ELEGY TO THE MEMORY OF AN UNFORTUNATE LADY.

See the Duke of Buckingham's verses to a Lady designing to retire into a Monastery compared with Mr. Pope's Letters to several Ladies, p. 206 [86], quarto edition. She seems to be the same person whose unfortunate death is the subject of this poem.[531]—Pope.

The unfortunate lady seems to have been a particular favourite of our poet. Whether he himself was the person she was removed from I am not able to say, but whoever reads his verses to her memory will find she had a very great share in him. This young lady who was of quality, had a very large fortune, and was in the eye of our discerning poet a great beauty, was left under the guardianship of an uncle, who gave her an education suitable to her title; for Mr. Pope declares she had titles, and she was thought a fit match for the greatest peer. But very young she contracted an acquaintance, and afterwards some degree of intimacy, with a young gentleman, who is only imagined, and, having settled her affections there, refused a match proposed to her by her uncle. Spies being set upon her, it was not long before her correspondence with her lover of lower degree was discovered, which, when taxed with by her uncle, she had too much truth and honour to deny. The uncle finding that she could not, nor would strive to withdraw her regard from him, after a little time forced her abroad, where she was received with all due respect to her quality, but kept up from the sight or speech of anybody but the creatures of this severe guardian, so that it was impossible for her lover even to deliver a letter that might ever come to her hand. Several were received from him with promises to get them privately delivered to her, but those were all sent to England, and only served to make them more cautious who had her in care. She languished here a considerable time, went through a great deal of sickness and sorrow, wept and sighed continually. At last wearied out, and despairing quite, the unfortunate lady, as Mr. Pope justly calls her, put an end to her own life. Having bribed a woman servant to procure her a sword, she was found dead upon the ground, but warm. The severity of the laws of the place where she was in denied her Christian burial, and she was buried without solemnity, or even any to wait on her to her grave except some young people of the neighbourhood, who saw her put into common ground, and strewed her grave with flowers, which gave some offence to the priesthood, who would have buried her in the highway, but it seems their power there did not extend so far.—Ayre.

From this account, given with the evident intention to raise the lady's character, it does not appear that she had any claim to praise, nor much to compassion. She seems to have been impatient, violent and ungovernable. Her uncle's power could not have lasted long; the hour of liberty and choice would have come in time. But her desires were too hot for delay, and she liked self-murder better than suspense. Nor is it discovered that the uncle, whoever he was, is with much justice delivered to posterity as "a false guardian." He seems to have done only that for which a guardian is appointed; he endeavoured to direct his niece till she should be able to direct herself. Poetry has not often been worse employed than in dignifying the amorous fury of a raving girl. The verses have drawn much attention by the illaudable singularity of treating suicide with respect; and they must be allowed to be written in some parts with vigorous animation, and in others with gentle tenderness; nor has Pope produced any poem in which the sense predominates more over the diction. But the tale is not skilfully told; it is not easy to discover the character of either the lady or her guardian. Pope praises her for the dignity of ambition, and yet condemns the uncle to detestation for his pride. The ambitious love of a niece may be opposed by the interest, malice, or envy of an uncle, but never by his pride. On such an occasion a poet may be allowed to be obscure, but inconsistency never can be right.—Johnson.

I have in my possession a letter to Dr. Johnson, containing the name of the lady, and a reference to a gentleman well known in the literary world for her history. Him I have seen, and from a memorandum of some particulars to the purpose, communicated to him by a lady of quality, he informs me that the unfortunate lady's name was Withinbury, corruptly pronounced Winbury; that she was in love with Pope, and would have married him; that her guardian, though she was deformed in her person, looking upon such a match as beneath her, sent her to a convent, and that a noose, and not a sword, put an end to her life.—Sir John Hawkins.

The Elegy to the Memory of an unfortunate lady, as it came from the heart, is very tender and pathetic—more so, I think, than any other copy of verses of our author. The true cause of the excellence of this elegy is, that the occasion of it was real,—so true is the maxim that nature is more powerful than fancy, and that we can always feel more than we can imagine; and that the most artful fiction must give way to truth, for this lady was beloved by Pope. After many and wide enquiries I have been informed that her name was Wainsbury, and that—which is a singular circumstance—she was as ill-shaped and deformed as our author. Her death was not by a sword, but, what would less bear to be told poetically, she hanged herself. Johnson has too severely censured this elegy when he says, "that it has drawn much attention by the illaudable singularity of treating suicide with respect." She seems to have been driven to this desperate act by the violence and cruelty of her uncle and guardian, who forced her to a convent abroad, and to which circumstance Pope alludes in one of his letters.—Warton.

