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SECTION V.

OF THE ELEGY TO THE MEMORY OF AN

UNFORTUNATE LADY, THE PROLOGUE
TO CATO, AND THE EPILOGUE

TO JANE SHORE,

THE ELEGY to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, which is next to be spoken of, as it came from the heart, is very tender and pathetic; more so, I think, than any other copy of verses of our author. We are unacquainted with the whole of her history, and with that series of misfortunes which seems to have drawn on the melancholy catastrophe alluded to in the beginning of this ELEGY. She is said to be the same person to whom the Duke of Buckingham has addressed some lines, viz. "To a Lady designing to retire into a Monastery." This design is also hinted at in POPE'S Letters, where he says, in a letter R 3

addressed,

* Vol. vii. p. 193. Octavo Edition.

addressed, I presume, to this very person,

"If you are resolved, in revenge, to rob the world of so much example as you may afford it, I believe your design will be vain: for even in a monastery, your devotions cannot carry you so far towards the next world, as to make this lose sight of you but you will be like a star, that, while it is fixed in heaven, shines over all the earth. Wheresoever Providence shall dispose of the most valuable thing I know, I shall ever follow you with my sincerest wishes; and my best thoughts will be perpetually waiting upon when you never hear of me or them. Your own guardian angels cannot be more constant, nor more silent."

you,

This ELEGY opens with a striking abruptness, and a strong image; the poet fancies he beholds suddenly the phantom of his murdered friend :

What beck'ning ghost along the moonlight shade,
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
'Tis she!-But why that bleeding bosom gor'd?
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

This

This question alarms the reader, and puts one in mind of that lively and affecting image in the prophecy of Isaiah, so vigorously conceived, that it places the object full in one's eyes: "Who is this that cometh from Edom? with dyed garments from Bosra ?" Akenside has begun one of his odes in the like manner;

O fly! 'tis dire SUSPICION's mien ;
And meditating plagues unseen,
The sorc'ress hither bends!
Behold her torch in gall imbru'd ;
Behold her garments drop with blood
Of lovers and of friends!

The execrations on the cruelties of this lady's relations, which had driven her to this deplorable extremity, are very spirited and forcible; especially where the poet says emphatically,

Thus, if eternal justice rules the ball,

Thus shall your wives, and thus your children fall.

He describes afterwards the desolation of this family, by the following lively circumstance and prosopopœia :

Ꭱ Ꮞ

* Chap. Ixiii. ver. 1.

There

There passengers shall stand, and pointing say,
(While the long funerals blacken all the way,)
Lo! these were they whose souls the furies steel'd,
And curst with hearts unknowing how to yield !
So perish all whose breast ne'er learn'd to glow
For others good, or melt at others woe.

The incident of her dying in a country remote from her relations and acquaintance, is touched with great tenderness, and introduced with propriety, to aggravate and heighten her lamentable fate:

*

No friend's complaint, no kind domestic tear,"
Pleas'd thy pale ghost, or grac'd thy mournful bier:
By foreign hands thy dying eyes were clos'd,
By foreign hands thy decent limbs compos'd,
By foreign hands thy humble grave adorn'd,
By strangers honour'd, and by strangers mourn'd!

The force of the repetition of the significant epithet foreign, need not be pointed out to any reader of sensibility. The right of sepulture, of which she was deprived from the manner of her

death,

* Something like that pathetic stroke in the Philoctetes of Sophocles, who, among other heavy circumstances of distress, is said not to have near him, any συντροφον όμμα. Ver. 171.

Not to be translated.

death, is glanced at with great delicacy; nay, and a very poetical use is made of it:

What though no sacred earth allow thee room,
Nor hallow'd dirge be mutter'd o'er thy tomb,
Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest,
And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast;
There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow,
There the first roses of the year shall blow.

If this ELEGY be so excellent, it may be ascribed to this cause, that the occasion of it was real; for it is certainly an indisputable maxim, "That nature is more powerful than fancy; that we can always feel more than we can imagine; and that the most artful fiction can give way to truth." When Polus, the celebrated actor, once affected his audience with more than ordinary emotions, it was "luctû et lamentis veris," by bursting out into real cries and tears ; for in personating Electra weeping over the supposed urn of her brother Orestes, he held in his hand the real ashes of his own son lately dead.* Events that have actually happened, are, after all, the properest subjects for poetry.

The best

Aul. Gell. Noct, Attic. lib. vii. cap. v.

eclogue

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