Indeed, if any personality is
then evinced in the adaptation of these old world themes, it is
generally connected with a more or less emphatic disparagement or
grotesque distortion of their real meaning.
When Dryden, for example, makes use of the legend of Midas, in his
_Wife of Bath's Tale_, he makes, not Midas's minister, but his queen,
tell the mighty secret--and thus secures another hit at woman's
loquacity.
Prior's _Female Phaeton_ is a younger sister, who, jealous of her
elder's success, thus pleads with her 'mamma':
I'll have my earl as well as she
Or know the reason why.
And she wants to flaunt it accordingly.
Finally,
Fondness prevailed; mamma gave way;
Kitty, at heart's desire,
Obtained the chariot for a day,
And set the world on fire.
Pandora, in Parnell's _Hesiod or the Rise of Woman_, is only a
'shining vengeance...
A pleasing bosom-cheat, a specious ill'
sent by the gods upon earth to punish the race of Prometheus.
The most poetical fables of Greece are desecrated by Gay into mere
miniatures for the decoration of his _Fan_.
Similar instances abound later on. When Armstrong brings in an
apostrophe to the Naiads, it is in the course of a _Poetical Essay on
the Art of Preserving Health_. And again, when Cowper stirs himself to
intone an _Ode to Apollo_, it is in the same mock-heroic vein:
Patron of all those luckless brains,
That to the wrong side leaning
Indite much metre with much pains
And little or no meaning.
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