The real history of the lady distinguished by the epithet "unfortunate" in Pope's exquisite elegy, is still involved in mysterious uncertainty. One thing is plain, that he wished little should be known. It is remarkable that Caryll asks the question in two letters, but Pope returns no answer. It is in vain, after the fruitless enquiry of Johnson and Warton, perhaps, to attempt further elucidation; but I should think it unpardonable not to mention what I have myself heard, though I cannot vouch for its truth. The story which was told to Condorcet by Voltaire, and by Condorcet to a gentleman of high birth and character, from whom I received it, is this:—that her attachment was not to Pope, or to any Englishman of inferior degree, but to a young French prince of the blood royal, Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Berry, whom, in early youth, she had met at the court of France. The verses certainly seem unintelligible, unless they allude to some connection to which her highest hopes, though nobly connected herself, could not aspire. What other sense can be given to these words:

She was herself of a noble family, or there can be no meaning in the line,

Under the idea here suggested, a greater propriety is given to the verse, which otherwise appears so tame and common-place,

It sufficiently appears from Pope's letter that she was of a wild and romantic disposition. She left her friends and country, and commenced a sentimental pursuit after the object in which her ambition and enthusiastic caprice had centered. Having alienated her relations by her wayward conduct, and being disappointed in the hopes she had formed, she retired voluntarily to a convent. Warton asserts that she was "forced" into a nunnery. This is expressly contrary to what Pope himself says in a letter to her: "If you are resolved in revenge to rob the world of so much example as you may afford it, I believe your design to be in vain; for, in a monastery, your devotions cannot carry you so far towards the next world, as to make this lose sight of you." It is most probable that incipient lunacy was the cause of her perverted feelings, and untimely end. Johnson says, "poetry has been seldom worse employed than in dignifying the amorous fury of a raving girl." This seems severe, contemptuous, and unfeeling. Johnson, however, chiefly adverted, I imagine, to the false reasoning and absurd attempt in the lines "Is there no bright," &c., to make suicide the natural consequence of more elevated feelings. Johnson spoke as a severe moralist, and a rigid philosopher, against such contemptible reasoning as Pope employs upon this subject from the fifth to the twenty-second verse. Having been, as might naturally be expected from his superior understanding, disgusted with the reasoning part of the poem, the gentler touches of fancy and tenderness were lost, if I may say so, on him. He would turn with disdain from such images as—

or perhaps exclaim, as upon another occasion, Incredulus odi. Notwithstanding, however, his severity, the animated passages of this poem, "But thou, false guardian," &c., and the lines of tenderness and poetic fancy interspersed, cannot be read without sympathy. The verses "Yet shall thy grave," &c., are possibly too common-place, but they are surely beautiful. If any expression might be objected to, perhaps it would be "silver" for "white" wings of an angel.—Bowles.

The Elegy, although produced at an early age, is not exceeded in pathos and true poetry by any production of its author. But whilst we admit the extraordinary powers displayed by the poet, we cannot but perceive that they are apparently employed to give a sanction to an act of criminality, and to inculcate principles which cannot be too cautiously guarded against. It must, however, be observed, that this piece is not to be judged of by the common rules of criticism. It is, in fact, a spontaneous burst of indignation against the authors of the calamity which it records. Throughout the whole poem, the author speaks as if he were under a delusion, and utters sentiments which would be wholly unpardonable at other times. It is only in this light that we can excuse the violence of many of the expressions, which border on the very verge of impiety. The first line of the poem demonstrates that he is no longer under the control of reason. He sees the ghost of the person whom he so highly admired and loved. The "visionary sword" gleams before his eyes, and in the excess of his grief he perceives nothing but what is great and noble in the act that terminated her life. This impassioned strain is continued till his anger is turned against the author of her sufferings, when it is poured out in one of the most terrific passages which poetry, either ancient or modern, can exhibit,—a passage in which indignation and revenge seem to absorb every other feeling, and to involve not only the offender, but all who are connected with him, in indiscriminate destruction. Nor is this sufficient—their destruction must be the cause of exultation to others, and they are to become the objects of insult and abhorrence—

