Anthony Alsop
Anthony Alsop was born about 1670 and died in
Life
Alsop was born at Darley Dale in Derbyshire and educated at Westminster School. Going on to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1690, he took the degrees of Bachelor of Arts in 1695 and Master of Arts in 1697. While there he gained a reputation for his elegant Latin verse, some of it produced for public university occasions, some for private circulation, and some Jacobite in spirit. His speciality was the witty verse epistle, most often using the Sapphic stanza.
In 1698 Alsop edited a selection of
Poetry
Alsop left many Latin odes in manuscript which were published in 1752 by his stepson
The humorous nature of his Latin writing can be gained from some of the personal epistles he wrote. That written to the aristocratic archdeacon Henry Bridges in 1721 contains the satirical advice to trim his High church religious views to those of the new Hanoverian establishment:
- Be wise at last, and learn those skills
- by which to be accounted great and good.
- Let the pattern of worship be everywhere free,
- unconfined by law;
- let each have his own faith and mind,
- under no leader or guidance, for who can
- bear the imperious yoke of the clergy,
- or priestly control?"[3]
Another to the lawyer Joseph Taylor begins with a Horatian invitation to supper but then playfully adapts the Latin to the contemporary situation of enjoying smuggled goods: "I have a little bottle of wine (vasculum Bacchi), brought by a friendly ship, without the knowledge of the customs officer (clam quaestore)."[4] Another poem warns him of the tedious and expensive process of bribing his way into Parliament, when "you must furrow your way through a great ocean of liquor, many clouds of smoke must pour out and a perpetual flow of ale."[5]
The two books of Alsop's odes was not reprinted and he was forgotten until a biographical and critical study of him, with a modern edition of the Latin and English poems, was published in 1998.[6]
References
- ^ Google Books
- ^ vol.6, pp.256-268
- ^ Lines 17-24
- ^ Lines 7-8
- ^ The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin (2015), pp.83-4
- ^ D. K. Money, The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse, Oxford University 1998.
Biographical details are chiefly taken from two sources.
- "Alsop, Anthony" in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900).
- "Anthony Alsop" in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Writers and Writing, (Oxford 2011)