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Title: The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1

Author: Alexander Pope

Contributor: Whitwell Elwin

Release date: May 2, 2010 [eBook #32190]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF
ALEXANDER POPE, VOLUME 1 ***

THE WORKS
OF

ALEXANDER POPE.
NEW EDITION.

INCLUDING

SEVERAL HUNDRED UNPUBLISHED LETTERS, AND
OTHER NEW MATERIALS.

COLLECTED IN PART BY THE LATE

RT. HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER.
WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES.

BY REV. WHITWELL ELWIN.
VOL. I.

POETRY.—VOL. I.

WITH PORTRAITS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS.

LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1871.

[The right of Translation is reserved.]

LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

CONTENTS
OF

THE FIRST VOLUME OF POETRY.
PAGE
Catalogue of Pope's collected Editions of his Works vii

Pope's Memorial List of Relations and Friends ix

Advertisement of Warburton To his Edition of Pope's Works xi

Introduction xv

The Author's Preface 1

Recommendatory Poems 17

Translations 37
The First Book of Statius's Thebais 41
Sappho To Phaon from Ovid 87
The Fable of Dryope from Ovid 104
Vertumnus and Pomona from Ovid 108

January and May, from Chaucer 113

The Wife of Bath, from Chaucer 155

The Temple of Fame 185

Pastorals 231
Discourse of Pastoral Poetry 257
1. Spring, to Sir William Trumbull 265
2. Summer to Dr. Garth 276
3. Autumn to Mr. Wycherley 285
4. Winter, to the Memory of Mrs. Tempest 292

Messiah, a Sacred Eclogue 301

Windsor Forest 319

CATALOGUE
Of Pope's Collected Editions of his Works.

The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope. London: Printed by W.
Bowyer for Bernard Lintot, between the Temple Gates, 1717.
4to and folio.
This volume consists of all the acknowledged poems which Pope had
hitherto published, with the addition of some new pieces.
The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope. Volume ii. London: Printed
by J. Wright, for Lawton Gilliver, at Homer's Head in Fleet
Street, 1735. 4to and folio.
The volume of 1735 contains, with a few exceptions, the poems which Pope
had printed since 1717. The pages of each group of pieces—Epistles,
Satires, Epitaphs, etc.—are numbered separately, and there are other
irregularities in the numbers, arising from a change in the order of the
Moral Essays after the sheets were struck off.
Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his friends.
London: Printed by J. Wright for J. Knapton in Ludgate Street,
L. Gilliver in Fleet Street, J. Brindley in New Bond Street, and
R. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1737. 4to and folio.
This is Pope's first avowed edition of his letters. A half-title, "The Works of
Mr. Alexander Pope in Prose," precedes the title-page.
The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, in Prose. Vol. ii. London:
Printed for J. and P. Knapton, C. Bathurst, and R. Dodsley,
1741. 4to and folio.
The half-title is more precise: "The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, in Prose.
Vol. ii. Containing the rest of his Letters, with the Memoirs of Scriblerus,
never before printed; and other Tracts written either singly, or in
conjunction with his friends. Now first collected together." The letters are

the Swift correspondence, and they are in a different type from the rest of
the book. The numbers of the pages are very irregular, and show that the
contents and arrangement of the volume had been greatly altered from some
previous impression. The folio copies of the two volumes of poetry, and the
two of prose, are merely the quarto text portioned out into longer pages,
without a single leaf being reprinted. The trifling variations from the
quartos were introduced when the matter was put into the folio size.
The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq.; vol. i. with explanatory
Notes and Additions never before printed. London: Printed for
B. Lintot, 1736. Small 8vo.
This is the first volume of an edition which extended to nine volumes, and
which from the want of uniformity in the title-pages, the dates, and names
of the publishers appears to consist of odd volumes. The copyright of Pope's
works belonged to different proprietors, and they at last agreed to print their
respective shares in small octavo, that the several parts united might form a
complete set. Each proprietor commenced printing his particular section of
the octavos when the previous sizes he had on hand were sold, and thus it
happened that the second volume of the edition came out in 1735 before the
first, which was published in 1736. The series was not finished till 1742,
when the fourth book of the Dunciad was added to the Poems, and the Swift
Correspondence to the Letters. Some of the volumes were reprinted, and the
later editions occasionally differ slightly from their predecessors. The
Poems and Letters of Pope are more complete in the octavos than in the
quartos, but the octavos, on the other hand, omit all the prose works except
the Letters, and the Memoirs of Scriblerus, and octavos and quartos
combined are imperfect in comparison with the editions which have been
published since Pope's death.

A MEMORIAL LIST
OF

DEPARTED RELATIONS AND FRIENDS.
WRITTEN BY POPE IN AN ELZEVIR VIRGIL, NOW IN
THE LIBRARY OF THE EARL OF MANSFIELD.[1]

NATUS MAJI 21, 1688, HORA POST MERID. 6-3/4.

Quo desiderio veteres revocamus amores
Atque olim amissas flemus amicitias.

Catullus.

Anno 1700, Maji primo, obit, semper venerandus, poetarum princeps,
Joannes Dryden, æt. 70.[2]
Anno 1708, mens. Aprili, obiit Gulielmus Walsh, criticus sagax, amicus et
vir bonus, æt. 49.
Anno 1710, Jan. 24, Avita mea piissimæ mem., Eliz. Turner, migravit in
cœlum, annum agens 74.
Anno 1710, mens. Aprili, Tho. Betterton, Roscius sui temporis, exit
omnium cum plausu bonorum, æt. 74.
Anno 1712, mens. Januario, decessit vir facetissimus, juventutis meæ
deliciæ, Antonius Englefleld, æt. 75.
Anno 1718, obit Tho. Parnell, poetica laude, et moribus suavissimis
insignis.
Anno 1715, mens. Martio, decessit Gul. Wycherley, poeta morum scientia
clarus, ille meos primus qui habebat amores, æt. 75.
Anno 1716, mens. Decemb. obit Gulielmus Trumbull, olim Regi Gul. a
secretis, annum agens 75. Amicus meus humanissimus a juvenilibus annis.

Pater meus, Alex. Pope, omnibus bonis moribus præditus obit, an. 1717.
Simon Harcourt, filius, obit, mens. Junio 1720, Lutet. Parisior. Quem
sequitur Pater, olim M. Britann. Cancellar., mense Julio 1727.
Jacobus Craggs R.M.B. a secretis, natura generosus et ingenuus, amicus
animosus, charissim. memor., e vita exc. Feb. 1720/1.
Robertus Oxoniæ Comes, mihi perfamiliaris et jucundus, fortiter obit, 1724.
Jo. Sheffield, Buckinghamiæ Dux, mihi lenis et amicissimus, fato functus
est Feb. 1720/1 æt. 73.
Nutrix mea fidelissima M. Beech, obiit 5 Novem. 1725, æt. 77.
Robertus Digby, ex Patre antiquis præditus moribus, e vita migravit, Apr.
1726.
Edwardus Blunt, vir amicissimus obit, Aug. 1726.
Anno 1728/9, Jan. 20, æt. 57, mortuus est Gulielmus Congreve, poeta,
eximius, vir comis, urbanus, et mihi perquam familiaris.
Elijah Fenton, vir probus, et poeta haud mediocris, decessit men. Julio
1730, æt. 48.
Francisc. Atterbury, Roffens Episcopus, vir omni scientia clarus, animosus,
ex Anglia exilio pulsus, an. 1723. Obiit Parisiis, mense Febr. 1732, æt. 70.
Joan. Gay, probitate morum et simplicitate insignis, socius peramabilis, sub
oculis meis mortuus est, Dec. 4, 1723, æt. 44.
Mater mea charissima, pientissima et optima, Editha Pope, obiit septima die
Junii 1733, annum implens nonagesimum tertium.
G. Garth, MD. homo candidus et poeta urbanus, obiit 1719.
Joan. Arbuthnot, MD. vir doctiss., probitate ac pietate insignis, obiit Febr.
27, 1734/5, æt. 68.
Carolus Mordaunt. Com. Peterbor., vir insigniss. bellica virtute, ac morum
comitate, obiit Ulyssipont. anno ætatis 78, 1735, mense Octobris.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Virgil was probably bought by William Murray at some sale of Pope's books, for on the fly-
leaf is written "E. Libris A. Popei, Pr. 5s."
[2] Pope who had only once set eyes on Dryden, and had no acquaintance with him, marks his
admiration by including him in this memorial of relations and friends.

ADVERTISEMENT OF WARBURTON TO HIS
EDITION OF POPE'S WORKS, 1751.
Mr. Pope, in his last illness, amused himself, amidst the care of his higher
concerns, in preparing a corrected and complete edition of his writings;[1]
and, with his usual delicacy, was even solicitous to prevent any share of the
offence they might occasion, from falling on the friend whom he had
engaged to give them to the public.[2] In discharge of this trust, the public
has here a complete edition of his works, executed in such a manner, as, I
am persuaded, would have been to his satisfaction. The editor hath not, for
the sake of profit, suffered the author's name to be made cheap by a
subscription;[3] nor his works to be defrauded of their due honours by a
vulgar or inelegant impression; nor his memory to be disgraced by any
pieces unworthy of his talents or virtue. On the contrary, he hath, at a very
great expense, ornamented this edition with all the advantages which the
best artists in paper, printing, and sculpture could bestow upon it.[4]
If the public hath waited longer than the deference due to its generous
impatience for the author's writings should have suffered, it was owing to a
reason which the editor need not be ashamed to tell. It was his regard to the
family interests of his deceased friend. Mr. Pope, at his death, had left large
impressions of several parts of his works, unsold, the property of which was
adjudged to belong to his executors; and the editor was willing they should
have time to dispose of them to the best advantage, before the publication
of this edition (which hath been long prepared) should put a stop to the sale.
But it may be proper to be a little more particular concerning the superiority
of this edition above all the preceding, so far as Mr. Pope himself was
concerned. What the editor hath done, the reader must collect for himself.
The first volume, and the original poems in the second, are here first printed
from a copy corrected throughout by the author himself, even to the very
preface,[5] which, with several additional notes in his own hand, he
delivered to the editor a little before his death. The juvenile translations, in
the other part of the second volume, it was never his intention to bring into

this edition of his works, on account of the levity of some, the freedom of
others, and the little importance of all. But these being the property of other
men, the editor had it not in his power to follow the author's intention.
The third volume (all but the Essay on Man, which together with the Essay
on Criticism, the author, a little before his death, had corrected and
published in quarto, as a specimen of his projected edition,) was printed by
him in his last illness, but never published, in the manner it is now given.
The disposition of the Epistle on the Characters of Men is quite altered; that
on the Characters of Women much enlarged; and the Epistles on Riches and
Taste corrected and improved. To these advantages of the third volume must
be added a great number of fine verses, taken from the author's manuscript
copies of these poems, communicated by him for this purpose to the editor.
These, the author, when he first published the poems to which they belong,
thought proper, for various reasons, to omit. Some, from the manuscript
copy of the Essay on Man, which tended to discredit fate, and to
recommend the moral government of God, had, by the editor's advice, been
restored to their places in the last edition of that poem.[6] The rest, together
with others of the like sort, from his manuscript copy of the other Ethic
Epistles, are here inserted at the bottom of the page, under the title of
Variations.
The fourth volume contains the Satires, with their Prologue,—the Epistle to
Dr. Arbuthnot; and Epilogue,—the two poems intitled mdccxxxviii. The
Prologue and Epilogue are here given with the like advantages as the Ethic
Epistles in the foregoing volume, that is to say, with the Variations, or
additional verses from the author's manuscripts. The Epilogue to the Satires
is likewise inriched with many and large notes, now first printed from the
author's own manuscript.
The fifth volume contains a correcter and completer edition of the Dunciad
than hath been hitherto published, of which, at present, I have only this
further to add, that it was at my request he laid the plan of a fourth book. I
often told him, it was pity so fine a poem should remain disgraced by the
meanness of its subject, the most insignificant of all dunces,—bad rhymers
and malevolent cavillers; that he ought to raise and ennoble it by pointing
his satire against the most pernicious of all,—minute philosophers and free-
thinkers. I imagined, too, it was for the interests of religion to have it

