter of Time to Begin Anew. Judith Sloman was the first to remark on what she called Dryden’s “logos theory” of translation (16).

28. Paul Hammond rightly remarks that the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (“Of Bodies chang’d to various Forms I sing”) could be a motto for Dryden’s work as a whole (208).

Chapter 4 Virgil, 1700–1760: Redefining Neoclassicism

1. The quote is from James Heywood. 2. Ulrich Brioch in 1968 takes Pope at face value, arguing that his “claim in

his Essay on Criticism . . . that imitating the ancients was as important as Aristotle’s demand for imitation of Nature, and as a principle was on a par with mimesis.” Yet, he forgets he has earlier pointed out that for the eighteenth-century Pope, his mocking Dunciad now classified as “epic”: Pope, in 1728, says of his Dunciad: ‘It beareth the name of Epic’, and Warburton’s preface to the 1743 version calls it a ‘little Epic’ ” (75, 62).

3. Stuart Curran discusses the innovative nature of Voltaire’s stance in his introduction to Le Bossu and Voltaire on the Epic (ix).

4. Weinbrot’s Augustus Caesar traces the rise and fall of political Augustanism; Harrison in his “English Vergil” focuses mainly on eighteenth-century perceptions of the “tyranny” of Augustanism.

5. Sambrook argues that Walsh satirizes the poem in his The Golden Age Restored, 1703. An Imitation of the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil that was printed


Notes 229

in The Works of William Walsh Esq. in Prose and Verse (London, 1736). This satire, says Sambrook, is evidence that Walsh was not the author of the original poem (324–25).

6. From the British Library copy of the eight-page edition, The Golden Age from the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil, &c., 1703 (3).

7. Mark Spilka argues that the classical realm is miniaturized by the eighteenth century. He likens it to looking back upon a high school scene in adult years: the former homecoming queens and football stars now seem trivial and do not allow scope for the complexities of adult life (72).

8. In other words, as Brean Hammond argues of the mock-heroics of the 1690s, the purpose of these poems was indeed to mock the heroic, despite critical consensus about them: “It has been an article of faith in definitions of the mock-heroic that, whatever the genre is doing, it is not mocking the heroic” (Professional Imaginative Writing 106).

9. Weinbrot quotes Pope’s outright condemnation: “The Aeneid was evidently a party piece, as much as Absalom and Achitophel. Virgil [was] as slavish a writer as any of gazetteers.”

10. Warton’s sentence follows Dryden’s verbatim (Dryden, Works 5: 283).11. Harrison cites both Warton passages (“English Virgil” 5–6).12. Obviously I disagree with Harrison’s proposal that Trapp is “the earliest

to defend Virgil in these terms” (“English Virgil” 5).13. In Time to begin Anew, I discuss the Jacobite politics of the opening of

Dryden’s Aeneis, including Trapp’s horror at Dryden’s supposed mistranslations (105–6).

14. The 1690s significance of what Dryden is doing here is also discussed in Time to Begin Anew (200).

15. Dryden repeated such statements throughout his career as translator. In the preface to Sylvae (1685), he claims of his first actual Virgil translations that they are “of a piece with [Virgil’s poetry], and that if he were living and an Englishman, they are such, as he wou’d probably have written” (Works 3: 4). He likewise ends his discussion of his Juvenal translations in 1693 by declaring “[We] have endeavour’d to make [Juvenal] speak that kind of English, which he wou’d have spoken had he liv’d in England, and had Written to this Age” (4: 89).

16. Citations are all from the title page of the 1742 text.17. This section (Dialogue V) is entitled “The Rules of the Epic or Narrative

Poem, of the Poetic Diction or Language, and of English Numbers.”18. Contrast Denham’s strong sense of his Royalist toils, continued in his

translations. See page 45–50 above.19. Harrison notes that for Warton and others in the eighteenth century,

“Tenderness is the chief characteristic of Aeneas” (“English Vergil” 86).20. Benedict, too, remarks, “Despite his avowedly neoclassical principles,

[Fielding’s] novels oscillate between various tones in a fashion closer to the deliberately carnivalesque printed miscellany than to the consistent model of the epic” (176).


230 Notes

21. Strahan translates Huetius’ Latin, which he includes in a footnote. The Preface has no pagination.

22. In Time to Begin Anew, I discuss Dryden’s presentation of James II as Neptune (70, 111–13).

23. Warton’s terms from his discussion of “pure” poetry in his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1: 330).

24. Quoted in Harrison (“English Vergil” 85).25. Obviously I disagree with Thackeray who notes Pitt’s response to

eighteenth- century “interest in the psychology of passion,” and suggests that he places greater “emphasis than Dryden on the female characters in the Aeneid,” partly to account for his predecessor’s deficiencies (332).

Chapter 5 The Legacy: Tradition Metamorphosed 1. Ross attributes this self sufficiency to a Romantic perspective of

history: “A Dryden or a Pope can be satisfied with translating a Virgil or a Homer, giving homage to the classics through obvious imitation and looking back to a golden age whose values represent a gauge by which they can measure their own merits and flaws. A Wordsworth or a Shelley, however, is exhilarated and distressed by the impossibility of relying on a past age to provide values that the poet can simply translate into the language of his time. Because history has intervened, the romantic poet sees his circumstances as unique. Historicism mandates originality” (90).

2. Bruce Graver summarizes: “His [Wordsworth’s] nephew, Christopher Wordsworth, Jr., one of the most remarkable classical scholars ever to attend Cambridge, took an active interest in it while it was being written and gave it a prominent place in his Memoirs of William Wordsworth. Julius Charles Hare, another Cambridge classicist and “one of the profoundest Germanists is his day,” was so impressed that he eventually convinced Wordsworth to publish part of the translation in his journal of classical studies, The Philological Museum” (“Wordsworth” 262).

3. Many critics quote Byron’s letter to Murray, where he disclaims a plan for his epic-length poem: “You ask me for the plan of Donny Johnny. I have no plan—I had no plan; but I had or have materials” (Kahn 147).

4. Reiman’s emphasis, not Shelley’s. 5. Again I use Fuchs’s language of the “postcolonial mock heroic.” See

page 163 above. 6. Hadley J. Mozer’s entertaining essay points out that Byron probably

echoes deliberately the numerous want ads that appeared regularly in newspapers.

7. Ross discusses Barbauld’s depiction in several of her poems of the corruption pervading England as a result of empire (224–26).


Notes 231

8. Furtwangler points out that the play became a kind of staple in the colonies: “More than one shrewd producer held it forth as the first offering to wary audiences” (42).

9. Lines cited from original copy of John Adams, “Thoughts on government applicable to the present state of the American colonies. In a letter from a gentleman to his friend” (1776) (25).

10. Shields lists “Charles Woodsman’s ‘Indico’ (1758), James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764), and George Ogilvie’s paean to rice culture, Carolina; or, The Planter (1776)” (18).

11. Dowling associates this image with the Connecticut georgic and traces it to British poet James Thomson’s Summer (44–45). Freneau was not a Connecticut wit.


