Write a character sketch of The Baron.

Ans. The Baron truly represents the fops and dandies of Pope’s time. He falls in love with the bright locks of Belinda and desires to own one of them and resolves to get it by any means fair or foul.

In order to acquire his purpose he seeks to propitiate heaven and builds an altar of Love for this purpose. The altar is made of vast twelves French romances on which are collected three garters, half a pair of gloves and all the trophies of his former loves. The pyre is lighted by his passionate love letters and he breathes three amorous sighs to raise the fire. This ceremony may be likened to the out performed by Belinda at the dressing-table. Like Belinda’s ritual, the ceremony of the Barons ritual is also saturated with irony and satire. In him the fops of the time are being ridiculed.

The Baron is ridiculed when the poet states the strategy for cutting Belinda’s lock of hair entered into his mind when he sipped coffee and inhaled coffee fumes. When he came to possess the lock he spoke in a manner which indicates a spirit of bravado in him. He uses bombast to express his petty achievement which makes us roar with laughter at his empty-headedness and stupidity. Sir Plume pleads with him for the restoration of the lock but in vain. The Baron swears by the lock itself never to part with it and parades this “long-contended honours” of Belinda’s head with a proud triumph. His selfconceit is in effable as it were.

The Baron wakes up before dawn unlike the ‘sleepless lovers’ who get up at noon. He is in a pious mood like Belinda. He lights his pyre of tokens in a ludicrous manner. He too has his deities to worship, particularly Love. In the Baron’s plots as in Belinda’s mirror all is fair in love and war, and love is a campaign.

The Baron plots for a minor victory. This will gain him the reputation of a lady-killer. He is adventurous in his own eyes and in the eyes of the fops. His mock-heroic description is accurate from the dramatic point of view. At the time of the rape, the Baron indulges in a flourish which is rather selfcongratulatory. He celebrates his own honour, which expresses the irony of the situation. Romances and assignations are his elements, and snuff-boxes and tweezer-cases are adequate containers for his wits. We find the Baron in the last Canto of the poem as defeated in the very moment of his finest adventure.

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