known, that so great a genius had a due abhorrence of these pests of virtue
and society. He came readily into my opinion; but, at the same time, told me
it would create him many enemies. He was not mistaken, for though the
terror of his pen kept them for some time in respect, yet on his death they
rose with unrestrained fury in numerous coffee-house tales, and Grub Street
libels. The plan of this admirable satire was artfully contrived to show, that
the follies and defects of a fashionable education naturally led to, and
necessarily ended in, freethinking, with design to point out the only remedy
adequate to so destructive an evil. It was to advance the same ends of virtue
and religion, that the editor prevailed on him to alter everything in his moral
writings that might be suspected of having the least glance towards fate or
naturalism, and to add what was proper to convince the world that he was
warmly on the side of moral government and a revealed will. And it would
be great injustice to his memory not to declare that he embraced these
occasions with the most unfeigned pleasure.
The sixth volume consists of Mr. Pope's miscellaneous pieces in verse and
prose. Amongst the verse several fine poems make now their first
appearance in his works. And of the prose, all that is good, and nothing but
what is exquisitely so, will be found in this edition.
The seventh, eighth, and ninth volumes consist entirely of his letters, the
more valuable, as they are the only true models which we, or perhaps any of
our neighbours, have of familiar epistles.[7] This collection is now made
more complete by the addition of several new pieces. Yet, excepting a short
explanatory letter to Col. M[oyser], and the letters to Mr. A[llen] and Mr.
W[arburton] (the latter of which are given to show the editor's inducements,
and the engagements he was under, to intend the care of this edition)
excepting these, I say, the rest are all here published from the author's own
printed, though not published copies delivered to the editor.[8]
On the whole, the advantages of this edition, above the preceding, are these,
—that it is the first complete collection which has ever been made of his
original writings; that all his principal poems, of early or later date, are here
given to the public with his last corrections and improvements; that a great
number of his verses are here first printed from the manuscript copies of his
principal poems of later date; that many new notes of the author are here

added to his poems; and lastly, that several pieces, both in prose and verse
make now their first appearance before the public.
The author's life deserves a just volume, and the editor intends to give it.
For to have been one of the first poets in the world is but his second praise.
He was in a higher class. He was one of the "noblest works of God." He
was an "honest man,"[9]—a man who alone possessed more real virtue than,
in very corrupt times, needing a satirist like him, will sometimes fall to the
share of multitudes. In this history of his life,[10] will be contained a large
account of his writings, a critique on the nature, force, and extent of his
genius, exemplified from these writings; and a vindication of his moral
character, exemplified by his more distinguished virtues,—his filial piety,
his disinterested friendships, his reverence for the constitution of his
country, his love and admiration of virtue, and (what was the necessary
effect) his hatred and contempt of vice, his extensive charity to the indigent,
his warm benevolence to mankind, his supreme veneration of the Deity, and
above all his sincere belief of Revelation. Nor shall his faults be concealed.
It is not for the interests of his virtues that they should. Nor indeed could
they be concealed, if we were so disposed, for they shine through his
virtues, no man being more a dupe to the specious appearances of virtue in
others.[11] In a word, I mean not to be his panegyrist but his historian. And
may I, when envy and calumny have taken the same advantage of my
absence (for, while I live, I will freely trust it to my life to confute them)
may I find a friend as careful of my honest fame as I have been of his!
Together with his works, he hath bequeathed me his dunces. So that as the
property is transferred, I could wish they would now let his memory alone.
The veil which death draws over the good is so sacred, that to tear it, and
with sacrilegious hands, to throw dirt upon the shrine, gives scandal even to
barbarians. And though Rome permitted her slaves to calumniate her best
citizens on the day of triumph, yet the same petulancy at their funeral would
have been rewarded with execration and a gibbet.[12] The public may be
malicious; but is rarely vindictive or ungenerous. It would abhor all insults,
on a writer dead, though it had borne with the ribaldry, or even set the
ribalds on work, when he was alive. And in this there is no great harm, for
he must have a strange impotency of mind indeed whom such miserable
scribblers can disturb or ruffle. Of all that gross Beotian phalanx who have
written scurrilously against the editor, he knows not so much as one whom

a writer of reputation would not wish to have his enemy, or whom a man of
honour would not be ashamed to own for his friend.[13] He is indeed but
slightly conversant in their works, and knows little of the particulars of their
defamation. To his authorship they are heartily welcome. But if any of them
have been so far abandoned by truth as to attack his moral character in any
respect whatsoever, to all and every one of these and their abettors, he gives
the lie in form, and in the words of honest Father Valerian, mentiris
impudentissime.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] "I own the late encroachments upon my constitution made me willing to see the end of all further
care about me or my works. I would rest for the one in a full resignation of my being to be disposed
of by the Father of all mercy; and for the other (though indeed a trifle, yet a trifle may be some
example) I would commit them to the candour of a sensible and reflecting judge, rather than to the
malice of every short-sighted and malevolent critic, or inadvertent and censorious reader. And no
hand can set them in so good a light," &c.—Let. cxx. to Mr. W.—Warburton.
[2] "I also give and bequeath to the said Mr. Warburton, the property of all such of my works already
printed as he hath written or shall write commentaries or notes upon, and which I have not otherwise
disposed of or alienated; and as he shall publish without future alterations."—His Last Will and
Testament.—Warburton.
[3] A subscription would have been simply a petition from Warburton to the public, soliciting them
to increase the value of the legacy bequeathed him by Pope.
[4] The engravings were execrable; the type and paper good, but not extraordinary. The outlay upon
the edition, for which Warburton takes credit as for a munificent act, was a common-place
commercial transaction, with the certainty of a large return.
[5] The corrections are few and trivial. The account which Warburton gives of the novelties in his
edition is from first to last exaggerated.
[6] The only restored lines which improve the orthodoxy of the Essay on Man relate to a future state.
[7] Either Warburton had never heard of Madame de Sévigné's letters, or what is more likely, he was
unable to taste their charm. Their delicate graces, and native liveliness, would have been lost upon
the man who thought that Pope's artificial epistles were "true models of familiar" letters.
[8] The assertion that the copies had not been published is unaccountable. Every line of them had
been published twice over by Pope in his lifetime, and all but two or three pages, had been published
again and again.
[9]

A wit's a feather, and a chief's a rod,
An honest man's the noblest work of God.—Warburton.

[10] It will be printed in the same form with this, and every future edition of his works, so as to make
a part of them.—Warburton.
The Life which Warburton promised with such solemn pomp was never written and he was content
to assist Ruffhead in his feeble compilation.
[11] Warburton intimates that Pope's only faults grew out of his credulous belief in "the specious
appearance of virtue," which was a sarcasm directed against those friends of Pope who were the
enemies of Warburton.
[12] The demand of Warburton was not for a truce on the day of Pope's funeral, which took place
seven years before. He insisted that because Pope was dead no one should ever again question his
title to be called "good." Neither Pope nor Warburton was accustomed to spare dead men, and the
claim for exemption was specially inconsistent in the preface to works which were full of bitter
attacks upon both living and dead. Warburton was to go on circulating Pope's venom, and any victim
who retaliated was to be pronounced "sacrilegious," "a scandal even to barbarians," and worthy to be
"rewarded with execration and a gibbet."
[13] Warburton was a fortunate author. Though he published a host of paradoxical notions, his
opponents, if we are to trust his repeated assertions, were always fools and knaves.

INTRODUCTION.
In his will, dated December 12, 1743, not quite six months before he died,
Pope bequeathed his printed works to Warburton, on condition that he
published them without "future alterations." Warburton states that the object
of the proviso was to relieve him from the obloquy he might incur by
reproducing offensive strokes of satire. A few slight alterations which had
not the sanction of any prior edition were nevertheless introduced by
Warburton into some of the poems, and he announced on the title-page and
in the preface, that they were taken from a corrected copy delivered to him
by Pope. Mr. Croker mistrusted the genuineness of the "alterations," and he
intended to reject the text of Warburton, and adopt in the main the text of
the last octavo edition which had appeared during the lifetime of the poet.
The honour of Warburton is not above suspicion, but Mr. Croker was misled
by erroneous inferences when he accused him of tampering with the text,
and falsely pleading the authority of "a copy corrected by the author
himself."
Fantastic in his conceptions, violent in his animosities, hasty and imperious
in the expression of his opinions, Warburton sometimes repented his
rashness, and cancelled numerous leaves in his Shakespeare and Pope after
the volumes were printed off. Mr. Kilvert, who edited his Literary Remains,
found among his papers a cancelled leaf of the Pope, containing the
commencement of the Prologue to the Satires. On the first page Warburton
had inserted among the "Variations" a couplet which he said was copied
from the manuscript of Pope:

And now vile poets rise before the light,
And walk, like Margaret's ghost, at dead of night.

The allusion was to the ballad of William and Margaret, written by Mallet.
He was the ally of Pope and Bolingbroke, and when Pope was dead he was
employed by Bolingbroke to blast the memory of their former friend.[1] The
mention of Margaret's ghost gave Warburton the opportunity of appending a
bitter note upon Mallet, whom he accused of "arraigning his dead patron for

a cheat," and the leaf was cancelled to get rid of both note and variation.
Mr. Croker believed that Warburton "forged" the variation to gratify his
spleen against Mallet, whom he detested, and that before the volume was
published "either his own conscience, or some prudent friend, suggested
that such manifest fraud would not be tolerated." The conjecture was
unfounded. Pope presented several of his manuscripts to the son of
Jonathan Richardson, the portrait-painter, for his trouble in collating them
with the printed text. Richardson's interlined copy of the first quarto volume
of Pope's poetry passed into the hands of Malone, and was ultimately
bought by Mr. Croker. The manuscripts which Richardson possessed in the
handwriting of Pope were purchased by Dr. Chauncey, and are still the
property of his descendants. Among them is the Prologue to the Satires, and
it contains the couplet Mr. Croker believed to have been forged. In every
instance where the manuscripts exist the variations printed by Warburton
are found to be authentic.
The inference of Mr. Croker from the variations must be reversed. They do
not invalidate, but attest, the fidelity of Warburton, and the "alterations" in
the text of the poems must pass unchallenged unless there is some direct
proof of their inaccuracy. The arguments, on the contrary, are altogether in
their favour. Four printed pages of the first Moral Essay, with the
corrections in manuscript, were discovered by Mr. Kilvert among
Warburton's papers. "Some of the words," says Mr. Croker, "are so neatly
written as to leave a strong impression on my eye of their being Pope's;
other portions of the manuscript are more like Warburton's looser hand."
The faint doubt expressed by Mr. Croker would hardly have arisen if his
suspicion had not been previously awakened, for the corrections are all
indubitably in the handwriting of the poet. Nor was the manuscript in this
instance the guide of Warburton. He followed a copy of the Moral Essays
printed by Pope in his last illness, though never published. "Warburton has
the propriety of it as you know," wrote Bolingbroke to Lord Marchmont,
one of the executors; "alter it he cannot by the terms of the will."[2] This of
itself is an answer to Mr. Croker. The executors had access to Pope's latest
printed version of the Moral Essays, which was Warburton's avowed
authority, and he could not alter a single word without certain detection, and
the consequent forfeiture of his legacy. He was alive to the risk. A portion
of Pope's revised edition of his poetical works was passing through the

press at the time of his death, and Warburton directed the printer to give the
sheets, when the executors inquired for them, to their colleague the
celebrated Murray, who was afterwards Lord Mansfield, adding, "Pray
preserve all the press copy to the least scrap."[3] The terms of the will bound
the editor to be faithful to his trust, under a penalty of 4,000l., the estimated
value of the bequest,[4] and he saw the necessity of having the voucher of
the poet's handwriting for the minutest departure from the previous text in
such of the proofs as had not received Pope's final imprimatur. A more
ample guarantee could not be desired for the authenticity of the particulars
in which Warburton's text differs from the printed copies superintended by
Pope. All the displaced readings, which are not utterly insignificant, are
preserved in the notes to the present edition, as well as numerous
unpublished variations, which are taken from the manuscripts of Pope, or
the transcripts of Richardson.
The text of Pope's poems is more easily settled than elucidated. No other
poet so near to our own time presents equal difficulties. His satires abound
in uncertain allusions, and controverted topics which require a large amount
of illustration and discussion. His philosophy was not understood by
himself, and it is a study to disentangle his confused arguments, and
interpret his doubtful language. He often expressed his opinions with wilful
ambiguity, took refuge in equivocations, or had recourse to falsehoods, and
we are constantly forced upon perplexing investigations to recover the truth
he endeavoured to conceal. Fortunately his best poems and choicest
passages are least incumbered with puzzling questions, and his obscurities
have not much interfered with his popularity because the mass of readers
are content to enjoy the beauties and leave the enigmas unsolved.
The number and eminence of the commentators on Pope, the diversity of
their attainments, and the extent of their annotations appear to promise all
the help which knowledge, acuteness, and taste could supply. The result is
far below what might reasonably have been anticipated. Warburton, Pope's
first editor, had a vigorous understanding, and possessed the enormous
advantage that he carried on the work in concert with the poet, and could
ask the explanation of every difficulty. A diseased ambition rendered his
talents and opportunities useless. Without originality he aspired to be
original, and imagined that to fabricate hollow paradoxes, and torture
language into undesigned meanings was the surest evidence of a fertile,