WORKS CONSULTED

Addison, Joseph. Miscellaneous Translations from Bion, Moschus, Ovid, and Mr. Addison, with an Original Poem on Bowling. 1716.

———. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.

Alexander, Caleb. The Works of Virgil Translated in Literal English Prose; with Some Explanatory Notes. Boston, 1796.

Amarasinghe, Upali. Dryden and Pope in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Study of Changing Literary Taste 1800–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.

Anon. Clavis Virgiliana: Or, a Vocabulary of All the Words in Virgil’s Bucolics, Georgics, and Æneid. London, 1742.

———. The Conspiracy of Aeneas and Antenor against the State of Troy: A Poem. London, 1682.

———. “An Heroic Poem upon His Majesties Most Gratious Releasing the Chimney-Money.” London, 1689.

———. The Tatler. Ed. Donald F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.———. Verdicts of the Learned concerning Virgil and Homers Heroic Poems.

London, 1697.Atkins, Maurice. Cataplus: Or, Æneas His Descent to Hell: A Mock Poem, in

Imitation of the Sixth Book of Virgil’s Æneis, in English Burlesque. London, 1672.

Atterbury, Francis. Reflections on the Character of Iapis in Virgil: Or, the Character of Antonius Musa, Physician to Augustus. London, 1740.

Banier, Abbé Antoine. The Mythology and Fables of the Ancients, Explain’d from History. Vol. 1. London, 1739. New York: Garland Publishing, 1976.

Barbauld, Anna Letitia. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Barlow, Joel. Poem Spoken at the Public Commencement at Yale College in New Haven, Sept 12, 1781. Hartford, CT, 1781.

———. The Vision of Columbus; A Poem in Nine Books. Hartford, CT, 1787.———. The Works of Joel Barlow. Ed. William K. Bottorff and Arthur L. Ford.

Vol. 2: Poetry. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970.Barnard, John. “Dryden, Tonson, and the Patrons of The Works of Virgil

(1697).” In John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays. Ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. 174–240.


234 Works Consulted

Bayne, Peter. Two Great Englishwomen, Mrs Browning and Charlotte Bronte. London: James Clarke, 1881.

Beare, William. Turnus and Drances: Being an Attempt to Shew, Who the Two Real Persons Were, that Virgil Intended to Represent Under Those Two Characters. 1750.

Behn, Aphra. Miscellany, Being a Collection of Poems by Several Hands. Together with Reflections on Morality, or Seneca Unmasqued. London, 1685.

Bell, Bernard W. “African-American Writers.” In American Literature 1764–1789: The Revolutionary Years. Ed. Everett Emerson. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. 171–94.

Benario, Janice M. “Book 4 of Horace’s Odes: Augustan Propaganda,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 91 (1960): 339–52.

Benedict, Barbara M. Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Blackmore, Richard. “An Essay on the Nature and Constitution of Epick Poetry.” In Essays upon Several Subjects (1716). New York: Garland Publishing, 1971.

———. Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem in Ten Books (1695). Scolar Press, 1971.

Blackwell, Thomas. An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735). New York: Garland Publishing, 1970.

Bossu, René Le. Treatise of the Epick Poem (1695). In Le Bossu and Voltaire on the Epic. Ed. Stuart Curran. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970.

Boys, John. Æneas His Descent into Hell: As It is Inimitably Described by the Prince of Poets in the Sixth of His Æneis. London, 1661.

———. Æneas His Errours, or his Voyage from Troy into Italy: An Essay upon the Third Book of Virgils Æneis. London, 1661.

Boys, Richard C. Sir Richard Blackmore and the Wits: A Study of “Commendatory Verses on the Author of the Two Arthurs and the Satyr against Wit” (1700). New York: Octagon Books, 1969.

Brady, Nicholas. Proposals for Publishing a Translation of Virgil’s Æneids in Blank Verse. Together with a Specimen of the Performance. London, 1714.

Brioch, Ulrich. The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem. Trans. David Henry Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Original German version 1968.

Brown, M. Elaine Dolan. “The Horatian View of the Poet.” In Approaches to Teaching Pope’s Poetry. Ed. Wallace Jackson and Paul R. Yoder. New York: Modern Languages Association of America, 1993. 96–100.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. London: Women’s Press, 1978.

Brownley, Martine Watson. “Gibbon’s Narrative Attitudes and Values in the Decline and Fall,” Research Studies 46.3 (1978): 172–82.


Works Consulted 235

Byron, George Gordon. Byron’s Don Juan: A Variorum Edition. Ed. Truman Guy Steffan and Willis W. Pratt. Vols. 2 and 3. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1957.

Caldwell, Tanya. Time to Begin Anew: Dryden’s Georgics and Aeneis. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000.

Canfield, J. Douglas. “Royalism’s Last Dramatic Stand: English Political Tragedy, 1679–89,” Studies in Philology 82.2 (1985): 234–63.

Cobb, Samuel. Clavis Virgiliana: Or New Observations upon the Works of Virgil. 1714. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970.

Coleridge, Sara. Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with Some Lessons in Latin in Easy Rhyme. 5th Edition. London, 1853.

Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Colomb, Gregory G. Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock-Epic. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

Congreve, William. Incognita, and, the Way of the World. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. London: Edward Arnold, 1966.

Cook, Patrick J. Milton, Spenser and the Epic Tradition. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996.

Corman, Brian. “Nahum Tate.” The Literary Encyclopedia. August 11, 2003. <http://www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_people.php?UID54317>

Cotton, Charles. Charles Cotton’s Works, 1663–1665: Critical Editions of the Valiant Knight and Scarronides. Ed. A. I. Dust. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992.

———. Scarronides: Or, Le Virgile Travesty. A Mock-Poem, Being the First Book of Virgils Aeneis in English, Burlesque. London, 1664.

Crowne, John. The History of the Famous and Passionate Love, Between a Fair Noble Parisian Lady, and a Beautiful Young Singing Man; a Chanter in the Quire of Notre Dame in Paris, and a Singer in Opera’s: An Heroic Poem in Two Canto’s, Being in Imitation of Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas; and Shows All the Passions of a Proud Beauty, Compell’d by Love to Abandon Her Self to Her Inferiour; but Finding Some Slights, How She Reveng’d Her Self and Recovered Her Honor. London, 1692.

Curran, John E. “The History Never Written: Bards, Druids, and the Problem of Antiquarianism in Poly Olbion,” Renaissance Quarterly 51.2 (1998): 498–525.

D’Addario, Christopher. “Dryden and the Historiography of Exile: Milton and Virgil in Dryden’s Late Period,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 67.4 (2004): 553–72.

Davenant, William. Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert. Ed. David F. Gladish. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

De la Mayne, Thomas. Love and Honour: A Poem taken from Virgil in Seven Cantoes. 1742.

Denham, John. Poems and Translations, with the Sophy. London, 1668.———. The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham. Ed. Theodore Howard Banks.

Archon Books, 1969.


236 Works Consulted

Dennis, John. The Critical Works of John Dennis. Ed. Edward Niles Hooker. 2 vols. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939–43.