Compassion at length succeeds to resentment, and pity to terror. The poet in some degree assumes his own character, and his feelings are expressed in language of the deepest affection and tenderness, which impresses itself indelibly on the memory of the reader. The concluding lines, whilst they display the ardour of real passion, demonstrate how greatly the author was attached to the art he professed; that, and his affection for the object of his grief, could only expire together;

This poem first appeared in the quarto of 1717, where it bore the title of "Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady." In the edition of 1736, "Elegy" was substituted for "Verses." The earliest historical account of the heroine was given by William Ayre, Esq., in a miserable compilation called Memoirs of Pope, which is full of extravagant fictions and blunders.[532] This wretched book-maker has merely turned the incidents of the poem into prose, and amplified them in the process. His narrative would be unworthy of notice if it had not been adopted by Ruffhead, who borrowed, without acknowledgment, the statements, and, in the main, the very language of Ayre. The authority of Ruffhead's work is entirely due to the fact, that it was in part drawn up from manuscripts supplied by Warburton, and was subsequently revised by him. The copy corrected by the bishop contains no note on the pages which record the fate of the unfortunate lady. It does not follow that he knew the particulars to be true because he has not declared them to be false. He was probably ignorant on the subject, and unable either to confirm or confute the story. Dr. Johnson was in the same position. "The lady's name and adventures," he says, in his Life of Pope, "I have sought with fruitless inquiry. I can, therefore, tell no more than I have learned from Mr. Ruffhead, who writes with the confidence of one who could trust his information." The trust was fallacious. Ruffhead, an uncritical transcriber, a blind man led by the blind, was deceived by a transparent impostor who, in default of facts, embellished the hints in Pope's verse. His style of invention is emblazoned in the last sentence of his narrative when he says, that "the priesthood would have buried the lady in the highway, but it seems their power there did not extend so far." The law of England till the reign of George IV. ordained that a suicide, unless irresponsible from insanity, should be interred in the highway, and a stake driven through the body. Pope, in his poem, only spoke of "unpaid rites," whence Ayre, alias Curll, concluded that the law of the place did not sanction road-burial. Familiar, however, with the English notion he transfers it to the priests of a locality where the usage, by his own confession, did not exist.

Nearly half a century after the death of the poet, Hawkins and Warton, who evidently derived their statements from a common source, produced a legend, which instead of being drawn from the elegy is directly opposed to it. Pope says that the unfortunate lady destroyed herself with a sword, Warton that she put an end to her life with a rope; Pope says that she had beauty, Warton that she was deformed: Pope says that she had titles, Warton that she was simply one Wainsbury; Pope says that she had fame, and Warton has quoted a name so obscure that nobody has been able to discover her lineage, her connections, her residence, or that she was ever known to a single human being of the time. The Warton form of the romance has been jotted down by the Duchess of Portland in her note book, from which it appears that the narrators did not agree among themselves; for Warton declares that the lady was beloved by Pope; the duchess that Pope was beloved by the lady, and that he did not return her affection. In his Essay on the Genius of Pope, Warton states that her first suitor was the Duke of Buckingham, that on his deserting her she retired into a convent in France, and that her retreat into a nunnery prompted the poet, "who had conceived a violent passion for her," to express his feelings in the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard.[533] The Duke of Buckingham, on March 16, 1705, married his third wife, who survived him. The tone and details of the Elegy forbid the notion that it could have been written on a cast-off mistress of the duke, and the incidents must, therefore, have occurred before March 16, 1705, when Pope was barely sixteen years and ten months old. The fable thus requires us to suppose that the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard was the production of a lad of seventeen, that it was composed several years before the translation of the letters existed from which he has borrowed a considerable part of the phraseology as well as the ideas, and that his virulent denunciation of the "false guardian," was for not allowing a ward "with beauty, titles, wealth, and fame," to wed the son of a linen-draper,—a mere boy without money, reputation, or prospects, and who was deformed and stunted in an extreme degree.

In 1806, Bowles promulgated a tradition which contradicts the representations both of Ayre and Warton. The hero of Warton is Pope himself; the hero of Bowles is the Duke of Berry. The heroine of Warton in one version, for he is not consistent, was forced into a convent; and the heroine of Bowles withdrew there of her own accord. The unfortunate lady of Ayre and Ruffhead is driven abroad by her uncle, that she may be weaned from an English attachment; the unfortunate lady of Bowles falls in love with a foreigner on the continent; the lady of Ayre and Ruffhead is thwarted in her matrimonial schemes because she has fixed her heart upon a person beneath her; and the lady of Bowles is reduced to despair because she aspires to the hand of a person above her. Bowles maintains that the latter view must be received or the Elegy is unintelligible. Johnson has shown that the Elegy is contradictory, and if the verses which represent the lady's fate to have been the consequence of her ambition favours the theory that she was enamoured of some superior in rank, the passage which represents the uncle as steeling his heart against his niece out of pride equally favours the rival hypothesis that she was devoted to an inferior.