penetrating genius. He employed his sagacity less to discover than to distort
the ideas of his author, and seems to have thought that the more he deviated
from the obvious sense the greater would be his fame for inventive power.
He has left no worse specimen of his perverse propensity than the spurious
fancies, and idle refinements he fathered upon Pope. They are among his
baldest paradoxes, are conveyed in his heaviest style, and are supported by
his feeblest sophistry. His lifeless and verbose conceits soon provoke by
their falsity, and fatigue by their ponderousness. Lord Marchmont said
laughingly to Pope that "he must be the vainest man alive, and must want to
show posterity what a quantity of dulness he could carry down on his back
without sinking under the load."[5] The exuberant self-sufficiency of
Warburton deluded him into the belief that the text derived its principal
lustre from the commentary. He selected for the frontispiece to his edition a
monument on which were hung medallions of himself and the poet, and
Blakey, the draughtsman, told Burke that "it was by Warburton's particular
desire that he made him the principal figure, and Pope only secondary, and
that the light, contrary to the rules of art, goes upwards from Warburton to
Pope." A gentleman remarked, when Burke related the anecdote, that they
were drawn looking in opposite directions.[6] The sarcasm summed up the
opinion which has always prevailed. The clumsy inventions of Warburton
had not the semblance of plausibility, and scarce anybody except his
shadow, and fulsome echo, Bishop Hurd, ever doubted that the text and
commentary looked different ways.[7]
Proud of his dreary paradoxes, Warburton scorned the humble office of
furnishing useful information. Pope had said, in his Imitations of Horace,
that because three ladies liked a luckless play, a spendthrift had taken the
whole house upon the poet's night,[8] which drew from Warburton the
following note:—"The common reader, I am sensible, will be always more
solicitous about the names of these three ladies, the unlucky play, and every
other circumstance that attended this piece of gallantry, than for the
explanation of our author's sense, or the illustration of his poetry, even
where he is most moral and sublime. But had it been in Mr. Pope's purpose
to indulge so impertinent a curiosity, he had sought elsewhere for a
commentator on his writings. Which defect in these notes, the periodical
scribblers, however, have been stupid and shameless enough to object to
them."[9] Warburton's reserve was praiseworthy when his motive was

respect for private feelings. His general neglect to clear up the allusions in
Pope's poems did not admit of this apology, and in default of a better
defence he called his critics "stupid and shameless." His habit when reasons
failed him was to supply their place with abuse.
The edition of Warburton was published in 1751, and no attempt was made
to supersede it till Gilbert Wakefield commenced a new edition in 1794. He
was "labouring," he says, "for a subsistence," and the cost of the work,
which was printed at his own expense, obliged him to bring out a volume at
a time. Before the first volume was quite through the press he learned that
Joseph Warton was engaged on a similar undertaking. Warton had the
support of the London booksellers, and the edition of Wakefield ended with
his opening volume. The world did not lose the benefit of his annotations.
He published in 1796 his Observations on Pope, which consist of notes on
the remaining poems, and of supplemental notes to the poems he had
previously edited. Wakefield said that an "inculpable perfection pervaded
the whole body of Pope's compositions," and in the extravagance of his
admiration he overlaid the volume of his unfinished edition with weak
rhapsodies which masked the useful part of his labours. He restrained his
eulogistic excesses in his Observations, and kept more closely to his main
design of tracing Pope's "imitations of his predecessors." All persons
tolerably read in poetry could perceive that the obligations Pope
acknowledged in his notes were but a fraction of the whole, and in 1740,
Bowyer, the printer, with the assistance of Mr. Clarke, a clergyman,
commenced a collection of parallel passages. From the letters of Clarke to
Bowyer it appears that Pope was annoyed. Bowyer profited by his irritation,
and offered to treat with him. "I think," wrote Clarke in 1742, "you buy his
friendship cheap with a whole hecatomb of notes, essays, illustrations, and
the mob of commentators."[10] The progress of the negociation is not
recorded. The result is revealed in the fact that Bowyer shortly afterwards
became Pope's printer. The sensitiveness which was disturbed at the
gleanings of Bowyer would have shuddered at the abundant harvest of
Wakefield. He himself had no intention of depreciating the merits of Pope.
He only wished to illustrate a favourite author. Many of the parallelisms are
too slight to be applicable, or they are common phrases the property of
every Englishman. A vast number remain which are a curious exhibition of
Pope's patience and skill in the art of poetical mosaic, and of the large

amount of borrowed beauties he intermixed with his undoubted originality.
The interpretation of the text, though subordinate with Wakefield, was not
neglected by him. He and a friend who assisted him, Dr. William Bennet,
Bishop of Cloyne, have explained more allusions than all the other
commentators, and the least known and appreciated of the editors of Pope is
the man who has done the most for his author.
The edition of Warton appeared in 1797. "His reason," he says in his
preface, "for undertaking the work was the universal complaint that Dr.
Warburton had disfigured and disgraced his edition with many forced and
far-sought interpretations, totally unsupported by the passages which they
were brought to elucidate." Warton had the stimulus of a second motive. He
published in 1756 the first volume of his Essay on Pope, and his criticisms
were roughly attacked in many passages of Ruffhead's Life of the poet,
which was prompted and partly written by Warburton. While Warburton
lived Warton did not venture to retaliate. The thirty years which intervened
had not extinguished his resentment, and he seized the opportunity to
revenge the ancient grudge. His consciousness of Warburton's defects did
not keep Warton from repeating the error of filling page upon page with
irrelevant matter. His Essay on Pope had been a receptacle for his store of
miscellaneous reading, and in a separate work there was no objection to a
medley of anecdote and criticism. He was seventy-five when he published
his edition of Pope, and to save himself trouble he apportioned out the old
farrago in notes. Profuse in digressions, he is sparing of needful
explanations. His turn was for the lighter portions of criticism and
biography, and most of his apposite remarks are critical opinions. They are
often just, but never profound, for he had neither fervid feelings nor a
robust understanding, and his highest qualities are a fair poetical taste, and a
tolerable acquaintance with ancient and modern authors.
Bowles was a school-boy at Winchester when Warton was head-master, and
he intimated that this early connection was the cause of his being employed
to revise the next edition of Pope. It appeared in 1806. His poetic sensibility
was exquisite, and he was well-read, shrewd, and candid. His failing was a
hurry of mind which disqualified him for a painstaking commentator. He
was content to jot down in a careless, colloquial style the off-hand thoughts
of his quick and cultivated intellect, and he did not add much to the scanty
explanations of Warton and Warburton. The chief merit of his edition is his

excellent literary criticism, which is truer, deeper, and more refined than
that of his old Winchester master. The estimate Bowles formed of the poetry
and character of Pope was allowed to pass unchallenged for thirteen years,
when some remarks of Campbell, in his Specimens of British Poets,
commenced a controversy which lasted from 1819 to 1826. In the series of
pamphlets he published to vindicate his opinions, Bowles exhibited his
wonted acuteness, courage, and negligence. With all his slips in minor
points the fresh facts which have come to light have more than confirmed
his view of Pope's moral obliquities, and in the discussion on the principles
of poetry he reduced the whole of his adversaries to silence. He and Hazlitt
were the only persons among the disputants, eminent or obscure, who
showed any real comprehension of the subject.
The next edition of Pope, justly considered by Mr. Croker to be the worst,
came out in 1824, and was superintended by Roscoe, the author of the Life
of Lorenzo de Medici, and Leo X. He barely contributed a single illustrative
note, his criticisms are platitudes, and his vindications of Pope a tissue of
blunders. He was misled by his credulous faith in his hero, by the rashness
with which he imposed his own guesses for facts, and above all by his want
of penetration and research. His half-knowledge was worse than ignorance.
A few of his multitudinous errors were exposed by Bowles whom he had
attacked. Roscoe replied in a feeble, disingenuous pamphlet, which drew
from Bowles his taunting and crushing retort, Lessons in Criticism to
William Roscoe, Esq. This ended the Pope controversy.
The faults of plan and execution in the editions of Warburton, Warton,
Bowles, and Roscoe stand out in strong relief, and Mr. Croker resolved, as
far as possible, to correct the mistakes, retrench the superfluities, and
supply the omissions. Warton and Bowles dismissed a large proportion of
the barren, oppressive commentaries of Warburton. Roscoe put back the
whole of the bulky excrescence. Most of it had been adopted by Pope, and
to relieve the text, without excluding interpretations sanctioned by the poet,
Mr. Croker determined to print the pedantic lumber in appendixes. The
notes of the other editors rested upon their intrinsic merits, and he intended
to sift out the surplusage, and only retain what was pertinent. To curtail is
easy. The difficulty was to clear up the many obscurities which remained,
and Mr. Croker was anxious to furnish his share of explanation, though he
was convinced that numerous contemporary allusions would always baffle

curiosity. His chief attention was directed to the satires, and he continued
for many years to pursue his investigations, and accumulate materials. His
busy life was succeeded by failing health, and he died before he had
prepared his notes for the press. The results of his research have luckily all
been preserved, for his habit was to write them out in full at the time. He
was an acute and eager enquirer into political, personal, and social history,
and no man could have been more competent to bring to the surface the
under-current of forgotten circumstances.
I have kept to the plan sketched out by Mr. Croker. "A commentary," says
Johnson, "must arise from the fortuitous discoveries of many men in
devious walks of literature," and few poets have had more commentators
than Pope. I have borrowed whatever I met with in previous writers that
throw light upon his meaning, faults, and beauties, have cast aside what was
plainly inapplicable and erroneous, and have done what I could to fill up
deficiencies. My own notes will be recognised by the absence of any
signature; all other notes throughout the work have the names of their
authors attached, even when a note is by the same author as the text. The
extracts from Warton are sometimes taken from his Essay, and both in his
case and that of Bowles I have occasionally joined together scattered
fragments which were connected in their subject. The rest of the
arrangements will be understood at a glance.
The letters of Pope demand a more particular discussion. Estimated by their
intrinsic merits they would call for little notice. "He laboured them," says
Horace Walpole, "as much as the Essay on Man, and as they were written to
everybody they do not look as if they had been written to anybody."[11]
Their dry and frigid generalities could not be more happily exposed. The
chief importance of the correspondence is in its relation to the morality of
Pope, and the fame of men whose reputation is involved in the question of
his uprightness. His real nature has always been hotly debated. "His
detractors," says De Quincey, "fancy that in his character a basis of ignoble
qualities was here and there slightly relieved by a few shining spots; we, on
the contrary, believe that in Pope lay a disposition radically noble and
generous, clouded and overshadowed by superficial foibles; or, to adopt the
distinction of Shakespeare, they see nothing but 'dust a little gilt,' and we
'gold a little dusted.'"[12] Pope boasted loudly of his virtue, and his
champions judge him by his own representations. His accusers hold that his

professions were hypocritical, as when Lord Macaulay speaks of his "spite
and envy, thinly disguised by sentiments as benevolent and noble as those
which Sir Peter Teazle admired in Mr. Joseph Surface."[13] The charges
brought against him are thickly scattered over his life, and either the guilty
appearances are deceptive, or we must admit that his mind was essentially
corrupt. His correspondence brings up the ever-recurring enquiry, and we
have to decide whether his letters are not many of them fraudulent, and the
circumstances attending their publication a series of ignominious plots,
infamous false accusations, and impudent lies.
Every examination into the history of the letters was slight before Mr. Dilke
engaged in the laborious task. His familiarity with the books, pamphlets,
and periodicals of the time could not be exceeded, and his doubts once
awakened he accepted nothing upon trust. With an immense amount of
research and skill he proceeded to track Pope through his tortuous courses.
He laid bare the ramifications of the plot against Curll, which was only
known in a few of its prominent particulars. He detected, what none of the
editors and biographers had perceived, the base manœuvres and deceit
which accompanied the publication of the "Letters to and from Dr. Swift."
He was originally put upon his investigations by the manuscript collection
of Pope's letters to Caryll, and these revealed a new set of frauds in the
evidence they supplied of letters converted into a fictitious correspondence.
His inclination was to favour Pope whenever there was an opening for a
liberal interpretation, and it was not from hostility that he exposed the net-
work of fraud, and brought out the dark traits of a dishonourable disposition
with new and terrible force. He printed his discoveries in the Athenæum[14],
and after studying the facts afresh by the light of his essays, I am compelled
to adopt his conclusions. The evidence upon which they rest is often
circumstantial and intricate, and cannot be followed to the end without
steady attention, and some trial of patience.
The letters of the poet which were first sent to the press were given by
Cromwell to his mistress, Elizabeth Thomas, who sold them in her distress
to Curll for ten guineas. She was a shameless woman, and boldly justified
her conduct. "Everyone," she said, "knows that the person to whom a letter
is addressed has the same right to dispose of it as he has of goods purchased
with his money." The right which originally belonged to Cromwell, of
publishing to the world whatever had been written to him in the confidence