Dentith, Simon. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Dowling, William C. Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Dryden, John. Sylvæ: Or, the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies. London, 1685.———. The Works of John Dryden. Ed. Edward Niles Hooker and

H. T. Swedenberg. 20 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955–2000.

Dryden, John and Jacob Tonson. Miscellany Poems: Containing a New Translation of Virgill’s Eclogues, Ovid’s Love Elegies, Odes of Horace, and Other Authors, with Several Original Poems by the Most Eminent Hands. London, 1684.

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. “Horace’s Odes 4.2 and Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism,’ ” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 18.1 (2005): 21–22.

Edwards, Michael. “A Meaning for Mock-Heroic,” Yearbook of English Studies 15 (1985): 48–63.

Emerson, Everett. “The Cultural Context of the American Revolution.” In American Literature 1764–1789: The Revolutionary Years. Ed. Everett Emerson. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. 3–19.

Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn. Ed. E. S. de Beer. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.

Fanshawe, Richard. Il Pastor Fido: The Faithful Shepherd. With an Addition of Divers Other Poems: Concluding with a Short Discourse of the Long Civil Wars of Rome. 2nd Edition. London, 1692.

Fielding, Henry. Amelia. Ed. Martin C. Battestin. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983.

———. The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq. Ed. William Ernest Henley. Vol. 15. New York: Croscup and Sterling, 1902.

———. The Covent-Garden Journal and a Plan of the Universal Register Office. Ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

———. A Journey from This World to the Next and the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Ed. Ian A. Bell and Andrew Varney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

———. Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq. Ed. Henry Knight Miller. Vol. 1. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972.

———. Plays. Ed. Thomas Lockwood. Vol. 1: The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.

Fletcher, Thomas. Poems on Several Occasions, and Translations: Wherein the First and Second Books of Virgil’s Aeneis Are Attempted in English. London, 1692.

Foerster, Donald M. “Critical Approval of Epic Poetry in the Age of Wordsworth,” PMLA 70.4 (1955): 682–705.


Works Consulted 237

Fowler, Don. “The Virgil Commentary of Servius.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil. Ed. Charles Martindale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 73–78.

Foxon, David. Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade. Rev. and ed. James McLaverty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Frank, Tenney. Vergil, a Biography. New York: Russell and Russell, 1922.Freneau, Philip. The American Village: A Poem; to Which Are Added, Several

Other Original Pieces in Verse. New York, 1772.Frost, William. Dryden and the Art of Translation. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1955.———.“Translating Virgil, Douglas to Dryden: Some General Considera-

tions.” In Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance. Ed. Maynard Mack and George de Forest Lord. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. 271–86.

Fuchs, Jacob. “Postcolonial Mock-Epic: Abrogation and Appropriation,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.2 (2000): 23–44.

Furtwangler, Albert. “Cato at Valley Forge,” Modern Language Quarterly 41 (1980): 38–53.

Garrett, Jane. The Triumphs of Providence: The Assassination Plot, 1696. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Garrison, James D. Pietas from Vergil to Dryden. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

Gaull, Marilyn. “Romans and Romanticism,” The Wordsworth Circle 36.1 (2005): 15–20.

Gildon, Charles. The Complete Art of Poetry: In Six Parts. London, 1718.Gillespie, Stuart. “Translation and Canon-Formation.” In The Oxford History

of Literary Translation in English. Ed. Stuart Gillespie. Vol. 3: 1660–1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 7–20.

Gossman, Ann. “Maia’s Son: Milton and the Renaissance Virgil.” In Studies in Medieval, Renaissance, (and) American Literature: A Festschrift (Honoring Troy C. Crenshaw, Lorraine Sherley, and Ruth Speer Angell). Ed. Betsy F. Colquitt. Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1971. 109–19.

Grahame, James. British Georgicks. Edinburgh, 1809.Graver, Bruce E. “Wordsworth and the Language of Epic: The Translation

of the Aeneid,” Studies in Philology 83.3 (1986): 261–85.Greenlaw, Edwin. Studies in Spenser’s Historical Allegory. Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932.Griffin, Dustin. “Milton and the Decline of Epic in the Eighteenth

Century.” New Literary History 14.1 (1982): 143–54.———. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington, KY: University Press of

Kentucky, 1994.Griffith, John. “The Columbiad and Greenfield Hill: History, Poetry, and

Ideology in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Early American Literature 10 (1975): 235–50.


238 Works Consulted

Gugler, MaryBeth. “Mercury and the ‘Pains of Love’ in Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,’ ” English Language Notes 29.2 (1991): 31–36.

Hale, David, G. “Virgil and Homer in the Early Tudor Period,” The Early Renaissance: Virgil and the Classical Tradition. Ed. Anthony L. Pellegrini. Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1985. 121–29.

Hammond, Brean S. “Corinna’s Dream,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 36.2 (1995): 99–118.

———. Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: “Hackney for Bread.” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Hammond, Paul. Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hardison, O. B. Jr. The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962.

Harrington, James. The Political Works of James Harrington. Ed. and introd. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

———. Virgil’s Æneis: The Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Books: Translated by James Harrington. London, 1659.

Harris, Tim. London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

———. Politics Under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660–1715. London: Longman, 1993.

———. Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685. London: Allen Lane, 2005.

Harrison, T. W. “Dryden’s Aeneid.” In Dryden’s Mind and Art. Ed. Bruce King. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969. 143–70.

———. “English Vergil: The Aeneid in the XVIII Century,” Philologica Pragensia (1967): 1–11, 80–92.

Hayley, William. An Essay on Epic Poetry (1782). Intro. Sister M. Celeste Williamson. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968.

Hemans, Felicia. Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Holyday, Barten. Horace, The Best of Lyrick Poets. Containing Much Morality, and Sweetnesse. Together with Aulus Persius Flaccus His Satyres. Translated into English by Barten Holyday. London, 1652.

Horace. The Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles of Horace. Done into English. London, 1684.———. Poems of Horace, Consisting of Odes, Satyres, and Epistles, Rendred in

English and Paraphrased by Several Persons. London, 1671.Howard, Edward. The Brittish Princes: An Heroick Poem. London, 1669.Howard, Sir Robert. Poems, viz. 1. A Panegyrick to the King. 2. Songs and

Sonnets. 3. The Blind Lady, a Comedy. 4. The Fourth Book of Virgil, 5. Statius


Works Consulted 239

His Achilleis, with Annotations. 6. A Panegyrick to Generall Monck. By the Honorable Sr Robert Howard. London, 1660.

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. W. W. Norton: New York, 1990.

———. “Fielding and the Disappearance of Heroes.” In The English Hero, 1660–1800. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1982. 143–67.

Hurst, Isobel. Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Johnson, James William. “England, 1660–1800: An Age without a Hero?” In The English Hero, 1660–1800. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1982. 25–34.

Kahn, Arthur. “Byron’s Single Difference with Homer and Virgil: The Redefinition of the Epic in Don Juan,” Arcadia: Zeitschrift fur Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 5 (1970): 143–62.

