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“A Severe Animadversion on Bossu”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
An error has been committed at the expense of René Le Bossu, the noted seventeenth-century critic of the epic; and its elimination is important not only in justice to “the learned Bossu” but in correcting a widely accepted misinterpretation of one of our foremost English writers. Furthermore, in addition to affording belated personal justice, the correction will reveal a notable example of the unconscious influence of party spirit in criticism and scholarship, as a result of which cool and informed appraisal is sacrificed to the pleasure of ridicule.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947
References
1 Vol. vi, p. 267.
2 Quarterly Review, February., 1811, p. 42.
3 P. 426.
4 Here Le Bossu's definition of the epic is given, which the authors persist in seeing as a recipe.
5 P. 484. Of course, the figurative flippancies here employed are not Le Bossu's.
6 P. 564.
7 P. 566.
8 Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England (1660-1830) (Paris, 1925), p. 247.
9 P. 189.
10 “Rules and English Critics of the Epic, 1650-1800.” SP, xxxv (1938), 575.
11 The Theory of the Epic in England, 1650-1800 (Berkeley, 1944), p. 68.
12 Ibid., p. 87.
13 P. 306.
14 The paper is also reprinted in Vol. 17 of Chalmers' British Essayists.
15 Whatsoever Rules we have laid down in this Treatise, and howsoever we have expressed our thoughts, yet it has been far from our design to form a Poet, and to teach Men how to make an Epopea: But only to give the World a clearer insight into the Aeneid. So that we must look upon the whole only as the way whereby one should judge of that excellent piece.—LeBossu, Traité du Poème Épique, Bk. vi, Chap. 8 (W. J.'s translation, 1695).
Contrast the quotation from Scott, supra.
16 Traité, Bk. vi, Ch. 2.
17 Prince Arthur, Bk. i, p. 13.
18 Prince Arthur, Bk. x, p. 330.
19 Eliza, Bk. vi, p. 174.
20 Eliza, Bk. i, pp. 9-10.
21 Eliza, Bk. i, pp. 12-13.
22 Eliza, Bk. i, pp. 14-17.
23 Traité, Bk. vi, Ch. i.
24 “Pope's dual attitude—one might almost call it a ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ attitude—towards Le Bossu is very curious. As translator of Homer, he is full of respect for him. … On the other hand in his capacity as satirist and mock-heroic poet, Pope is the first English writer to ridicule Le Bossu by burlesque applications of his critical scheme.” —A. F. B. Clark, loc. cit.
25 “Dissertation on the Nature and Conduct of the Aeneid,” Works of Virgil (1753), Vol. ii, p. iv.
26 Joseph Warton's Essay on Pope: A History of the five Editions (Chapel Hill, 1933), pp. 52-70.