The Adventures of Roderick Random

The Elegy

The narrator requests to examine Melopoyn’s poetical works and is profoundly affected by an elegy composed in imitation of Tibullus, addressed to Monimia. The poem’s despondent tone mirrors the narrator’s own romantic disappointments, causing him to identify the subject with Narcissa and plunge into such deep melancholy that he resorts to wine to secure sleep.

Strap’s Resolution

Strap announces that he has engaged himself as a journeyman barber, a measure designed to economise on the narrator’s expenses during his imprisonment and to earn a subsistence for them both should the narrator’s funds be exhausted before relief arrives.

第六十二章

The narrator reads Melopoyn’s tragedy with great admiration, judging it by the classical rules of Aristotle and Horace, finding the plot well-constructed, the characters strongly contrasted, and the diction appropriately poetic. Melopoyn then recounts his life story: the son of a country curate who educated him in the classics, he planned his tragedy while young but his father’s death left him poor, and after his mother’s death he journeyed to London with high hopes of theatrical fame. He obtained a recommendation from a Catholic priest to the manager Mr. Supple, but faced repeated delays; when he finally called on Supple, the manager claimed his son had destroyed the manuscript by using it as waste paper in the kitchen. Melopoyn rewrote the entire play from memory, only to be told the season had passed and he must wait until the next year, by which time he had nearly exhausted his money. Facing destitution, he attempted various literary avenues—pastoral poems rejected by booksellers, translation work that paid a pittance—before descending to write sensationalist ballads and ghostly tales for Grub Street publishers, earning meager sums while producing content for the lowest tastes of the common people.