Kallendorf, Craig. “Cristoforo Landino’s Aeneid and the Humanist Critical Tradition,” Renaissance Quarterly 36.4 (1983): 519–46.

Keeble, N. H. The Restoration: England in the 1660s. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.

Keener, Frederick M. “Pope, The Dunciad, Virgil, and the New Historicism of Le Bossu,” Eighteenth-Century Life 15 (1991): 35–57.

Kelsall, Malcolm M. Jefferson and the Iconography of Romanticism: Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.

———. “What God, What Mortal? The Aeneid and the English Mock-Heroic,” Arion 8 (1969): 359–79.

Kenney, E. J. “ ‘A Little of It Sticks’: The Englishman’s Horace,” Britannia Latina: Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. London: Warburg Institute, 2005. 178–93.

Ketton-Cremer, R. W. “Johnson and the Antiquarian World,” New Rambler: Journal of the Johnson Society of London (1968): 5–11.

Kroll, Richard. “The Double Logic of Don Sebastian.” In John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany. Ed. Susan Green and Steven Zwicker. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2001. 47–69.

Lauber, John. “Don Juan as Anti-Epic,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 8.4 (1968): 607–19.

Lawson, John and Harold Silver. A Social History of Education in England. London: Methuen, 1973.

Lerer, Seth, “John of Salisbury’s Virgil,” Vivarium 20.1 (1982): 24–39.L’Estrange, Roger. The First Book of Virgil’s Æneis: Made English. London,

1687.Levine, Joseph M. Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in

Restoration England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford University Press,

1961.


240 Works Consulted

Lewkenor, John. Metellus His Dialogues: The First Part Containing a Relation of a Journey to Tunbridge-Wells; Also a Description of the Wells and Place with the Fourth Book of Virgil’s Aeneids in English. 1693.

Lindheim, Nancy. “The Virgilian Design of The Shepheardes Calendar,” Spenser Studies 13 (1999): 1–21.

Mace, Nancy. Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

McKeon, Michael. “Genre Theory.” In Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 1–4.

———. “Revisionist Grand Theory.” In Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 355–61.

McLaverty, James. Pope, Print and Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Mennes, Sir John and Dr. Smith. Musarum Deliciae: or, the Muses Recreation: Conteining Severall Select Pieces of Sportive Wit. London, 1655.

Miner, Earl and Jennifer Brady, Eds. Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Mozer, Hadley J. “ ‘I want a Hero’: Advertising for an Epic Hero in Don Juan,” Studies in Romanticism 44.2 (2005): 239–60.

Nelson, Nicolas H. “The English Horace in Defense of Literature: Matthew Prior’s Early Satires,” Papers on Language and Literature 28.1 (1992): 19–37.

Nohrnberg, James, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.

O Hehir, Brendan. Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.

Oakman, Robert L. “The Character of the Hero: A Key to Fielding’s Amelia,” Studies in English Literature 16 (1976): 473–89.

Ogilby, John. Africa Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of AEgypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid, the Land of Negroes, Guinee, AEthiopia and the Abyssines : With All the Adjacent Islands, Either in the Mediterranean, Atlantick, Southern or Oriental Sea, Belonging Thereunto : With the Several Denominations of Their Coasts, Harbors, Creeks, Rivers, Lakes, Cities, Towns, Castles, and Villages, Their Customs, Modes and Manners, Languages, Religions and Inexhaustible Treasure : With Their Governments and Policy, Variety of Trade and Barter: And Also of Their Wonderful Plants, Beasts, Birds and Serpents: Collected and Translated from Most Authentick Authors and Augmented with Later Observations: Illustrated with Notes and Adorn’d with Peculiar Maps and Proper Sculptures. London, 1670.

———. The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in His Passage through the City of London to His Coronation: Containing an Exact Accompt of the Whole Solemnity; the Triumphal Arches, and Cavalcade, Delineated in Sculpture; the Speeches and Impresses Illustrated from Antiquity. London,


Works Consulted 241

1662. A Facsimile. Ed. Ronald Knowles. Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1988.

———. The Kings Coronation: Being an Exact Account of the Cavalcade, with a Description of the Triumphal Arches, and Speeches Prepared by the City of London, for His Late Majesty Charles the Second, In His Passage from the Tower to Whitehall. Also the Narrative of His Majesties Coronation, with His Magnificent Proceeding, and Feast in Westminster-Hall, April the 13th. As It Was Published by His Majesties Order, with the Approbation and License of Sir Edward Walker, Garter Principal King at Arms. By John Ogilby Esquire. London, 1685.

———. The Relation of His Majesties Entertainment Passing through the City of London, to his Coronation: with A Description of the Triumphal Arches and Solemnity. By John Ogilby. London, 1661.

———. The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, Translated by John Ogilby. London, 1649.

———. The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, Translated, Adorn’d with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations. By John Ogilby. London, 1654.

Ogilvie, R. M. Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1964.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. ed. The Connecticut Wits. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1963.

Parry, Graham. “A Troubled Arcadia.” In Literature and the English Civil War. Ed. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 38–55.

Pearson, Jacqueline. Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Peterfreund, Stuart. “The Prelude: Wordsworth’s Metamorphic Epic,” Genre 14.4 (1981): 441–72.

Phillips, John. Maronides, or Virgil Travestie: Being a New Paraphrase upon the Fifth Book of Virgils Æneids in Burlesque Verse. London, 1672.

Pitt, Christopher. The Æneid of Virgil. Translated by Mr. Pitt in Two Volumes. London, 1740.

Pittock, Joan H. “Thomas Hearne and the Narratives of Englishness,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 22.1 (1999): 1–14.

Pollak, Ellen. The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985.

Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. Geoffrey Tillotson. Vol. 2: The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940. Twickenham Edition.

———. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. Maynard Mack. Vol. 7: The Iliad of Homer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967. The Twickenham Edition.

———. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams. Vol. 1: Pastoral Poetry and an Essay on Criticism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961. The Twickenham Edition.


242 Works Consulted

Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Preston, Thomas R. “From Typology to Literature: Hermeneutics and Historical Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 23.3 (1982): 181–96.

Prior, Matthew. The Literary Works of Matthew Prior. Ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.

———. An Ode in Imitation of the Second Ode of the Third Book of Horace. London, 1692.

Proudfoot, L. Dryden’s Aeneid and Its Seventeenth Century Predecessors. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1960.

Pyne, John. Musarum Deliciae: Contayning more then a select century of royall Latine anagrams, besides diverse written in English, upon the sacred name and titles of our dread soveraigne and of his dearest consort, and their most princely progeny. Together with apposite anagrams upon all the English monarchs that have lived and died since the union of the royall roses and houses of Yorke and Lancaster. Some few of those extracted from his Maiesties imperiall name, have been heretofore presented to his royall hands with gracious acceptance. The Latine anagrammes are expressed in English verses in the opposite columne. Perused anew, and now published altogether, (with the authors assent) by Arthur Pyne Esquire, to whom the anagrams made in honour of the Prince his Highnesse were in speciall manner directed. London, 1635.

Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Rapin, René. Observations on the Poems of Homer and Virgil: A Discourse Representing the Excellencies of Those Works; and the Perfections in General of All Heroick Actions. Out of the French by John Davies of Kidwelly. London, 1672.

———. The Whole Critical Works of Monr. Rapin, in Two Volumes . . . Newly Translated into English by Several Hands. London, 1706.

Reiman, Donald. “Don Juan in Epic Context,” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977): 587–94.

Revard, Stella P. “Milton and the Progress of the Epic Proemium,” Milton Studies 38 (2000): 122–40.

Reverand II, Cedric D. Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode: The Fables. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.

Roscommon, Earl of. Horace’s Art of Poetry. Made English. London, 1680.Rose, Margaret A. Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993.Rosenberg, D. M. “Epic Warfare in Cowley and Milton,” Clio 22.1 (1992):

67–80.Ross, Marlon B. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of

Women’s Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.Ross, Trevor, “The Emergence of ‘Literature’: Making and Reading the

English Canon in the Eighteenth Century,” English Literary History 63.2 (1996): 397–422.


Works Consulted 243

———. The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.

———. “ ‘Pure Poetry’: Cultural Capital and the Rejection of Classicism,” Modern Language Quarterly 58.4 (1997): 435–56.

Sambrook, A. J. “William Walsh and The Golden Age from the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil (1703),” Modern Philology 64 (1967): 324–25.

Schakel, Peter J. “Swift’s Remedy for Love: The ‘Scatalogical’ Poems,” Papers on Language and Literature 14 (1978): 137–47.

Schonhorn, Manuel. “The Audacious Contemporaneity of Pope’s Epistle to Augustus,” Studies in English Literature 8.3 (1968): 431–43.

Scott, James, “St. Peter, Aeneas, and the Medieval Evolution of Vergilian Allegory,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 9.1 (2002): 59–79.

Sessions, William A. “Spenser’s Georgics,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 202–38.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Essays and Letters. Ed. Ernest Rhys. Freeport, NY: Libraries Press, 1971.

Sherburn, George. “Fielding’s Amelia: An Interpretation.” In Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ronald Paulson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962. 146–57.

———. “Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature.” A Literary History of England. Ed. Albert C. Baugh. New York: Appleton, 1948. 699–1108.

Shields, David S. Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America 1690–1750. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Sinclair, May. Mary Olivier: A Life (1919). New York: Dial Press, 1980.Sloman, Judith. Dryden: The Poetics of Translation. Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 1985.Smith, James. The Loves of Hero and Leander: A Mock Poem: with Marginall

Notes, and Other Choice Pieces of Drollery. Got by Heart, and Often Repeated by Divers Witty Gentlemen and Ladies that Use to Walke in the New Exchange, and at Their Recreations in Hide Park. London, 1653.

Sowerby, Robin. The Augustan Art of Poetry: Augustan Translation of the Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

———. “Augustan Dryden,” Translation and Literature 10 (2001): 51–66.———. “Pope and Horace.” In Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on

British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century. Ed. Charles Martindale and David Hopkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 159–83.

Spence, Joseph. Polymetis Abridged, or a Guide to Classical Learning; Being an Inquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Ancient Artists. 1765.

Spilka Mark. “Fielding and the Epic Impulse,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature 11 (1969): 68–77.

Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.


244 Works Consulted

Stamm, R. “On the Carnivalesque,” Wedge 1 (1982): 47–55.Strahan, Alexander. The First Six Books of Virgil’s Æneid, Translated into Blank

Verse by Alexander Strahan Esq. London, 1753.Swedenberg Jr. H. T. The Theory of Epic in England 1650–1800. Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1944.Sweet, Rosemary, “Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century

England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.2 (2001): 181–206.Swift, Jonathan. A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles

and Commons in Athens and Rome: With the Consequences They Had upon Both Those States. Ed. Frank Ellis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

———. Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Ed. Herbert Davis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1965.———. The Works of Jonathan Swift; Containing Interesting and Valuable Papers

not Hitherto Published. Ed. Thomas Roscoe. Vol. 1. London, 1850.Tate, Nahum. Brutus of Alba: Or the Enchanted Lovers, a Tragedy Acted at the

Duke’s Theatre. London, 1678.Thackeray, Mark. “Christopher Pitt, Joseph Warton, and Virgil,” Review of

English Studies 43.171 (1992): 329–46.Thomas, Richard F. Virgil and the Augustan Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001.Tissol, Garth. “Dryden’s Additions and the Interpretive Reception of

Ovid,” Translation and Literature 13.2 (2004): 181–93.Trapp, Joseph. The Aeneis of Virgil Translated into Blank Verse. 2 vols. London,

1718–20.———. The Preface to the Æneis of Virgil (1718). Intro. Malcolm Kelsall. Los

Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1982. Augustan Reprint Society #214–15.

Tutchin, John. An Heroick Poem upon the Late Expedition of His Majesty to Rescue England from Popery, Tyranny, and Arbitrary Government. London, 1689.

Van Doren, Mark. John Dryden: A Study of His Poetry. New York: Henry Holt, 1946.

Van Eerde, Katherine. John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times. Kent, England: Dawson, 1976.

Varey, Simon. “Exemplary History and the Political Satire of Gulliver’s Travels.” In The Genres of Gulliver’s Travels. Ed. Frederick N. Smith. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1990. 39–55.

Venuti, Lawrence, “The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural Politics in the Interregnum,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23.2 (1993): 197–219.

Virgil. The Golden Age from the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil, &c. London, 1703.———. The Passion of Dido for Aeneas: As It Is Incomparably Exprest in the

Fourth Book of Virgil. Translated by Edmund Waller and Sidney Godolphin, Esqrs. London, 1658.

———. Virgil. Transl. H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Loeb Edition.


Works Consulted 245

———. The Works of Virgil Translated into English Prose, As Near the Original as the Different Idioms of the Latin and English Languages Will Allow. 2 vols. London 1743.

Voltaire. Essay on Epick Poetry (1727). In Le Bossu and Voltaire on the Epic. Ed. Stuart Curran. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970.

Warren, Joseph. An Oration Delivered March 5th, 1772: At the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770. Boston, 1772.

Warton, Joseph. An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1782). 2 vols. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970.

Warton, Joseph and Christopher Pitt. The Works of Virgil in English Verse: The Aeneid Translated by the Rev. Mr. Christopher Pitt; the Eclogues and Georgics, with Notes on the Whole, by the Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton: With Several New Observations by Mr. Holdsworth, Mr. Spence, and Others. Also, a Dissertation on the Sixth Book of the Æneid, by Mr. Warburton; on the Shield of Æneas, by Mr. W. Whitehead; on the Character of Iapis, by the Late Dr. Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester; and, Three Essays on Pastoral, Didactic and Epic Poetry, by the Editor. 4 vols. London, 1763.

Webb, Wm Stanford. “Vergil in Spenser’s Epic Theory,” English Literary History 4.1 (1937): 62–84.

Weinberg, Bernard. “Scaliger versus Aristotle on Poetics,” Modern Philology 39.4 (1942): 337–60.