At variance in nearly every particular, the conflicting histories of the unfortunate lady have the common quality, that they are unsupported by a single circumstance which could warrant the smallest measure of belief. Bowles heard his version, for which he declined to vouch, from an unnamed gentleman, who heard it from Condorcet, who heard it from Voltaire, who heard it nobody knows where. Ayre and the rest cite no witnesses whatever, for the obvious reason that they had none of any value to cite. The only accounts which give the lady's name report it differently, and not one of the investigators of her story,—not even Warton after his "many and wide enquiries,"—can tell us where she was born or died, or where she lived, or to whom she was related or known. The veriest phantom that ever flitted in darkness before the eye of credulous superstition could not be more illusive and impalpable.

The biographers and editors who went about enquiring after the unfortunate lady had no suspicion that she might be altogether a poetical invention, nor could they have shown that here was the solution of the mystery unless they had been in possession of the Caryll correspondence. Pope, in a posthumous note, which was published by Warburton, directs us to the letters to several ladies at p. 206 of the quarto edition, for the indications that the unfortunate lady of the Elegy was also the heroine of the Duke of Buckingham's Verses to a Lady designing to retire into a Monastery. There are no letters to ladies at p. 206 of the quarto, but some are inserted from p. 86 to p. 95, and 206 is a palpable misprint for 86, where, in conformity with the title of the duke's poem, we have a letter to a lady who was meditating a retreat to a convent. The preceding letter is addressed to Mr. Caryll, and, in the table of contents, is said to be "Concerning an unfortunate lady." The letter which relates to the monastic project is said, in the table of contents, to be "To the same lady," and thence it appears that the lady who thought of withdrawing to a nunnery was the same unfortunate lady who was the subject of the letter to Caryll. From the Caryll correspondence we discover that she was the wife of John Weston, Esq., of Sutton, in the county of Surrey; but, instead of dying by her own hand in a foreign country, she died a natural death in her native land on the 18th of October, 1724, several years after the poet had commemorated the suicide of the unfortunate lady.[534] It follows that he has falsely represented the unfortunate lady of his letters to have been the same individual with the unfortunate lady of the Elegy, and since he was driven to conjure up a fictitious victim we may be sure that there was no real victim in the case. This explains Pope's omission to answer Caryll's inquiry who the unfortunate lady was;[535] this explains why the tragical death of a woman "with beauty, titles, wealth, and fame," was unknown to her contemporaries; this explains why the histories of her differ from each other, and why in every one of them she remains a shadowy being whose very existence cannot be traced; this explains why, as Johnson observes, it is not easy to make out from the poem the character of either the heroine or her guardian: and this accounts for the contradictions which have crept into the Elegy. Pope adopted the common incident of a miserable girl having recourse to self-destruction, and he wished to have it believed that he had a personal interest in her fate. His disposition to talk of himself in his poetry has been noticed by Johnson. Windsor Forest, the Essay on Criticism, the Temple of Fame, the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, and the Rape of the Lock, all ended egotistically. The Elegy was an inviting occasion for the indulgence of his propensity. He had got, as he thought, a romantic heroine, and yielding to the temptation to blend his name with her story, he wound up his verses with the celebration of his devoted attachment to her. He laid the scene of her death abroad to account for English ignorance of the tragedy, and he endeavoured to authenticate the fable for posterity by a posthumous note which involved the assumption that the unfortunate lady of his letters was the same lady commemorated in his poem. The note which was designed to accredit the tale has answered the opposite purpose, and convicted him of a puerile deception, not the mere impulse of youthful vanity, but renewed on the brink of the grave, with a final sense of satisfaction in propping up and perpetuating the petty fraud.

