leaves his
innocent pastoral employment to chase, with evil intentions, "a rural
nymph" who calls on "Father Thames" for aid. Father Thames is deaf or
indifferent, and Pan is about to clutch her when at her own request she
is dissolved into a river. Before her transformation she was one of the
"buskined virgins" of Diana, what time the goddess forsook "Cynthus'
top" for Windsor, and was often seen roving there over the "airy
wastes." There was no occasion now to envy "Arcadia the immortal
huntress and her virgin train," since Windsor could boast

As bright a goddess, and as chaste a queen,

and the poet proceeds to complete the comparison between Diana and Queen
Anne,--between the virgin huntress, and a prolific mother, who was ugly,
corpulent, gouty, sluggish, a glutton and a tippler. Pope afterwards
affected a disdain of royalty; he was ready enough to flatter it when he
had his own ends to serve. He could not have devised a less felicitous
compliment. Tickell's poem was specially praised in the Spectator for
its freedom from the follies of "pagan theology." Addison laughed at the
whole tiresome tribe of gods and goddesses, and, with good-humoured
pleasantry, warned the versifiers, who were about to celebrate the
Peace, against introducing "trifling antiquated fables unpardonable in a
poet that was past sixteen." He laid stress upon the circumstance that
in a panegyric, which should be distinguished for truth, "nothing could
be more ridiculous than to have recourse to our Jupiters and Junos,"[22]
and no incongruity of the kind could be more absurd than to couple Diana
and Queen Anne. Windsor Forest was still in manuscript when Addison's
essay appeared. Pope was not at the pains to re-cast his poem, but he
must have recognised the force of the playful satire, and thenceforward
he abjured mythological trash.

The passage on the death of Cowley exemplifies, in a short compass, the
unskilful use to which Pope put the worn-out rags of antiquity:

O early lost! what tears the river shed,
When the sad pomp along his banks was led!
His drooping swans on ev'ry note expire,
And on his willows hung each muse's lyre.

"The appropriate business of poetry," says Wordsworth, "her privilege,
and her duty, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear;
not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses
and passions."[23] Since genuine emotions are often founded upon
fancies,