Weinbrot, Howard D. Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England: The Decline of a Classical Norm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

———. Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

West, Michael. “Dryden and the Disintegration of Renaissance Heroic Ideals,” Costerus: Essays in English and American Language and Literature 7 (1973): 192–222.

White, Peter. Promised Verse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Wilcher, Robert. The Writing of Royalism 1628–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Wilding, Michael. Dragon’s Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

Wilkie, Brian. Romantic Poets and the Epic Tradition. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.

Winterer, Caroline. The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780–1910. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Woolf, D. R. “The Dawn of the Artifact: The Antiquarian Impulse in England, 1500–1730,” Studies in Medievalism 4 (1992): 5–35.

Wordsworth, Jonathan. “That Wordsworth ‘Epic,’ ” The Wordsworth Circle 11 (1980): 34–35.


246 Works Consulted

Wordsworth, William. Translations of Chaucer and Virgil. Ed. Bruce E. Graver. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Young, Edward. Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (1759). Leeds, England: Scolar Press, 1966. Facsimile reproduction.

Youngren, William H. “Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” Modern Philology 79.2 (1982): 267–83.

Zwicker, Steven N. Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

———. “Reading Vergil in the 1690s.” In Vergil at 2000: Commemorative Essays on the Poet and His Influence. Ed. John D. Barnard. New York: AMS Press, 1986. 281–301.


Index

Abrams, M. H., 195Achilles, 44, 66, 68, 112, 146, 182Adams, Abigail, 210Adams, John, 209–10, 213, 231Adams, John Quincy, 211Addison, Joseph, 67, 138, 144, 146,

171–2, 176–81, 187, 205, 209Aeneas, 2–5, 7–8, 26, 32, 34, 35, 37,

39–40, 43, 49, 50, 55, 66–7, 78–9, 84, 86, 88–91, 93, 103, 105, 109–13, 119, 124–6, 130, 150, 154, 161, 165, 169–71, 173, 176, 182–5, 197, 215

Aesop, Fables, 60Alexander, Caleb, 210Allegory, 2–4, 8, 18, 20, 32–4, 36, 38,

100, 115–17, 145–6, 153–5, 157, 176Amarasinghe, Upali, 133Ancients/Moderns debate, 10, 15, 21,

100–1, 140, 185Anne, Queen, 6, 145–6Antiquarianism, 20–1, 70, 144, 153,

155, 163, 168, 183, 217Aristophanes, 169Aristotle, 4, 19, 65–8, 100, 169, 211,

223, 228Arnold, Matthew, 192Arthur, King, 20, 26, 39, 114Atkins, Maurice, 87–93Atterbury, F., Bishop of Rochester,

155–7, 167–8Auerbach, Erich, 200Augustanism, 4–11, 14, 16–23, 25–8,

31–40, 44–6, 56–8, 60–1, 63, 70,

78, 81, 87, 95, 98–114, 119, 123, 130, 136, 145–6, 148–9, 153, 155–6, 160, 163, 171, 176, 185, 189–90, 193, 206

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 14, 47, 88, 123, 128, 130, 226–7

Banier, Abbé le, 18, 137–8, 168, 170Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 193, 204–7,

230Barlow, Joel, 24, 214–16Barnard, John, 98, 226Bayne, Peter, 207–8Beare, William, 154–7Beaumont, Sir George, 195Behn, Aphra, 16, 77–8, 132, 202Benario, Janice M., 206Benedict, Barbara, 71, 76–7, 224, 229Benson, William, 151, 196Blackmore, Sir Richard, 20, 22,

99–101, 114–20, 145, 155, 214, 227Blackwell, Thomas, 68, 140, 168Bloom, Harold, 192Boccaccio, 133, 135Boethius, 120Boileau, Nicolas, 67, 82, 141Bossu, René le, 4, 8–9, 11, 15, 67–9,

99, 101–2, 114, 116, 119, 140, 150, 159, 169, 186, 219, 227

Boyne, Battle of, 121Boys, John, 34–8Boys, Richard, 120Brady, Nicholas, 180Brett, Arthur, 27


248 Index

Brioch, Ulrich, 224, 228Brown, M. Elaine Dolan, 143Brown, Tom, 119Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 193,

203, 207, 210, 214Brownley, Martine, 19Brut (also Brute and Brutus,

grandson of Aeneas), 3, 7, 26, 55, 78, 79

Bunyan, John, 27Byron, George Gordon, 24, 193–4,

199–202, 204, 208, 210, 214, 216, 230

Caldwell, Tanya, 226–30Canfield, J. Douglas, 78, 223Cato, 209Catullus, 77Caxton, William, 69Charles I, 6, 25, 32, 40, 46–7, 51, 146,

220–1Charles II, restoration of, 5, 19, 21, 25,

34, 39–40, 51–2, 56–60, 70, 105, 108, 221–2, 224, praise of, 37–41, reign of, 17, 22, 26–9, 42–3, 54, 61, 64, 75, 80, 84, 95, 146, 174, sanctity of, 6

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 60, 135Chesterfield, Philip, Earl of, 161Chudleigh, Lady Mary, 226Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 154–5, 169,

192, 209, 211Civil war, 5, 17, 21, 26, 45, 51, 59, 64,

107, 139, 146, 220, 224Cleveland, John, 83Cobb, Samuel, 149–50, 154, 157Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 189–90,

194, 196–9Coleridge, Sara, 204Colley, Linda, 190, 207Congreve, William, 156–7Connecticut Wits, 212, 231Corman, Brian, 224Cotton, Charles, 82–8, 91–4, 225Cromwell, Oliver, 5, 25, 94

Crowne, John, 22, 124, 131–2Curran, John, 20Curran, Stuart, 8, 67–8, 228

Dacier, Madame, 203Davenant, William, 26–7, 33, 38, 45,

223David, King, 5, 7, 28, 73, 105, 145, 148De la Mayne, Thomas, 161–2Denham, John, 10, 21, 35–6, 45–51, 61,

70, 107–8, 135, 221, 224, 229Dennis, John, 67, 101, 116, 119, 226Dentith, Simon, 190–1Dido, 31, 33, 36, 40–1, 43, 45, 49, 50,

78–9, 85–7, 91, 94, 106–8, 119, 122, 124, 127–32, 134, 161–2, 165, 184–5, 220

Dowling, William, 212–13, 215, 231

Dryden, John, 1–2, 5–6, 10–12, 19, 28, 40, 41, 44–5, 60, 67, 74, 140, 169, 196–7, 210, 223, 227, Absalom and Achitophel, 19, 72–3, 75–6, 93, 105, 109, 135, 221, 224–5, 229, All for Love, 79, 161, Annus Mirabilis, 7, 28–9, 40, 98, 103, 174, 207, 215, 227, Astraea Redux, 5–7, 19, 28–9, 34, 57, 75, 96, 98, 101, 103, 106, 109, 145, 224, “Character of St Evremond,” 112, “Discourse Concerning … Satire,” 115, 224, Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 38, 66, 82, 84, Examen Poeticum, 111, 122–3, Fables, 20, 22, 113–14, 120, 124, 131–6, 172–3, 180, 187, 202, 216, 227–8, MacFlecknoe, 72, 222, 224, miscellany poems, 72, 76–7, 82, 123, Secular Masque, 136, “To . . . Mrs. Anne Killigrew,” 123, Virgil, 9, 13, 19, 22–3, 31, 51, 53, 55, 66, 97–113, 115–18, 123–4, 127–8, 130–1, 134–6, 145, 148–54, 157, 159–60, 163, 166, 170–81, 184–5, 198–9, 202, 205, 216–17, 219, 223, 226, 230