The supposition that the story was true has seduced Warton, Wakefield, and Roscoe into some weak critical fancies. Warton thinks the Elegy the most pathetic of Pope's writings, and says "that the cause of its excellence is that the occasion of it was real." Wakefield remarks that the text of the latest edition does not differ from the earliest, and conjectures that "the author's interest in the subject rendered the poem too affecting for his own perusal." Roscoe, to excuse the principles inculcated in the piece, alleges that it was "a spontaneous burst of indignation," and that "the first line demonstrates that Pope was no longer under the control of reason." Similar causes have dissimilar effects. Unfortunate ladies who are "no longer under the control of reason" are prone to stab or hang themselves. When Pope is "no longer under the control of reason" he sits down and writes an elegy which Roscoe says "is not exceeded in pathos and true poetry by any production of its author." Had the grief been as genuine as it was imaginary the apology is manifestly futile; for the man whose mind is sufficiently calm to permit him to sing his woes in polished verse, must have passed beyond the stage when he is incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. The plea might have justified the sentiments in a drama where the speaker was represented as pouring out his feelings while the calamity was fresh, but in an elegy the poet embodies his own opinions at the time of composition, and the bad morality becomes deliberate doctrine.

Vague and sounding verse could not lend a momentary speciousness to the sophistries of the Elegy. That the transgression of the angels was ambition is a common, though an unauthorised idea. That their sin was "glorious" is a notion peculiar to Pope. This "glorious fault" they infused into the unfortunate lady and "bade her soul aspire." The particular aspiration they suggested to her was to marry out of her sphere; her lofty ambition was an inordinate desire to make a good worldly match. Thwarted in the magnanimous purpose of her life, she had the second great merit of an heroic death; for to commit suicide was, in Pope's opinion, "to think greatly," "to die bravely," "to act a Roman's part." The exalted representation will not stand before the annals of suicide. They bear daily witness that self-destruction is the refuge of diseased, weak, pusillanimous, conscience-stricken minds.[536] The want of fortitude is proportioned to the slightness of the disaster which prompts the deed. What is remediable may be more readily endured than what cannot be cured, and there could be no stronger mark of a childish, self-indulgent, unhealthy character, without force or dignity, the slave of impulse, than that a woman should be guilty of suicide because her guardian refused his consent to an unequal marriage. There might be much room for pity; there could be none for admiration. The strength of affection which could be the only redeeming element is eliminated by the poet who, in this part of the Elegy, resolves the lady's love into the ignoble craving to marry into a higher station than her own. Her worldly disposition is the evidence to Pope that she had "a purer spirit" than such "kindred dregs" as had not sufficient grandeur of mind to worship rank. Out of compassion for her superiority "fate snatched her early away," that she might not be doomed to associate with the "dull souls" who love their equals, and bear their trials with resignation.

The opening lines of the Elegy have some of the indefiniteness which Johnson censured in the portrayal of the lady and her guardian. A female ghost with a gored and bleeding bosom, and bearing a visionary sword, beckons the poet to go with her into a glade. For what purpose does she beckon him? The apparition may be supposed to be the creature of a heated imagination, but there should be some significance in the act ascribed to her. The ghost of the King of Denmark did not beckon Horatio or the sentinels. It passed by them with "a slow and stately march," and made no sign, till Hamlet was present at its fourth appearance, and then

The ghost of the unfortunate lady imparted no information to Pope, for he avows his ignorance of everything relating to her ghostly condition. A passage in Milton's Comus, separated from the context, might seem to countenance the indiscriminate use of the epithet "beckoning," as if it were a general characteristic of spectres.

A superstition attached to "desert wildernesses," where the wanderer who lost sight of his associates could seldom strike into their track on the pathless waste, was made known to Milton by the travels of Marco Polo. "If," says the old Venetian, in his account of the great Asiatic desert, Lop or Gobi, "any one at night stays behind, or diverges from his company, he hears, when he wishes to rejoin it, spirits speaking in the air, who seem to be his comrades, and sometimes call him by his name, beguiling him out of the right road, so that many continue to go astray and perish."[538] The lady in Comus was in a like situation. She was benighted, she had lost her way, she heard "the tumult of loud mirth," and when she reached the spot from whence the merriment proceeded she found "nought but darkness." Then the "calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire," that lure poor wanderers to destruction, rushed into her thoughts, and she conceived she might be the dupe of malignant phantoms.[539] Pope's beckoning ghost was not of this class of "dire" counterfeit "shadows." She is represented as an honest, sympathising spirit, who could never have designed to entice her lover or friend into the glade with a murderous intent. Warton quotes the commencement of Ben Jonson's Epitaph on Lady Winchester, which Pope must have had in his mind when he wrote his Elegy. The ghost beckoned Jonson to pluck a garland from the yew tree.[540] A spirit could not have revisited the world, for a more frivolous purpose, but at least the poet felt that he must assign a cause for the beckoning. The omission in Pope arose from a frequent source of misapplied language. Isolated lines and phrases, which had the sanction of classic authors, lingered in his memory, and he forgot the accompaniments to which they owed their fitness.

