"If Momus’s project had taken, of having windows in our breasts, I should be for carrying it further, and making those windows casements: that while a man showed his heart to all the world, he might do something more for his friends, e’en take it out, and trust to their handling."
— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Author
Date
August 18, 1716; 1735
Metaphor
"If Momus’s project had taken, of having windows in our breasts, I should be for carrying it further, and making those windows casements: that while a man showed his heart to all the world, he might do something more for his friends, e’en take it out, and trust to their handling."
Metaphor in Context
The freedom I shall use in this manner of thinking aloud (as somebody calls it), or talking upon paper, may indeed prove me a fool, but it will prove me one of the best sort of fools, the honest ones. And since what folly we have will infallibly buoy up at one time or other in spite of all our art to keep it down, it is almost foolish to take any pains to conceal it at all, and almost knavish to do it from those that are our friends. If Momus’s project had taken, of having windows in our breasts, I should be for carrying it further, and making those windows casements: that while a man showed his heart to all the world, he might do something more for his friends, e’en take it out, and trust to their handling. I think I love you as well as King Herod could Herodias (though I never had so much as one dance with you), and would as freely give you my heart in a dish as he did another’s head.
Categories
Provenance
Reading Anne Jessie van Sant's Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 60. Found again reading Dennis Todd's Imagining Monsters (University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 250.
Citation
See Letters of Mr Pope, and Several Eminent Persons, From the Year 1705, to 1735. Vol. I. (London: Printed for T. Cooper, at the Globe in Pater-Noster-Row, 1735), letter 15, 1:151-5. <Link to ECCO>
Theme
Momus Glass
Date of Entry
07/08/2013