of friendship, he had, by his gift, transferred to herself; and thus it appeared
that Cromwell had a right to be treacherous to Pope, and Mrs. Thomas a
right to be treacherous to both Pope and Cromwell. With more reason she
inferred that neither of them at heart would be vexed at the proceeding.
Cromwell, she urged, could not be angry that the world should know "the
professions of love, gratitude, and veneration made him by so celebrated an
author," and Pope could not resent the exhibition of the "early pregnancy of
his genius." "And yet," she continued, "had either of you been asked,
common modesty would have obliged you to refuse what you would not be
displeased with if done without your knowledge."[15] There can be little
doubt, from his subsequent conduct, that this was the light in which the
publication was viewed by the poet, notwithstanding his assertion in a note
to the Dunciad, "that he was ashamed of the letters as very trivial things,
full not only of levities, but of wrong judgments of men and books, and
only excusable from the youth and inexperience of the writer." Mrs.
Thomas did him an incalculable injury, not by revealing his secrets, but by
flattering his vanity. The favourable reception of his correspondence
originated the desire to give some further specimens to the world, and led
him into the miserable series of falsehoods and frauds by which he
endeavoured to accomplish his design without seeming to be privy to it.
The letters to Cromwell were published in Curll's "Miscellanea," of which
the title-page says "Printed in the year 1727;" but the dedication to the
letters themselves is dated June, 1726, and it was in 1726 that they
appeared. The incidental and scanty notices of them at the time are
sufficient to indicate the impression they produced. Thompson, writing in
October to Aaron Hill, says that "though careless and uncorrected, they are
full of wit and gaiety." There may have been many who thought that they
did as much credit to the heart as to the head of the poet. "I have read the
collection of letters you mention," Fenton wrote to Broome in September,
1726, "and was delighted with nothing more than that air of sincerity, those
professions of esteem and respect, and that deference paid to his friend's
judgment in poetry which I have sometimes seen expressed to others, and I
doubt not with the same cordial affection. If they are read in that light, they
will be very entertaining and useful in the present age; but in the next,
Cicero, Pliny, and Voiture may regain their reputation." The comments on
Pope's sincerity were plainly ironical. Fenton considered him to be

extremely hypocritical, and some person concerned in the publication of
1726 must have formed the same opinion of his character, if the ludicrous
tail-piece is intended to be typical of the letters. A little man whose
diminutive stature did not permit him to clasp the taller figure in his arms
while they stood upon a level, is represented as having jumped off the
ground and seized his companion round the waist, who, with his hands
thrown into the air at the painful vehemence of the embrace, is struggling to
get loose. Undiscerning persons, who judged the poet by his words, would
form a different estimate, and would perceive only proofs of his excellence
where Fenton saw examples of his habitual insincerity. "His
correspondence," says Johnson, of the later collection of 1735, "filled the
nation with praises of his candour, tenderness, and benevolence, the purity
of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship."[16]
The letters to Cromwell had more than an ephemeral success. Curll, in his
reply in 1729 to the attack on him in the Dunciad, after noticing Pope's
affected depreciation of them, says, "However, they sell very well; price
5s."[17] The poet had already devised an excuse for following them up by a
second set. Theobald, who had earned his lasting enmity by pointing out the
errors in his edition of Shakespeare, was employed by some booksellers to
edit the posthumous papers of Wycherley, which had been purchased from
his heir. The work appeared in 1728. Pope saw in this circumstance a
pretence for dragging his own letters before the world, and an opportunity
of gratifying his spleen against Theobald. He said that the poems were
disreputable to the memory of his early friend, and that the correspondence
was published because it showed that it was his last resolution to have
suppressed them.[18] It showed the reverse. The last printed letter of
Wycherley exhibits him as intent as ever upon preparing his poems for the
press, and if we are to believe that he subsequently abandoned the design,
we must accept the fact upon the bare assertion of Pope, which derives no
support from any part of the correspondence. But though it failed to answer
the purpose avowed by its editor, it answered purposes not avowed which
were much nearer to his heart. It shows that the verses of Wycherley were
rugged, feeble, and full of repetitions, and that whatever they possessed of
strength and harmony was due to the revision of Pope. It shows that he
furnished entire passages, and where the text is not explicit on the point he
is careful to reclaim his contributions in the notes. It displays on the one

hand the "first sprightly runnings" of the precocious young poet, and on the
other the "last dull droppings" of the veteran author, who was verging upon
his dotage. "If we were to judge," says Warburton, "of this set of letters by
the manner of thinking and turn of expression, we should conclude that they
were all mistitled, and that those given to the boy of sixteen were written by
the man of seventy, and the contrary,—such sober sense, such gravity of
manners, and so much judgment and knowledge of composition, enlivened
with manly wit, distinguish those of Mr. Pope, while a childish jealousy, a
puerile affectation, a lying at catch for points, together with a total contempt
of method, make up the character of those of Mr. Wycherley." Warton
transcribes the judgment of Warburton, and adds his testimony to the
superiority of the letters of Pope. He says that he "has excelled Wycherley
in his own way of striving to be always witty," and that "the perpetual
attempt of the vain old man to be brilliant, the accumulation of simile upon
simile, the antithesis, the cant of satire, the severity on authors, critics, and
women, are sufficiently disgusting." In short, the whole effect of the
correspondence was to display the infirmities of Wycherley and the merits
of Pope; and his mode of relieving his departed friend from the reproach of
the posthumous poems was to reveal the secret that the only portions of
them which might have done him credit were not his own, but the work of
this zealous vindicator of his fame.
With such a futile excuse for printing the letters, Pope was anxious to throw
the responsibility upon some other person. He was the intimate friend of
Edward, the second Earl of Oxford, who, without being possessed of much
ability, courted the society of eminent men, and who, with no great tincture
of literature, had inherited from his father a passion for collecting books and
manuscripts. His correspondence with the poet descended, with the rest of
his personal papers, to his only child, who married the Duke of Portland in
1734. From the Duchess the papers passed to her eldest daughter, Lady
Elizabeth, wife to the third Viscount Weymouth, who subsequently became
the first Marquess of Bath. The Oxford manuscripts were consequently
removed to Longleat, where they have remained ever since among the
treasures of a library which is worthy of the regal edifice it adorns.[19] In
Pope's letters to his friend we have his own record of the device he adopted.
He wrote to Lord Oxford in September, 1729, and complained that the
publication of Wycherley's posthumous poems was derogatory to their

author, as well as to the critic who had advised him to re-cast them.
"Something," he said, "will be necessary to be done to clear both his and
my reputation, which the letters under his hand will abundantly do; for
which particular reason I would desire to have them lodged in your
lordship's hands." He had been slow in discovering that something was
necessary to be done to clear the reputation of his deceased friend; for
Theobald's book had come forth in 1728, and it was now the autumn of
1729. His tardy zeal appears to have been entirely begotten by the idea that
it could be made the pretext for producing the correspondence; but having
once conceived the scheme, he did not allow it to languish. On the 6th of
October he advanced a step further, and began to shadow forth the real
object of the request. He informed Lord Oxford that some of the letters
were to be printed, and asked permission to state that they were already in
his library, "which," says he, "they shall be as soon as you will give orders
to any one to receive them." "I would not," he went on, "appear myself as
publisher of them, but any one else may, or even the bookseller be supposed
to have procured copies of them,—formerly or now, it is equal. Certain it is
that no other way can justice be rendered to the memory of a man to whom
I had the first obligations of friendship, almost in my childhood." Lord
Oxford merely replied that if the documents were left in a box with the
porter, the man had orders to place it in the library, and that any mention of
that library would be agreeable to its owner;[20] but he took no notice of the
intimation that the poet designed to ascribe the publication to an imaginary
agent. Pope now considered him to be sufficiently prepared, and his next
letter disclosed the whole of the scheme, and at the same time announced its
execution. It then appeared that his noble dupe, who, as he was both weak
and amiable, was expected to prove a submissive tool, had been asked to
become the keeper of the manuscripts, that he might be held up to the world
as their publisher. "I am extremely obliged to you," Pope wrote to him, "for
your kind permission to quote your library, and to mention it in what
manner I pleased. I consulted Mr. Lewis upon the turn of the preface, and
have exceeded perhaps my commission on one point, though we both
judged it the right way; for I have made the publishers say that your
lordship permitted them a copy of some of the papers from the library,
where the originals remain as testimonies of the truth. It is indeed no more
than a justice due to the dead and to the living author."[21] In other words,
his lordship was asserted to have permitted the bookseller to print the

papers in his library, when they were not even sent to his house till after
they were printed, and this fiction was fathered upon him without so much
as his leave being asked, or his having been suffered to read a single line of
the work he was stated to have authorised. When Pope alleged that the
proceeding was "no more than a justice due to the dead and the living
author," he must have hoped that the outrage to Lord Oxford of which he
had been guilty in committing the act, would appear to be diminished by the
assurance with which he communicated it. His deceptions were not
confined to the preface. He shortly afterwards wrote to Swift, and contrived
to mention that he had contracted a friendship at sixteen with a man of
seventy. "I speak," he said, "of old Mr. Wycherley, some letters of whom,
by-the-bye, and of mine, the booksellers have got and printed, not without
the concurrence of a noble friend of mine and yours. I do not much approve
of it, though there is nothing in it for me to be ashamed of, because I will
not be ashamed of anything I do not do myself, or of anything that is not
immoral, but merely dull."[22] The booksellers had printed the letters with
the concurrence of a noble friend, and the noble friend had never heard a
word on the subject till the printing was completed. Pope did not much
approve of it, and he had protested to Lord Oxford that in no other way
could justice be rendered to the memory of a man to whom he had the first
obligations of friendship. He would not be ashamed of what he did not do
himself, and he alone had edited the work and sent it to the press. The value
of his asseverations may be measured by the triple falsehood he volunteered
to Swift. He was aware that the arguments by which he hoped to persuade
Lord Oxford to become his dupe would not impose upon the penetrating
understanding of the Dean, and he therefore openly repudiated what he was
unable to excuse. If the publication had vindicated Wycherley, it would
have been its own justification; but as it was put forth to do honour to Pope,
he sacrificed his veracity to avoid the imputation of vanity. He cruelly
sneered, in his "Prologue to the Satires" at the poor garretteer, who urged
the plea for printing his compositions that he was "obliged by hunger and
request of friends." The poet had not the excuse of hunger, and he improved
upon the model he satirised when he pretended that his friends had taken his
papers, and printed them against his will.
The deception which Pope practised was never suspected till it was revealed
by his correspondence with Lord Oxford, which has hitherto remained in