Dunton, John, 71


Index 249

Dust, A. I., 84, 86–7, 94, 225Dwight, Timothy, 24, 212–14, 216

Edwards, Michael, 81, 225Eleusinian mysteries, 169Elizabeth I, 3, 7, 28, 146Emerson, Everett, 209–12Epic, reputation of, 1, 8–9, 17, 190–1,

195–6, 199–202, 208, 210, and history, 3, 6, 15, 18, 21, 25–6, 28, 34–40, 61, 101–2

Etherege, George, 83, 85Euripides, 169Evelyn, John, 5, 25, 220, 223Exclusion Crisis, 64

Fanshawe, Richard, 31, 220, 222Fielding, Henry, 16, 23, 45, 89, 125,

136, 144, 160, 162, 167, 187, 194, 202, Amelia, 164–6, Author’s Farce, 1, 11, 216, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 166, “A Parody from the First Aeneid,” 164, The Veroniad, 162–4

Flecknoe, Richard, 83Fletcher, Thomas, 22, 114, 120–2Foerster, Donald, 190–1, 193–4, 199Frank, Tenney, 225Franklin, Benjamin, 211Freneau, Philip, 214, 231Frost, William, 26, 116, 141, 228Fuchs, Jacob, 163, 167, 228, 230Furtwangler, Albert, 209, 231

Garrett, Jane, 227Garrison, James D., 227Gay, John, 147genre, notions of, 13, 19, 21, 71, 80,

101, 132, 139, 147, 172, 190, 199, 210, see also Novel

George I, 148Georgic, the, 4, 57–8, 74, 151–2, 157,

167, 176–7, 179, 193, 204–6, 210–14, 222, 228, 231

Gibbon, Edward, 19

Gildon, Charles, 159–60, 169Gillespie, Stuart, 141Glorious Revolution, 19, 99, 111, 115,

146Godolphin, Sidney, 31, 35, 220Goldsmith, Oliver, The Deserted

Village, 213–14Grahame, James, 205–6Grant, Anne of Laggan, 206–7, 210Graver, Bruce E., 189, 196–7, 230Greenlaw, Edwin, 3Griffin, Dustin, 225Griffith, John, 213, 215–16Grub Street, 138, 147Gugler, Mary Beth, 219

Hammond, Brean, 14–15, 17, 81, 85, 115, 131, 219, 224, 227, 229

Hammond, Paul, 135, 228Hardison, Jr., O. B., 219Harrington, James, 31–3, 141, 220–1Harris, Tim, 25, 30, 63–4, 223Harrison, T. W., 11, 53, 65, 143–4,

147–8, 160, 179, 223, 228–30Hartley, David, 19Hayley, William, 148Hemans, Felicia, 207Herringman, Henry, 82Hide, Sir Edward, 36History, see also Epic; Translatio

imperii, relationship to literature, 13, 18–20, 89, 145, 166, 169, 201, theory of, 23, 99, 104, sacred British history, 2–4, 16, 18–20, 26, 31, 50, 108

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, 51, 223Holdsworth, Mr., 167–8Homer, 9, 39, 60, 66, 68, 79, 100,

111–12, 118–19, 128, 135, 137–40, 142, 158–60, 162, 164, 166, 171–3, 179, 182, 184, 190–1, 200, 202, 207, 214–15, see also Pope

Horace, 10, 15, 65, 67, 72, 76–7, 83, 100, 103, 120, 142–4, 171–2, 192, 206, 211, 217, 223–4


250 Index

Howard, Edward, 38–9Howard, Sir Robert, 21, 38–45, 61,

69–70, 221Huetius, 170, 230Humanist critical tradition, 2, 139,

221Hunter, J. Paul, 14, 81, 113, 139, 219Hurst, Isobel, 24, 191–2, 203–4,

207–8

Jacobitism, 98, 103–6, 110, 112–13, 122, 135, 151, 163, 173, 226, 228–9

James II (also Duke of York), 64, 104–5, 110–12, 121–2, 226, 230

Jefferson, Thomas, 209Juvenal, 90, 125, 194, 202, 229

Kahn, Arthur, 194, 200–2, 230Kallendorf, Craig, 2, 219Keeble, N. H., 5–6, 25, 27, 29, 40, 51,

70, 222–3Kelsall, Malcolm, 11, 116, 138, 167, 180,

209, 220, 226Kenney, E. J., 143, 158Keys, 20, 23, 153–7, 167–8, 170Killigrew, Thomas, 48Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 122Knowles, Ronald, 52, 56–8, 223Kroll, Richard, 227

L’Estrange, Roger, 70–1, 223Landino, Cristoforo, 2, 219Lauber, John, 200Lawson, John, 144, 158Lefevre, Raoul, 69Lely, Peter, 54Lerer, Seth, 2–3Levine, Joseph, 10, 26, 67, 100–1, 103,

119, 226Lewis, C. S., 200Lewkenor, John, 22, 107, 124–6,

128–9Lilly’s Latin Grammar, 158Literacy rates, 30, 71Locke, John, 158, 191

Longinus, 67, 141–2Lonsdale, Lord, 196–7Lucretius, 76

Macauley, T. B., 192Mace, Nancy, 162Macheath, 84, 147Macrobius, 2Maecenas, 52, 103Mary II, 98, 114McKeon, Michael, 14, 81McLaverty, James, 61, 222–3Mennis, Sir John, 48–9, 82Milbourne, Luke, 151Milton, John, 6, 10, 16, 27, 133, 135,

148, 159–60, 164, 171, 179–80, 182, 191, 207, 226–7

Miner, Earl, 135Miscellany collections, 71–8, 95,

146, 223Mock-heroic, 13–14, 17, 22, 80–95,

98, 103, 109, 117–18, 124–6, 131–2, 146, 163–4, 206, 224–5, 227, 229

Monck, General, 25, 40–1, 43–4, 146, 221

Monmouth, Duke of, 63, 75Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 7, 26, 115Mozer, Hadley, 230

Nelson, Nicolas, 143Neoclassical theory, 8–12, 15, 21, 65–6,

81–2, 102, 136–8, 140, 178, 193, 219, 229

Newgate prison, 86, 147Nohrnberg, James, 4, 219Novel, 11, 14–16, 19, 22–3, 45, 61, 81,

95, 99, 113, 123, 125, 132, 136, 156, 160–2, 164–7, 182, 184, 187, 190, 194, 202, 207, 216, 226–7, 229, see also Genre

