Note I.
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And mother Hubbard, in her homely dress,Has sharply blamed a British Lioness;That queen, whose feast the factious rabble keep,Exposed obscenely naked, and asleep._--P. 197. The poet, in the beginning of this canto, anticipates the censure ofthose who might blame him for introducing into his fables animals notnatives of Britain, where the scene was laid. He vindicates himselfby the example of Æsop and Spenser. The latter, in "Mother Hubbard'sTale," exhibits at length the various arts by which, in his time,obscure and infamous characters rose to eminence in church and state.This is illustrated by the parable of an Ape and a Fox, who insinuatethemselves into various situations, and play the knaves in all. Atlength, Lo, where they spied, how, in a gloomy glade,The Lion, sleeping, lay in secret shade;His crown and sceptre lying him beside,And having doft for heat his dreadful hide. The adventurers possess themselves of the royal spoils, with which theApe is arrayed; who forthwith takes upon himself the dignity of themonarch of the beasts, and, by the counsels of the Fox, commits everyspecies of oppression, until Jove, incensed at the disorders whichhis tyranny had introduced, sends Mercury to awaken the Lion from hisslumber: Arise! said Mercury, thou sluggish beast,That here liest senseless, like the corpse deceast;The whilst thy kingdom from thy head is rent,And thy throne royal with dishonour blent. The Lion rouses himself, hastens to court, and avenges himself of theusurpers.--There is no doubt, that, under this allegory, Spenser meantto represent the exorbitant power of Lord Burleigh; and he afterwardscomplains, that his verse occasioned his falling into a "mighty peer'sdispleasure." The Lion, therefore, whose negligence is upbraided byMercury, was Queen Elizabeth. Dryden calls her, The queen, whose feast the factious rabble keep; because the tumultuous pope-burnings of 1680 and 1681 were solemnizedon Queen Elizabeth's night. The poet had probably, since his changeof religion, laid aside much of the hereditary respect with whichmost Englishmen regard Queen Bess; for, in the pamphlets of theRomanists, she is branded as "a known bastard, who raised this prelaticprotestancy, called the church of England, as a prop to supply theweakness of her title."[264] Spenser's authority is only appealed to by Dryden as justifying theintroduction of lions and other foreign animals into a British fable.But I observed in the introduction, that it also furnishes authority,at least example, for those aberrations from the character andattributes of his brute actors, with which the critics taxed Dryden;for nothing in "The Hind and the Panther" can be more inconsistent withthe natural quality of such animals, than the circumstance of a lion,or any other creature, going to sleep without his skin, on account ofthe sultry weather.
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