manuscript. The repetition of the attempt on a more elaborate scale was less
successful, and it has always been believed by the immense majority of
inquirers that the promulgation of the collection of 1735, which the poet
vehemently denounced as an act of intolerable treachery, was from first to
last his own deed. "It seems," says Johnson, "that Pope being desirous of
printing his letters, and not knowing how to do, without imputation of
vanity, what has in this country been done very rarely, contrived an
appearance of compulsion, that when he could complain that his letters
were surreptitiously published, he might decently and defensively publish
them himself."[23] Fresh facts have rendered the evidence against him
stronger than ever, and the whole derives increased force from the
information we now possess that he had previously had recourse to a
kindred falsehood. In the first case he made a tool of a friend; in the second,
he varied his plan, and made a tool of an enemy.
Pope tells us, in the preface to the authorised edition of his correspondence,
which he brought out in quarto in 1737, that his disgust at the publication of
his letters to Cromwell, and "the apprehension of more treatment of the
same kind, put him upon recalling as many as he could from those who he
imagined had kept any."[24] He applied to his friend Caryll, in December,
1726, to surrender his collection; and, on renewing the request a few days
later, he added, "I have desired the same thing of Mrs. Blount, with whose
late worthy husband I entertained so long a correspondence, and of all
others." It was more than two years before Caryll could be induced to
comply with the demand, and it would seem that Mrs. Blount was little less
backward; for, on November 28, 1729, Pope wrote to Swift, "I lately
received from the widow of one dead correspondent, and the father of
another,[25] several of my own letters of about fifteen and twenty years old."
When the poet had gleaned together all the letters he could extort, "he
immediately," he says, "lessened the number by burning three parts in four
of them: the rest he spared, not in any preference of their style or writing,
but merely as they preserved the memory of some friendships which will
ever be dear to him, or set in a true light some matters of fact from which
the scribblers of the time had taken occasion to asperse either his friends or
himself." He was not more anxious to destroy the three parts than to secure
the fourth from destruction. "He laid by the originals together with those of
his correspondents, and caused a copy to be taken to deposit in the library

of a noble friend, that in case either of the revival of slanders, or the
publication of surreptitious letters during his life or after, a proper use might
be made of them."[26] The noble friend was Lord Oxford, and the request to
be allowed to place the letters in his library was made by Pope in
September, 1729, when he stated that "he had had it at heart for half a year
and more." Upon obtaining Lord Oxford's consent, he had the
correspondence transcribed under his own inspection; and on October 16 he
says, "I am causing the manuscripts to be fairly written, and hope at your
lordship's return to be the presenter of them in person." By his own avowal
he had carefully culled his letters, had prepared the selected portions for
some public purpose, and had taken the unusual precaution of preserving
them in duplicate. The end which he declared they were intended to serve
was a palpable pretence. He never specified any slanders they refuted, and
he could have had little idea of employing them to test the truth of
surreptitious letters when he began by burning three parts of the collection,
and only retained a fourth. The manifest fact was, that, while he was
desirous of consigning to oblivion those portions of his correspondence
which would not add to his reputation, he was eager to circulate the picked
specimens which he imagined would promote his fame.
No advance seems to have been made towards the accomplishment of his
design till 1733, when Curll advertised a life of Pope. An unknown person
who wrote a feigned hand, and who signed his letters with the initials P. T.,
then opened a correspondence with the bookseller, and furnished some
information upon the genealogy of the poet. He vindicated him from the
charge of plebeian descent, and affirmed that he sprung from the same stock
as Lord Downe.[27] This assertion was repeated by Pope in one of the notes
to his "Prologue to the Satires," though Mr. Pottinger, his cousin, ridiculed
the "fine pedigree," which had never been heard of in the family, and which
there is nothing to confirm.[28] There is thus at starting a curious identity
between the apocryphal statements of P. T. and the apocryphal statements of
Pope. But as P. T. must have had access to the manuscripts in the keeping of
Lord Oxford, he might be supposed to have found the account among the
memoranda of the poet, and no great stress could be laid upon the
coincidence to prove that P. T. was Pope in disguise, if the general tenor of
the correspondence did not indicate its origin.

There was a feud between Pope and Curll. The bookseller believed that the
poet had drugged him with an emetic, he had been subsequently satirised in
the Dunciad, and he had lost no opportunity of retaliating. An
uncompromising panegyric upon his antagonist would have run counter to
his prejudices, and while P. T. is careful to tell nothing which is not for the
honour of Pope, he has the precaution to consult the antipathies of Curll. He
pretends that the poet, with whom he was formerly well acquainted, has
treated him like a stranger, and that he cannot give so good an account of
his manners as of his parentage. He promises, if he receives encouragement,
to make these moral deficiencies the subject of a future letter, "without
entering into anything in anywise libellous." He omitted, however, in his
next communication, to keep this part of his engagement, and never
reverted to it. He had spoken of Pope's family in the same flattering and
perhaps fictitious terms as Pope himself; but, in spite of his pledge, and his
animosity, he forbore to relate the minutest particular to the discredit of the
poet. The inconsistency between the assumed character and the actual
conduct of P. T. is much too glaring. An enemy would have been far less
partial and considerate.
The first communication of P. T. was dated October 1733. He directed Curll
to signify the acceptance of his offer by inserting in the Daily Advertiser the
notice, "E. C. hath received a letter, and will comply with P. T." This Curll
did, and on the 15th of November got an answer from P. T., in which the
true purpose of the manœuvre transpires. Instead of sending traits of the
defects in Pope's manners, he announces that he has "a large collection of
his letters from the former part of his days till the year 1727, which will
alone make the most authentic memoirs of him that could be." He adds that
they will form a four or five shilling volume, and "yet I expect no more," he
says, "than what will barely pay a transcriber, that the originals may be
preserved in mine or your hands to vouch for the truth of them." He
appealed to the hatred as well as to the avarice of the bookseller. He again
asserted that he had experienced bad treatment from Pope and that his sole
motive was "to bestow upon him" the same "care" which Curll had done
already.[29] Again his thirst for retaliation ended in homage, for the
collection consisted of the identical letters which the poet had prepared for
the press, and which were intended to raise instead of to lower his
reputation. The conduct of P. T., who, having abjured profit and only

feigned revenge, was to get nothing by his roguery, is altogether
incomprehensible, if we are to suppose that he was what he professed; but
his conduct ceases to be a mystery if P. T. was Pope, who, having finished
editing his letters, may be presumed to have had the same desire to find a
pretext for printing them as he had exhibited in the instance of the
correspondence with Wycherley.
The point upon which the bargain went off for a time is equally significant.
P. T. enclosed an advertisement of the letters, and required as a preliminary
that it should be put forth by Curll, "for I shall not," he said, "be justified to
some people on whom I have dependence, unless it seem to the public eye
as no entire act of mine; but I may be justified and excused if, after they see
such a collection is made by you, I acknowledge I sent some letters to
contribute thereto."[30] This reasoning carries its own refutation. If his
patrons could believe that Curll, without his aid, had got at the bulk of the
correspondence, they would quite as readily have credited that he had not
assisted the bookseller to the remainder. Nor is it likely that the men who
would have renounced P. T. if he had been a principal in the business,
would have connived at his becoming an accomplice. His plea was as
fanciful as his desire for revenge; but assume that Pope was the real
negotiator and his motive is transparent. The advertisement would have
threatened that very surreptitious publication of his letters, against which he
affirmed that he kept his own version in readiness. He would have
repudiated the impending piracy, and hastened in self-defence to commit
the genuine edition to the press. The promise contained in the
advertisement, that "the originals would be shown at Curll's when the book
was published," would have empowered him to give an air of imposture to
the transaction, and to damage his foe, who when challenged would not
have been able to produce the documents. According to the language which
Pope uttered in the name of P. T. he did expect to be justified in his
proceedings by means of the advertisement, but not at all in the manner
which he wished the bookseller to believe.
All the conditions required by Pope seemed met together in Curll. He was
an enemy, and could be denounced when he had been deceived. He had
printed the letters to Cromwell without the consent of the poet, and it would
readily be credited that he had repeated the act. He was not nice in his
notions of honour, and he might be expected to catch at an offer, however

discreditable, which promised both profit and revenge. But whatever might
be his greediness and his malice, they had not swallowed up his caution,
and notwithstanding that P. T. wrote again to express his dissatisfaction that
no advertisement appeared, Curll forbore to announce letters he did not
possess, at the bidding of a conspirator whose name and person he did not
know. The subject in consequence slept from November 1733 till March
1735, when the poet was meditating some fresh proceeding respecting his
correspondence, for on the third of that month, he requested Lord Oxford to
send him by the hearer "the bound book of copies of letters," which, he
wanted, he said, "to inspect for a day or two." There are transcripts among
the Oxford papers of some of the letters of Wycherley to Pope, which
appeared in 1729. There are transcripts of Pope's correspondence with
Atterbury, which appeared in 1737. There are transcripts of a large part of
the Swift correspondence, which appeared in 1741. But while the earlier
and later letters are preserved on loose sheets the bound book has vanished,
and there is not a single transcript of any letter which was first given to the
world in the collection of 1735. The probability is that the book which Pope
professed to require for a day or two was never returned. The circumstance
is the more suspicious because he had the originals at home, which would
have served him for reference, whereas if his object was to commit the
letters clandestinely to the press he would use the copy which had been
specially prepared for the purpose,—which had been expurgated, altered,
and sometimes remodelled. Accordingly we find that P. T. reappears at this
crisis with the correspondence in print. He had failed to lure Curll by a
promise of letters which he would not produce. He now changed his tactics,
and offered him an entire impression of the book.
This second act of the plot was opened by a communication of Curll to
Pope on the 22nd of March, three weeks after the letters had been
withdrawn from the library of Lord Oxford. He invited the poet to close
their differences, and, as a proof of his readiness to oblige him, sent him the
old advertisement of P. T. Curll asserted that he took the step "by direction."
[31]
When he republished this statement he volunteered another, which
seems to be inconsistent with it, and says that the discovery of the
advertisement, when arranging his papers, determined him to propose a
cessation of hostilities.[32] As he was unconscious, however, of any
contradiction in the double account, it is probable that he may have been

influenced by some concurring advice. It strengthens this view that Pope, in
an anonymous "Narrative," which he subsequently put forth, reports what
Curll told a few days later, "to persons who sifted him in the affair,"[33]
which shows that the bookseller had people about him in the interest of the
poet, and these sifters, as the critic in the Athenæum remarks, might, when
needful, become prompters. The progress of events proved that the letter of
Curll was at least singularly opportune, and if not written "by direction,"
was one of those fortunate chances which often contribute to the success of
the best laid schemes. Pope replied to it by inserting an advertisement in the
"Grub Street Journal," the "Daily Journal," and "The Daily Post Boy." He
stated in this manifesto, that Curll "pretended that P. T. had offered him to
print a large collection of Pope's letters," that he would have no
correspondence with Curll, that he knew no such person as P. T., that he
believed the letters to be a forgery, and that he should not trouble himself in
the matter.[34] The poet might not choose to have any intercourse with a
former enemy of no good fame, but it was a strange return for his peace-
offering that he should advertise an insult on him, and equally singular
when he was incredulous, and had resolved not to trouble himself about the
matter, that he should parade in the newspapers the contents of a private
note. Yet extraordinary as was his conduct, if he had not any covert design,
it was consistent enough if he was the agent in the plot for bringing his
letters before the world. His advertisement would convey the impression
that he could not have connived at the publication he was contriving; it
would afford an opening for P. T. to come again upon the stage; and by
infuriating Curll it would induce him to close at once with the proposal
which was ready to be made to him. In conformity with this supposition P.
T., who had not communicated with the bookseller for upwards of two
years, saw the advertisement directly it appeared, and he lost not an instant
in informing Curll that since their last negotiation he had printed the letters.
[35]
It was true that Curll had betrayed him to Pope, but P. T. was generous
and would still give him the preference. The game required that Pope
should be incapable of being conciliated, and P. T. of taking offence.
P. T. demanded that Curll should show he was in earnest by putting forth the
old advertisement. Curll complied, and the negotiation went forward. An
agent was sent to him who assumed the name of Smythe and professed to
be a clergyman, but who was so little conversant with the character he

personated that he wore a clerical gown and lawyer's bands. On the 7th of
May he went to Curll's house at night; and, to bring the bargain to a
conclusion, exhibited to him most of the sheets of the volume, and a dozen
original letters.[36] Before Curll had published this statement Pope, for the
purpose of discrediting the promise which had been made in the
advertisement, that the originals should be produced when the book
appeared, had committed himself to the assertion that they all remained in
their proper place.[37] They must nevertheless, observes the critic in the
Athenæum, have been out of his possession, and doing service on the
evening when Smythe trafficed with Curll. The bookseller was not likely to
be deceived, for he had the Cromwell correspondence in his keeping, and
knew the poet's handwriting well.[38] He was as little likely to deceive, for
he told the fact in the course of a straight-forward story, without perceiving,
or at least without pointing out, its force in attesting the connivance of
Pope.
Fifty copies of the letters were in the possession of Curll by the 12th of
May, and were speedily sold. Smythe sent for him at one o'clock to a tavern
in Leicester Fields, and half an hour afterwards one hundred and ninety
additional copies were brought by a couple of porters, who were directed to
carry them to the shop of the bookseller. There they were immediately
seized by an order from the House of Lords, and Curll was commanded to
attend next day.[39] The peers in 1722 had voted it a breach of privilege to
publish the writings of any member of their body without his consent. Curll,
in an advertisement which appeared for the first time that morning, had
given a list of the persons to whom Pope's letters were addressed, and
among the names were those of the Earl of Halifax and the Earl of
Burlington. To print letters to lords was no offence. It was necessary that
there should be letters from them, and of this there was no other indication
than that the list of names was followed by the words,—"with the
respective answers of each correspondent."[40] Curll asserted that the
advertisement came to him through Smythe,[41] and the proceedings
founded upon it in the hour that it issued wet from the press were, as
Johnson states, instigated by Pope, "who attended to stimulate the
resentment of his friends."[42] If he had never set eyes upon the book before
it was published, curiosity would still have prompted him to turn over the
leaves, and he must immediately have discovered that it did not contain a