O Hehir, Brendan, 46–7, 221–2Oakman, Robert, 166Oblivion, Act of, 25


Index 251

Ogilby, John, Entertainments, 5, 21, 25, 56–60, Virgil, 21, 29–31, 35, 51–6, 61, 70, 95, 97, 99, 156, 221–3, 228

Ogilvie, R. M., 192Ovid, 12, 27, 58, 72, 76–8, 123, 127, 133,

135–6, 146, 205, 209, 227–8

Pamphlets, and politics, 30, 35, 38, 63Parodies, 17–18, 21–2, 64–5, 80–96,

124, 162, 164–6, 194, 202, 205, 216Parry, Graham, 31, 222Party politics, 1, 63, 163, 229Pearson, Jacqueline, 203Perrault, Charles, 118–19, 139Peterfreund, Stuart, 194–5Petronius Arbiter, 59, 124–5, 166Phaer, Thomas, 30, 221Phillips, John, 91–3Pitt, Christopher, 20, 23, 141, 150,

160, 167–8, 170–5, 179–87, 198–9, 230

Platonism, 2, 4, 19, 33, 42, 115Pocock, J. G. A., 220–1Pollak, Ellen, 219Pope Alexander, 1, 2, 9, 15, 17, 60–1,

132, 144, 163, 183, 222, 229, Dunciad, 61, 138, 159, 228, Essay on Criticism, 137–8, 168, 228, Homer, 8, 17, 128, 141–2, 171–3, 178, 191, 196, The Messiah, 138, 175, Rape of the Lock, 9, 79, 93, 130–1, 147, 206, Windsor Forest, 7, 9, 138, 146, 213

Potter, Lois, 221Powers, Lyall, 165Preston, Thomas, 19, 99Priam, 32, 70, 93–4, 102, 107–8, 150, 154Primitivism, 191, 210Prior, Matthew, 6–7, 114, 143, 227

Quint, David, 6, 26–7

Rapin, René, 8–9, 11, 15, 34, 38, 42, 66–9, 81, 94, 99–101, 140, 178, 219–20, 223, 226

Reiman, Donald, 200, 230

Reverand II, Cedric D., 133, 228Richard II, 135, 224Roscommon, Earl of, 142Rose, Margaret, 81–2Ross, Marlon B., 189, 202, 230Ross, Trevor, 139, 141, 180, 185

Salisbury, John of, 2Sambrook, A. J., 145, 228–9Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 3–4, 54Scarron, Paul, 82–5Schakel, Peter, 12Schools and universities, Classics in,

23, 100, 119, 142–4, 157–8, 192, 211Scott, James, 3Scott, Sir Walter, 196Servius (and Servian Virgil), 3–4, 6,

10–12, 16, 26, 30–1, 67, 156, 226Sessions, William A., 4, 221Shakespeare, 60, 66, 141–2, 147, 161,

191, 224Shelley, Mary, 203Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 190–1, 193,

200, 230Sherburn, George, 143, 164–5Shields, David, 212, 231Sidney, Sir Phillip, 18Silver, Harold, 144, 158Silvestris, Bernadus, 3Sinclair, May, 191, 203Sloman, Judith, 228Smith, Dr., 82Smith, James, 12–13Smollett, Tobias, 125Sowerby, Robin, 10, 15, 221, 226Spanish Succession, War of, 6Spence, Joseph, 149, 153, 167Spenser, Edmund, 7, 26–7, 34, 53, 103,

117, 135–6, 159, 213, 219, Faerie Queene, 3–4, 6, 8, 9, 16, 18–19

Spilka, Mark, 229St. John, H., 98St. Peter, 3Stallybrass, Peter, 17–18, 48, 88, 95,

222, 225


252 Index

Stamm, R., 17–18, 94Statius, 41, 44, 70, 221Sterne, Laurence, 89, Tristram Shandy,

68, 223Strafford, Earl of, 47–8, 221Strahan, Alexander, 160, 170, 180, 230Sublime, the, 16, 23, 98, 101, 133, 142,

148, 160, 171–83, 226Swedenberg, H. T., 223, 226Sweet, Rosemary, 153Swift, Jonathan, 16, 20, 80, 205, Battle

of the Books, 13, 140–1, “A Beautiful Young Nymph,” 12, 219, A Discourse . . .between the Nobles and Commons in Athens and Rome, 104–5, Gulliver’s Travels, 89, 113, 169, 219

Sybil, 37, 75, 87–8, 109, 126, 170

Tate, Nahum, 78–80, 162, 224Tatler, The, 80, 183–4, 224Temple, William, 111Thackeray, Mark, 178, 180–1, 230Theocritus, 76–7Thomas, Richard, 3, 10Tibullus, 77Tonson, Jacob, 72, 76, 226Translatio imperii, 3, 6–7, 28, 31, 34,

46–8, 65, 70, 75, 78, 87, 108–9, 145, 174–5

Translation theory, 20, 47, 76, 154, 157, 170, 185, 190, 197, 228

Trapp, Joseph, Virgil, 17, 23, 150–3, 160, 167, 170, 178–80, 182, 185–6, 196, 229

Tutchin, John, 111–12Twyne, Thomas, 30, 221Tyburn Hill, 86

United States, Seal of, 209Utrecht, Peace of, 7

Valley Forge, 209Van Doren, Mark, 127–8, 180Van Eerde, Katherine, 222–3Varey, Simon, 219

Venuti, Lawrence, 45, 47, 221Vicars, John, 30, 221Voltaire, 9, 112, 139–40, 160, 172, 182,

216, 219, 228

W. J., 8, 67, 99–102, 227Waller, Edmund, 31, 35, 70, 142–3,

220Walsh, William, 145, 228–9Warburton, William, 167–70, 228Warton, Joseph, 230, Virgil, 17, 22–3,

133, 141, 150, 160, 167–8, 170–87, 229

Warton, Thomas, 141Washington, George, 209Watt, Ian, 14Webb, Wm. Stanford, 4, 18, 219Weinberg, Bernard, 4, 219Weinbrot, Howard, 9–11, 138–9,

143–4, 147–8, 228–9West, Richard, 192Wheatley, Phillis, 209White, Allon, 17–18, 88, 95, 148, 222, 225Whitehead, Mr., 167–9Wilberforce, William, 206Wilding, Michael, 96, 226–7Wilkie, Brian, 199–200William III, 6–7, 19–20, 22, 98–9,

103–5, 109–14, 116, 120–2, 134–5, 173, 227

Winterer, Caroline, 192, 209, 211Women and the Classics, 2, 24, 30, 71,

78, 125, 193, 202–8, 216Wood, Robert, 190–1Wordsworth, Christopher, 230Wordsworth, Jonathan, 194–5Wordsworth, William, 24, 133, 189–90,

193–9, 201, 204, 210, 214, 216, 230Wotton, William, 100Wren, Christopher, 65, 223Wycherley, William, 83

Yonge, Charlotte, 203Young, Edward, 185–6

Zwicker, Steven, 26, 29, 103, 220, 226


virgil made english

Documents