SOURCE: Cope, Jackson I. “Shakerly Marmion and Pope's Rape of the Lock.” Modern Language Notes 27, no. 4 (April 1957): 265-67.

In the following essay, Cope suggests that a key scene in Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock was anticipated in Marmion's Cupid and Psyche.

The Abbe de Montfaucon de Villars' Le Comte de Gabalis (1670) provided Pope with the immediate source of Belinda's sylphs. But Pope, citing “Antient Traditions of the Rabbi's” for authority, departed from de Villars in utilizing the sylphs as Betty's better part at Belinda's toilet.¹ And commentators have agreed that “Pope's originality most obviously shows itself in the way he particularizes the notions he has borrowed …, and in the feminine satire which salts much of what he says of them and much of what he makes them say.”² But the high serious attendance of the sylphs to the preparations at their mistress' dressing-table may not have sprung...