single letter from a peer. The wording of the advertisement may, therefore,
be suspected to have been devised by him to afford a colour for what he
must have known was a groundless prosecution. A committee was
appointed to investigate the complaint. It met on the 14th of May, and the
case would have ended as soon as it was begun, if Pope's spokesman, Lord
Hay, who resided at Twickenham, and was one of his associates, had not
adduced from a letter to Jervas a passage which he alleged to be a reflection
on Lord Burlington. But the person who furnished the work to Curll had, by
an elaborate device, provided against a charge which no one except its
contriver could have foreseen. The fifty copies, which were sold on the
morning of the 12th, before the power of the House of Lords was put in
motion, contained the letter. Those which were furnished in the middle of
the day, as if to meet the messenger sent to seize them, were all defective,
and in every case the letter to Jervas was among the omissions.[43] Nor had
the leaves which contained it been simply kept back, but every trace of it
had been obliterated by an alteration at the printing-press. In the complete
work the missing letter commenced on p. 115 of vol. ii.[44] and ended on p.
117. In the imperfect books a note on Trumbull, which began at p. 114, is
carried on to the top of p. 115, and Pope's epitaph upon him, which appears
in no other copies of the correspondence, is added to cover a little of the
vacant space. The word "Finis" follows the note, though, in spite of this
indication that the whole is concluded, the work recommences on p. 117
with the letters to Gay, which continue to p. 154.[45] The coincidence was
far too extraordinary to be undesigned. Pope, who had incited the
prosecution the very hour the book was published, and who had been in
such haste to instruct Lord Hay that the debate in the House of Lords was
concluded, and the sheets seized by two o'clock, could alone have adapted
one batch to afford a pretext for the proceeding, and another batch to render
the proceeding abortive,—he alone could have arranged the delivery of the
respective parcels, and sent the fifty copies which contained the obnoxious
passage, in time to be sold in the morning, and the one hundred and ninety
copies in which it was wanting, just in time to be captured by the messenger
from the House of Lords. His object was not to procure the confiscation of
the correspondence, and stop the sale. He wished to simulate indignation,
and divert suspicion from himself without interfering with the success of
the work, and he conducted the prosecution with so much care to ensure

defeat that we may readily credit the assertion of Curll, "that the lords
declared they had been made Pope's tools."[46]
While the copies seized by the messenger had not the letter to Jervas, they
contained in compensation an address "to the reader," which was not in the
first fifty copies sent to Curll. This preface betrays throughout the hand of
Pope. The original proposition was that it should be furnished by Curll; and,
notwithstanding the revenge by which he professed to be actuated, P. T.
maintained that the poet ought to be mentioned with praise. "We must by no
means," he said, "seem to use him with disregard, but rather commend, lest
by any circumstances I writ to you the publisher be detected."[47] I This was
seven years after the appearance of the Dunciad, and Pope was not so
universally beloved as that the intimation that the correspondence was put
forth by an enemy could direct suspicion to the culprit. The pretence was
too palpable to impose upon any one, and P. T., who, among other motives
for his procedure, probably mistrusted Curll's cordiality or skill in a
panegyric, determined upon consideration to supply it himself. He was not
sparing in his tribute. "Mr. Pope," he wrote, "has not any great cause to
think the publication much offence to his modesty, or reflection on his
judgment, when we take care to inform the public that there are few letters
of his in this collection which were not written under twenty years of age.
On the other hand, we doubt not the reader will be much more surprised to
find at that early period so much variety of style, affecting sentiment, and
justness of criticism in pieces which must have been writ in haste, very few
perhaps ever re-viewed, and none intended for the eye of the public."[48]
This was the very language of the poet. He coveted the distinction of
precocity of talent, and was perpetually directing attention to the early age
at which he affirmed, and sometimes falsely, that many of his letters and
poems were penned. He asserted that his most finished epistles were thrown
off in haste, which, as they were always held to bear the marks of labour in
every sentence, is the last topic of praise that would have been selected by
anybody else. He was anxious to persuade the world that they were not
revised before they were published, and he prevaricated to foster the
deception.[49] He protested that they were never meant for the press, which
no one believed, and which could least of all be credited by the assumed
traitor who transcribed them from the copy that had been deposited in the
library of Lord Oxford to ensure their preservation. The vindictive P. T. was

both so fortunate and so hearty in his commendations that he proved the
mere echo of Pope in his self-applauding moods.
The other topics in the address "to the reader" were the same topics which
were subsequently reiterated by the poet. In his narrative of the P. T. plot,
and in the preface to the authorised edition of his correspondence, he relates
the method by which the Cromwell letters were obtained as affording a
vindication of his own collection.[50] P. T. was beforehand with him in
citing the precedent to explain the means by which his piratical volume was
formed, and to justify its publication.[51] The similarity of language and
ideas in the mention of the Wycherley letters was much more peculiar. Lord
Oxford appears to have refused to father the volume of 1729, for Pope
never again alleged that he sent it to the press. But neither did the poet
avow that he himself was responsible for its appearance. On the contrary, he
renewed the false statement that the letters were not printed till after they
were deposited in Lord Oxford's library, and spoke indefinitely of the
agency through which they were given to the world. "It happened soon
after," he says in his Narrative, "that the posthumous works of Mr.
Wycherley were published in such a manner as could no way increase the
reputation of that gentleman, who had been Mr. Pope's first correspondent
and friend; and several of these letters so fully showed the state of that case
that it was thought but justice to Mr. Wycherley's memory to print a few to
discredit that imposition."[52] "The next year," he says, in the preface to the
quarto of 1737, "the posthumous works of Mr. Wycherley were printed in a
way disreputable enough to his memory. It was thought a justice due to him,
to show the world his better judgment, and that it was his last resolution to
have suppressed those poems. As some of the letters which had passed
between him and our author cleared that point, they were published in 1729,
with a few marginal notes added by a friend."[53] "The letters to Mr.
Wycherley," says P. T.'s address to the reader, "were procured some years
since on account of a surreptitious edition of his posthumous works. As
those letters showed the true state of that case, the publication of them was
doing the best justice to the memory of Mr. Wycherley."[54] Pope
misrepresented the tenor of the letters as an excuse for divulging them; but
how came the vindictive P. T. to be the first to hit upon an untruth in which
he had no sort of interest, and to serve the cause of his antagonist by
promulgating the fanciful description? Pope ascribed the publication to an

indefinite agency, to avoid acknowledging that he was the sole originator of
the work; but how came his enemy P. T. to anticipate his wishes, and the
ambiguous phraseology in which he conveyed them? The identity of
thought and expression was the more singular that P. T., in a private
communication to Curll, had confirmed the original story of the poet, and
asserted that "a noble lord had handed to the press the letters of Wycherley."
[55]
To the world he varied the tale, and the variation was the same which
was adopted a week or two afterwards by Pope.
A coincidence remains which more than all the rest proclaims Pope to be
the author of the address "to the reader." Nothing would have served better
his purpose in the prosecution than to prevail upon Curll to confess that the
letters were of his own procuring and printing. Upon the seizure of the
books Smythe wrote to him in the name of P. T., promising that he should
have the work upon easier terms, and holding out the prospect of a second
and more important volume of correspondence if he would keep secret the
whole transaction, would assert that he had the letters from different hands,
and avow that he had printed them, as he did Cromwell's before.[56] The
preface, which had never been seen by Curll, and which was appended, as if
in anticipation of the event, to all the copies carried off to the House of
Lords, contained the same tale he was instructed to tell. "The collection," it
said, "hath been owing to several cabinets, some drawn from thence by
accidents, and others, even of those to ladies, voluntarily given. It is to one
of that sex we are beholden for the whole correspondence with H.
C[romwell] Esq., which letters being lent her by that gentleman she took
the liberty to print." On the 12th of May, the day the work was published,
Pope gave a similar account to Caryll of the mode by which the contents
were procured. "What," he said, "makes me sick of writing is the shameless
industry of such fellows as Curll, and the idle ostentation, or weak partiality
of many of my correspondents, who have shown about my letters (which I
never writ but in haste, and generally against the grain, in mere civility; for
almost all letters are impertinent further than Si vales, bene est; ego valeo)
to such a degree that a volume of two hundred or more are printed by that
rascal. But he could never have injured me this way, had not my friends
furnished him with the occasion, by keeping such wretched papers as they
ought to have burned." The whole of this passage is an egregious specimen
of misrepresentation and hypocrisy. A glance at the work must have

revealed to Pope that the new letters it contained were those which had been
returned to him,—the letters to Gay, Digby, Blount, and Caryll; that it
comprised letters to as well as from him,[57]—letters of which he was the
sole depositary; that the text was not taken from the originals, but from the
copy he had amended and re-cast; and that it was, therefore, impossible that
his acquaintances should have furnished materials which could only have
been derived from one source,—the bound book in the Oxford library. His
pretence that his letters were hasty and insignificant expressions of civility,
when he had spared no pains in collecting and editing them; his affected
indignation at his friends "for keeping such wretched papers as they ought
to have burned," when he himself had preserved them in duplicate, and
designed them for publication; his transparent fiction that almost the entire
circle of his correspondents,—Addison, Steele, Congreve, Gay, Walsh,
Trumbull, Craggs, Digby, Blount, and others,—had been guilty of "idle
ostentation or weak partiality," in showing these "wretched papers" to
somebody who transcribed them for the press,—are all so many additional
arguments to show the conscious guilt of Pope, and the gross and clumsy
inventions by which he endeavoured to divert suspicion. The fable he
concocted is, in its essential circumstance, identical with the fabulous story
of P. T. While P. T. on his part is telling a falsehood to the public in the
preface, and begging the bookseller to tell it in the House of Lords, Pope on
his own behalf is telling the same falsehood in private to Caryll. This
concurrence of misrepresentation between the letter of the poet, and P. T.'s
address "to the reader" and instructions to Curll, could not have proceeded
from independent and hostile persons.
Curll did not choose, when he was before the Committee of the House of
Lords, to father the lie which had been suggested to him. The proceedings
were adjourned from the 14th to the 15th, that the clerk might search
through some more copies of the book for the missing letter to Jervas, and
P. T. employed the interval in again pressing Curll to assume the entire
responsibility of the work. He gently rebuked him for owning that the books
were sent by an unknown hand which might, he said, "be thought shuffling,
and induce inquiry and suspicion of some dark transaction;" and he assured
him that the lords would consider him more sincere if he professed that he
had the letters from different hands, and had printed them himself.[58] Curll
repudiated the notion of evidencing his sincerity by deposing to a

