Note 206 — AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM.
Reading edition
Blackmore's attack upon Dryden occurs in a poem which appeared in 1700, called a Satire against Wit. The author treats wit as money, and proposes that the whole should be recoined for the purpose of separating the base metal from the pure.
Into the melting pot when Dryden comes What horrid stench will rise, what noisome fumes! How will he shrink when all his lewd allay And wicked mixture shall be purged away! When once his boasted heaps are melted down, A chestful scarce will yield one sterling crown.
This is exaggerated, but the censure is directed against the indecency which was really infamous. The invectives of Milbourne in his Notes on Dryden's Virgil, 1698, had not the same excuse. The strictures are confined to the translation of the Eclogues and Georgics, and are throughout rabid, insolent, coarse, and contemptible. To demonstrate his own superiority, Milbourne inserted specimens of a rival translation, which is on a par with his criticisms. He was in orders, and acknowledges that one of his reasons for not sparing Dryden was that Dryden never spared a clergyman. "I am only," replied the poet, with exquisite sarcasm, "to ask pardon of good priests, and am afraid his part of the reparation will come to little." Dryden retaliated upon both antagonists together in the couplet,
Wouldst thou be soon dispatched, and perish whole? Trust Maurus with thy life, and Milbourne with thy soul.
Pope's line in the first edition was
New Bl——s and new M——s must arise.
In the second edition he substituted S——s, which meant Shadwells, for Bl——s, but in the quarto of 1717 he again coupled Blackmore with Milbourne, and printed both names at full length. Blackmore was living, and the changes indicate Pope's varying feelings towards him.