The spectacle of the bleeding ghost of the lady haunting the glade by moonlight suggests to the poet that she may be doing penance for her self-inflicted death. He reasons himself into the conviction that her violence was meritorious, and he concludes that she has been "snatched to the pitying sky." At ver. 47 comes a couplet in which the christian idea of a spirit in heaven is superseded by the pagan notion of an ever "injured shade" to whom nothing can compensate for the loss of the customary funereal rites. Out of his ambition to imitate classic poets Pope jumbled discordant creeds together, and introduced this remnant of an extinct mythology, absurd in itself and offensive in a modern elegy. The passage which follows, from ver. 51 to ver. 68, is the most pleasing part of the poem, though the ten lines from ver. 59 have been severely criticised by Lord Kames. Fictitious topics of consolation were not, he said, "the language of the heart, but of imagination indulging its flights at ease," and were incompatible with "the deeply serious and pathetic."[541] Warburton criticised the criticism. He said it "smelled furiously of old John Dennis," and Bowles allowed that it was "absurd." The tone of Lord Kames is, perhaps, too contemptuous, for the lines have a certain sweetness of sentiment. Yet he was right when he maintained that they were not in harmony with the professions of grief and indignation which follow or go before. All ages and nations have shared the conviction that the omnipotence behind the phenomena of nature deputes them on special occasions to speak in exceptional ways to the affections, hopes, and fears of man. In the rear of these beliefs are numerous cases in which appearances are accepted for a symbolical language, not with an absolute faith, but with a fond acquiescence because they are the just reflection of our thoughts. Wordsworth's exquisite Hart-leap Well,—perfect in its descriptive power, its easy flow of beautiful English, and its mingled strains of animation and pathos—culminates in the creed that the bleakness of the once luxuriant enclosure in which the stag fell dead, is the protest of nature against the palace and bowers erected there by the knight in exultant commemoration of his cruel chase. Wide is the range in this domain of poetry, from sublimity down to prettinesses, from prettinesses to poor conceits. What is legitimate in itself may be wrongly placed, and here is the fault of Pope's lines. Amid the tempest of sorrow and anger he derives consolation from the notion that the first roses of the year will blow on the grave of the unfortunate lady, that the earliest dew-drops of the morning will weep her loss, that the turf will lie light on her insensate corpse, and that angels will overshadow in perpetuity the spot of earth which conceals it. The reveries of fancy may gratify the tranquil mind. They would be mockery to a man absorbed by terrible realities, to a man distracted by the suicide of the woman he adored.

The paragraph, "So peaceful rests," was much admired by the stone-cutters, and with tasteless ignorance they engraved it, slightly modified, upon hundreds of tombstones. No one in a churchyard requires to be reminded that its buried population is "a heap of dust." Amid the visible signs of mortality monuments should soothe and lift up the mind by speaking of that which is not corruptible—of that which was best in the acts, disposition, endurance, and belief of the dead, or of the contrast between the earthly life that was and the life that is, between the transitory and the immortal. Improper for an epitaph, the lines were not unsuited to an elegy, if the final paragraph had opened up a brighter vista instead of dropping into the lowest style of heathenism. The affection of the elegy-writer was to cease with the "idle business" of life, and the dearest object of his heart would be "beloved by him no more." He had talked of "pale ghosts," and "bright reversions in the skies," but by the time he got to the conclusion of his poetical exercise, skies, and ghosts had faded from his thoughts, and his language would leave the impression that the "last gasp" was the end of all things. In composition the Elegy is terse and powerful; the ideas are erroneous, inconsistent, or inadequate. Pagan and christian notions clash together; the story is represented under contradictory phases; the dreary close of the poem sets aside the faith which consoles survivors; the sentiments at the beginning are false and melodramatic; and the middle, though not devoid of tenderness, chiefly consists of borrowed fictions, which are too artificial for the occasion.

ELEGY

TO THE MEMORY OF

AN UNFORTUNATE LADY.