falsehood, and of silencing inquiry and suspicion by pretending that he had
procured a quantity of manuscripts from a variety of persons whom he must
have refused to name. "My defence," he replied, "is right; I only told the
Lords I did not know from whence the books came. This was strict truth
and prevented all further inquiry."[59] The pertinacity of P. T. in
endeavouring to persuade the bookseller to commit himself to a lie was as
gratuitous as it was shameless, for he had no interest in the deception he
urged. Curll had several weeks before announced to Pope that this
mysterious agent was the collector of the letters, and Pope in
communicating the intelligence to the public declared that he knew no such
person. The renewed mention of a couple of fanciful initials could not
increase P. T.'s risk of detection, any more than it could signify whether he
had sold the correspondence to Curll to be printed, or had printed it first and
sold it afterwards. But what would have been purposeless in P. T. was
important to Pope. The friends who had returned him the letters which
appeared in the volume must have joined with the public in ascribing the
work to him, and it was of the utmost moment that Curll should absolve
him from the imputation. Having entrapped his victim into a false
confession, he would have loudly appealed to it to prove that he was not
only innocent but injured. He would have complained to the world, as he
had done to Caryll, of the "idle ostentation and weak partiality" which had
caused his hasty and artless letters to be printed, and his vanity would have
been doubly gratified by the appearance that his choicest compositions were
the careless scratchings of his pen, and that the personal and literary merits
they displayed had been forced into day to the grievous annoyance of his
reluctant modesty.
Every incident which arose in the progress of the controversy strengthened
the case against Pope. At the same time that Smythe, on the behalf of P. T.,
exhorted Curll to give false evidence before the House of Lords, he
informed the bookseller of the method by which a portion of the
correspondence had been acquired. P. T. had been engaged with a noble
friend of Mr. Pope in preparing for the press the letters of Wycherley, and
had caused some extra copies to be struck off. These, he said, "put into his
head the thought of collecting more," and when he printed the materials he
had since accumulated he imitated as closely as possible the type and paper
of the stored up sheets.[60] P. T. made a merit of the revelation, and wished

that Curll should see in it a proof of the openness and confidence with
which he was treated. In reality it was an endeavour to explain the awkward
circumstance that the prose part of Pope's Wycherley had been done up with
the letters of 1735. The publication of 1729 was entitled the second volume
of Wycherley's "Posthumous Works," and contained a couple of notes
referring to poems which were inserted or omitted in what was called "the
present edition." But as Pope's letters were not an edition of Wycherley's
Works, the absurdity of the reference might have led at any moment to the
exposure of the fact that the sheets of the old book had been transferred to
the new, and it was better at once, by an air of candid confession, to account
for the importation than to run the risk of discovery. Curll had soon a rival
version to give of the manner in which these sheets were procured. He
announced that Gilliver, who published the Wycherley volume of 1729, had
declared that Pope bought of him the remainder of the impression,
consisting of six hundred copies, and directed the other letters comprised in
the volume of 1735 to be printed to match them.[61] There can be no
difficulty in deciding between these opposite statements. The assertion of P.
T. we know to be a falsehood, for Pope himself, and not the noble friend,
prepared the letters of Wycherley for the press. None of the inferior agents
could have carried off any large number of books, without detection, nor
could have stowed them away from 1729 to 1735. The motive to thieve
what was already published could only have been lucre, and yet thirty
pounds were taken for three hundred octavos of 470[62] pages each, when
but 50 of these pages were derived from the sheets that cost nothing. If, too,
there was any truth in P. T.'s story, he was encumbered with the pile of
stolen goods when he opened the correspondence with Curll in 1733,
whereas it is clear from his communications at that time that the idea of
supplying printed books had not then occurred to him. The trick which had
been practised was known to Pope when he put forth his "Narrative," and he
might have obtained a clue to the culprit by an investigation at the printing-
office. He nevertheless made no comments on the subject, nor, loudly as he
exclaimed against the abstraction of his letters, did he breathe a whisper
against the abstraction of the sheets of the Wycherley. Not a single
specimen, again, of the work of 1729 is now known to exist, which is in
some degree explained by its absorption into the volume of 1735; but, on
the supposition that the sheets transferred to that volume were merely extra
copies, struck off secretly for P. T., there is no reason why the Wycherley of

1729 should have disappeared. The conflicting statement of Curll is not
embarrassed by any of these difficulties, and was never denied by either
Gilliver or Pope, which is of itself sufficient to establish its truth, when we
bear in mind that, instead of confronting calumny with silence, the poet
denounced every charge he could repel.
The letter urging Curll anew to make a false statement of the means by
which he obtained the correspondence, was received by him on the morning
of May 15. "I am," he said, in his reply, "just again going to the Lords to
finish Pope."[63] He verified his boast. In place of adopting the advice of P.
T., he showed the letter which contained it.[64] Pope's double dealing had
been strongly suspected on the previous day, when it was discovered that
the copies seized had been altered in anticipation of the charge he preferred.
There was now a second coincidence to connect him with the plot. The
letter produced by Curll revealed that the correspondence had been taken
from the archives of Lord Oxford, and that the story Pope had volunteered
to Caryll, and which he undoubtedly reiterated to his friends among the
Lords, was not only an invention to conceal the truth, but the same
invention which P. T. exhorted the bookseller to adopt. Some step was
necessary to save the poet from discomfiture. He therefore put forth an
advertisement in the "Daily Post-boy," acknowledging, what he was no
longer able to deny, that "some of the letters could only be procured from
his own library, or that of a noble Lord," and promising twenty guineas to
either Smythe or P. T. if they would "discover the whole affair," and forty
guineas if they "could prove that they had acted by the direction of any
other person."[65] This was an old device of the poet. To escape from the
obloquy he incurred by an impious and indecent parody of the First Psalm,
he inserted an advertisement in the "Postman," offering a reward of three
guineas for the discovery of the person who sent it to the press. The
publisher, Mrs. Burleigh, declared that she possessed the manuscript in his
own handwriting, and expressed her readiness to produce it, but he never
ventured to accept the challenge or to contradict her assertion.[66] Pope did
not acknowledge that the essence of a falsehood was in the deceit. "If you
have seen a late advertisement," he wrote to Miss Blount, August 7, 1716,
alluding probably to this transaction, "you will know that I have not told a
lie, which we both abominate, but equivocated pretty genteelly." Without in
strict language disclaiming the authorship, he intended that the reader

should understand it as a disclaimer. His advertisement respecting the letters
was a kindred case. He meant it to be received as a denial of all connivance
at the publication of his correspondence, and in strict language he denied
nothing. He said that the book was printed by P. T., in combination with
Smythe, which was equally true, if P. T. was Pope. He could use the phrase
"some of the letters," when driven to confess that they were procured from
the library of Lord Oxford, because the volume contained the Cromwell and
Wycherley letters, which had been printed before. He could hold out the
bait of rewards to himself without any risk of betrayal, and the manœuvre
must have been adopted in concert with his accomplice Smythe, upon
whose secresy and fidelity he was already dependent.
The Committee of the Lords reported that there was not a letter from any
peer in the work, and since no law had been infringed, they recommended
that the seized copies should be restored.[67] Motte, the bookseller, writing
to Swift in July 31, 1735, says, that when Curll was before the House, "he
was ruffled for the publication in a manner as, to a man of less impudence
than his own, would have been very uneasy." With whatever virulence he
may have been attacked by the partisans of the poet, he was invulnerable
from his want of character as well as from his want of shame, and he had
the gratification of inflicting wounds he could not receive. "Pope," he said
to the Lords, "has a knack of versifying, but in prose I think myself a match
for him."[68] He afterwards boasted that he had not only vindicated his
assertion, but that he might affirm "with regard to all the attacks made upon
him by the petulant little gentleman,—veni, vidi, vici."[69] His ally, P. T.,
derived no satisfaction from this victory over their common antagonist.
Curll had proved a less ready dupe than had been anticipated, and his
insidious prompter reproached him for his adherence to the truth. Smythe
informed him that P. T. was out of humour with him for not "owning the
printing" at his final attendance before the Committee of the House of
Lords; that he had probably by his wilfulness lost a future copyright of
immense value, and that his imperfect sheets would not be completed, nor
additional books supplied, unless he paid twenty pounds in advance.[70] The
reply of Curll was lofty and defiant. He said he cared nothing for any man's
ill-humour; that he would never stoop to own a fact of which he was
innocent; that he had acted justly, which was what he should always think
wisely; that he despised the future copyright of which hopes were held out

to him; that he would have no more dealings with such dark suspicious
characters, and that unless he was frankly and fairly treated, he would print
all the letters he had received from them.[71] P. T. had previously stipulated
that his letters should be given up to him,[72] but Curll had the precaution to
take copies before he returned the originals, and, to avoid cavil, he stated
that he would make an affidavit of their accuracy. The effect of the threat
showed the alarm it excited. Smythe completely changed his tone. He no
longer prefers complaints against Curll, nor exacts conditions. He is his
friend and servant, and will bring him the remainder of the impression on
Thursday. He professes to be tired with the caprice of P. T. and has hardly
written the words when he announces that he has been sent for by him, and
hears from the messenger that he is in good humour.[73] Though P. T. was
awed, Curll no longer trusted him, and before Thursday came the bookseller
had advertised what he called, from the signature of the chief conspirator,
the "Initial Correspondence."[74]
P. T. and Smythe put forth a counter-advertisement on the 23rd of May, in
which they declared that they would retaliate by committing to the press the
letters of Curll.[75] The ostensible motive of the mock clergyman and his
employer was to cover the bookseller with infamy. The effect, they said,
will be, "to open a scene of baseness and foul-dealing that will sufficiently
show to mankind his character and conduct." The correspondence does not
bear out this description. The documents show that the lying and trickery
rested with P. T., while the bookseller was veracious in his assertions and
straight-forward in his proceedings. "That Curll," says Johnson, "gave a true
account of the transaction it is reasonable to believe, because no falsehood
was ever detected."[76] It was his boast that falsehood had been his
abhorrence throughout the discussion, and he drew vaunting comparisons
between Pope's addiction to the vice, and his own detestation of it.[77] His
very failings in one direction had helped to sustain his virtue in another. He
had too much effrontery to care to descend to duplicity, and it is impossible
to read his many controversial manifestoes without perceiving that he was
in general as truthful as he was impudent. In the instance of Pope's letters,
there is the original blot, that he saw no discredit in publishing papers
which he supposed to be purloined; but he had already avowed the fact
before the House of Lords, and the crime was more than shared by P. T. In
everything else the acts and language of the bookseller contrast favourably

with the meanness and falsehoods of his correspondent, who would not
have assisted to disseminate the record of his own misdeeds. But it was
different with the poet. He must have seen that the inevitable tendency of
the "Initial Correspondence" would be to convict him of the offences he had
tried to fasten upon Curll. His single chance of diminishing its disastrous
effect was to promulgate it as evidence upon his own side, and not to allow
it to come forth solely as the hostile statement of an opponent. The
proceeding in P. T. would have been to aid in propagating the proofs of P.
T.'s "baseness and foul-dealing." In Pope it was an effort to throw upon the
initials the stigma which would otherwise have fallen upon Pope himself.
The resolution of P. T. to proclaim his own disgrace was less extraordinary
than his manner of doing it. It was announced on the 24th of May, that "the
clergyman concerned with P. T. and Edmund Curll to publish Mr. Pope's
letters hath discovered the whole transaction, and a narrative of the same
will be speedily printed."[78] Hence it appears that Smythe had made a full
confession to the author of the "Narrative," and P. T. must be presumed to
have been a party to it, since he transmitted the originals of the
communications he had addressed to Curll, together with Curll's replies.
This "Narrative" was the work of Pope. He alone could have furnished
several of the particulars, together with the letter which Curll wrote to him
in March, 1735; and the statements, the misrepresentations,[79] the
reflections, and sometimes the words, are the same which he employed in
the preface to the quarto of 1737. Hitherto, P. T. had been so fearful of
detection by the poet, that in the language of Smythe, he suspected his own
shadow. He now unmasked himself without a motive, and without reserve,
to the man he had injured. He had nothing to tell of Curll but what Curll had
insisted upon relating before the House of Lords, and the only novel
information he could give was the details of his own thefts and frauds. This,
indeed, was what Pope would chiefly have cared to learn. He would have
been eager to ascertain who the person could be that had got access to his
letters, and the means by which they were copied and printed; and he
certainly would not have called anything "a discovery of the whole
transaction," which contained no revelation upon the only points of the least
importance. But it is extremely improbable that the wary P. T. should have
wantonly turned self-accuser. To the last this fabulous personage continued
to act in the manner which was most convenient to Pope, and the true

explanation of the pretended confession is, that it was a fiction of the poet
to account for his possession of the correspondence with Curll.
More inexplicable than all was the forbearance of Pope to produce the facts
in his "Narrative." He might feel bound to suppress the names of culprits
who had volunteered a confession of their crime; but he might have told the
manner of the theft, and specified the printer employed by P. T. He
refrained, on the contrary, from revealing the particulars which would have
absolved him from an odious imputation. He kept back every tittle of
evidence which would have acquitted him if he was innocent, and have
implicated him if he was guilty. His story has none of the circumstantiality
of an actual occurrence; his statements are as indefinite as the agents were
shadowy. He disclosed the dealings of P. T. with Curll, which Curll had
noised abroad, and was about to publish, but he does not bestow a thought
upon the far more essential question of the mode in which the
correspondence was purloined, and seems to be satisfied himself, and
wishes that the world should be satisfied likewise, with learning that a
person, whose only designation was a couple of initials, sent the letters
ready printed to the bookseller. Obliged to abandon his original story of the
means by which they found their way to the press, Pope had now some
powerful reason for diverting attention from the subject, and leaving the
mystery unexplained.
He speedily manifested his desire to consign P. T. to oblivion, and reverted
to his former scheme of imputing the publication to Curll. In the very
"Narrative" which showed that the bookseller had no share in gathering
together the correspondence, Pope inculcated the idea that he had been
active in the task. He charged him with having put forth an advertisement of
the letters to Cromwell, in which "he promised encouragement to all
persons who should send him more," and adds, a little lower down, "By
these honest means Mr. Curll went on increasing his collection."[80] The
accused challenged him to produce the advertisement, and the accuser was
silent. He persevered nevertheless in misrepresenting to his acquaintances
Curll's part in the business. Writing to Fortescue, on March 26, 1736, of the
volume of 1735, he calls it "the book of letters which Curll printed and
spared not," though the poet's own witnesses, P. T. and Smythe, had
demonstrated, even in their anger against Curll, that he had nothing to do
with procuring or printing the letters, and was merely the vendor of the

copies he had bought. In Pope's complaints to his other friends, Curll is the
single culprit to whom he ascribed the injury he had suffered, and on no one
occasion did he go through the form of keeping up his P. T. fiction. His
misrepresentations to the world at large were more covertly expressed. He
spoke in his authorised edition of the "publisher's own accounts in his
prefaces," and, as his first example, quotes P. T.'s address "to the reader,"
which he knew from the letters of Smythe had never been seen by the
publisher till it was shown him at the bar of the House of Lords. To help out
the mis-statement in the text his reference in a note is made to Curll's
reprint of the collection of 1735, instead of to the volume in which the
address "to the reader" was originally produced.[81] Nor was it, perhaps,
without design that in the catalogue of surreptitious editions, prefixed to an
octavo impression of his letters which appeared in 1737, he put first in the
list, as if it had been the parent of the rest, an edition of Curll, which was
taken from the volume of P. T., and allotted the second place to the
primitive text. He never revived the clumsy fabrication he had been
compelled to promulgate in his "Narrative." In private he transferred the
crimes of P. T. to Curll; in public he insinuated what he dared not assert for
fear of retaliation; but neither in public nor private was anything heard of
the phantom who had purloined, printed, and sold the correspondence. Had
his existence been real, or the invention been credited, Pope would not have
persisted in calumniating the bookseller for want of a culprit upon whom to
lay the offence.
Faulkner, the Dublin printer, told Dr. Birch, in 1749, that James Worsdale
was the person who went to Curll, by Pope's direction, in the habit of a
clergyman.[82] Before the entry in Birch's diary was published, Dr. Johnson
had given the same account in his "Lives of the Poets."[83] Worsdale was a
painter, dramatist, and actor, and, as if his triple calling was insufficient for
his versatile disposition, he followed a fourth, and was hired, Johnson says,
to conduct clandestine negotiations. When an attempt was made to extort
money from the second son of Sir Robert Walpole, he was engaged to mix
with the conspirators, to win their confidence, and to betray it. They were
convicted of the fraud, and Worsdale, in giving his evidence, "acted with so
much life and spirit the several parts he had performed during the time of
sifting out the mystery as gave no small diversion to the court."[84]
According to Horace Walpole, the poet had employed this personator and

detector of rogues in his more reputable capacity, to make several copies of
a portrait of Atterbury.[85] He seemed formed to carry on the traffic with
Curll, and since it was his profession to aid in plots, he might be expected to
be a secret as well as a willing assistant. Johnson, who attached some
weight to his evidence, says he was of doubtful veracity,—an objection
which would have applied to the disclosures of any representative of
Smythe; for no upright man would have played a part in a scheme of
deception. His assertion would have been worthless, if it had stood alone;
but it at least falls in with the numerous circumstances which all conjoin to
criminate Pope.
If his impatience to print the Wycherley correspondence renders it probable
that he would be anxious to print the more important collection which he
had sedulously prepared for the press; if the deception he practised in 1729,
to avoid being taxed with the proceeding, and to throw it upon somebody
else, favours the belief that he repeated the deception in 1735 with the same
intention; and if the various facts connected with the publication unite to
prove with accumulative force that he was the sole contriver of it, there is
the further argument that no other person had the slightest interest in
perpetrating the act. "The numbers," says Dr. Johnson, "offered to sale by
the private messengers, showed that the hope of gain could not have been
the motive to the impression." Money was so little the object that a parcel
of the books was sent to Lintot, "for which no price was ever demanded, as
he had made known his resolution not to pay a porter, and consequently not
to deal with a nameless agent."[86] Any person in the employment of Lord
Oxford, who had access to the papers, and was competent to transcribe
them, would not have undergone the toil, and risked detection, disgrace, and
ruin for the sake of a few pounds which he must have shared with his
accomplice Smythe. The vaunted revenge of P. T. could not have been the
motive; for beyond the empty profession, it was belied alike by his words
and deeds. The poet in truth loved himself too well to be able to counterfeit
speciously the part of a hater. P. T. published the letters which Pope meant
to be published; he lauded Pope in Pope's own strain; he took the measures
which were most to Pope's advantage; he reflected Pope's vanities,
weaknesses, and falsehoods, and behaved throughout in a manner as
identical with Pope's position as it was remote from his own. Lucre and
revenge were propensities to which P. T. was a stranger, though he aspired

to a reputation for the latter, and the only passion apparent in his conduct is
his mania to gratify by dishonesty and deceit the literary ambition of Pope.
"The engineer was hoist with his own petard," and Curll, the intended
victim, had the satisfaction of being the executioner. The poet plainly
considered him to be a scoundrel whom he had a right to damage by any
means, foul or fair. Walter Scott believed that his inveterate persecutor
administered the emetic to him, and extraordinary as it may seem that a
celebrated man of letters should adopt this method of punishing an
obnoxious bookseller, the language of Pope obliges us to accept the
conclusion[87]. The trick was puerile and degrading, but it inflicted no
injury. The prosecution in the House of Lords, and the subsequent effort to
fasten his own misdeeds upon his enemy was an outrage of a different
description. To lure him into purchasing a book, and then to employ the
influence conferred by genius in founding charges upon the act which were
absolutely groundless, and in branding him with the disgrace which
belonged to his accuser, was a baseness of which the lowest Grub-street
scribbler satirised in the Dunciad would probably not have been capable. A
spirit of unfairness, which, bad as it might be, was less injurious, pervaded
his commercial dealings with Curll. The bookseller paid ten pounds in
money, and twenty pounds in promissory notes, for three hundred copies of
the work. Two hundred and forty only were delivered, and of these one
hundred and ninety wanted the letters to Jervas, Digby, Blount, and
others[88]. P. T. and Smythe stated in their advertisement of May 23 that
Curll's notes "had proved not negotiable," which they seem to have
designed as an excuse for not completing the imperfect books[89]. Curll
maintained that the defence added slander to treachery; for the notes were
not due till the 12th of June, and he indignantly declared that they would be
honoured if the terms of the bargain were fulfilled[90]. But these terms were
never intended to be performed. Smythe had contracted to reserve the
whole impression for Curll, and assured him on May 10 that no one else
should sell a single copy.[91] The pledge was violated as soon as made by
sending a parcel of the books to Lintot, and one of the artifices which
marked every part of the transaction was employed in public to counteract
the promises which had been given in private. As Curll was to provide his
own title-page and preface, and the copies seized by the order of the House
of Lords had a title-page and preface by P. T., Smythe wrote to Curll on the

13th of May to explain this departure from the arrangement. A "wonderful
caution" had suddenly seized P. T., who, apprehending that an injunction
might be obtained in Chancery against Curll, had furnished a preface which
"threw the publication entirely off him," and a title-page, in which,
substituting the entire trade for an individual, it was said that the volume
was "printed and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster."[92]
This was pronounced by Smythe to be "as lucky as could be," and it was
certainly a curious piece of fortune which caused P. T. to transmit the fifty
early copies without title or preface, and inspired him immediately
afterwards to attach both to the copies which were instantly to be pounced
upon by a messenger from the Lords. To deceive Curll by promises was the
first end to be attained, and he was led to believe that he would have a
monopoly of the work. To deprive him of the advantages he imagined he
had secured was a second, though a subordinate object of the conspiracy.
The whole corporation of booksellers were to be invited to encroach upon
his rights, and the preface and title-page affixed to the copies produced at
the bar of the House of Lords had been drawn up with the secret purpose of
contradicting any claim which might be set up by Curll. When Smythe
wrote his deceptive explanation of the motives of P. T., these confederates
were endeavouring to coax their dupe into owning that he was the collector
of the letters, and it was necessary that he should still be humoured and
beguiled. When the mask was thrown off, P. T. and Smythe joined in the
declaration that they had neither of them "given or could pretend to give
any title whatever to Mr. Pope's letters to Curll," and they promised "that
every bookseller should be indemnified every way from any possible
prosecution or molestation of the said Curll."[93] This invitation to all the
world to republish the correspondence of Pope was advertised in the
newspapers, and the poet shortly afterwards reprinted it in his "Narrative"
without a word of direct remonstrance against the pretension to dispose of
his property. P. T. had always hitherto adopted the course which furthered
the projects of Pope, and Pope, in return, appeared to smile upon the
enormous prerogative to make a general grant of his correspondence which
had been assumed by P. T. Commercial honesty was not to be expected in a
plan which was based upon falsehood and calumny; but if an ordinary
tradesman had conducted his dealings in the same manner as Pope, his
custom and character would have been destroyed. The events which
followed the publication lead to the same conclusion with the incidents

which preceded and attended it. Pope stated in his "Narrative" that there
were so many omissions and interpolations in the surreptitious volume, that
it was impossible for him to own the contents in their present condition.[94]
In two distinct advertisements which he put forth in May and July, 1735, he
went further, and declared that some of the letters were not his at all.[95]
Nevertheless the bookseller, Cooper, with whom he was now in alliance,
reprinted the entire collection, and brought it out on the 12th of June. He at
the same time announced that his edition had been entered at Stationers'
Hall, according to the Act of Queen Anne, and that "Edmund Curll or any
other pirater of the book should be prosecuted." Curll then served upon him
a process, the purport of which does not appear, and Pope wrote to his
friend and counsel Fortescue, who a few months later was raised to the
bench, and informed him that he had bid Cooper send him the document for
his legal opinion, begged to be acquainted with the steps which were
necessary to be taken, and acknowledged that he had connived at Cooper's
publication. In a subsequent note he asks for further directions in the
conduct of the case. The poet and the bookseller were therefore working in
conjunction, or to speak more correctly, the bookseller was the agent of the
poet. It must have been by Pope's authority that he appropriated the
copyright of the letters, and threatened proceedings against any one who
invaded it. When Curll took up the gauntlet Pope adopted the cause,
engaged Fortescue in the defence, and carried on with him the
correspondence respecting it. His sanction of the publication is confirmed
by the catalogue of surreptitious editions, since this impression of Cooper is
omitted from the list, notwithstanding the insertion of a later impression by
the same bookseller, containing some slight additions that had not been
ordered by Pope. Thus while the poet pretended that he could not own the P.
T. collection, with its mutilated, interpolated, and forged letters, he had
secretly authorised a reprint which was identical with the collection he
denounced. His actions evince the insincerity of his words. He had the
power to erase the forgeries and interpolations with a stroke of his pen, and
unless he had approved of the book in its primitive state he would not have
entered into a league with Cooper to produce it unaltered. He afterwards
seemed to disclaim the republication he had espoused. In the preface to his
avowed edition in 1737, he spoke of the "piratical printers" of the
surreptitious editions, without making any exception, and said that there
was "not one of them to whom he had ever given the least title, or any other

encouragement than that of not prosecuting them." This was either a direct
untruth or, what was more in accordance with his peculiar morality, a
deceptive quibble. Though he knew that his readers must infer that the
epithet "piratical" was applied to all the printers who had put forth an
edition of the volume of 1735, he may yet have justified to himself the
assertion that he had never given the least title to any of them, by the
reflection that as he had given a title to Cooper he was not a piratical
printer.
While the inquiry was going on before the House of Lords in May, Smythe
impressed upon Curll that P. T. had his whole heart set upon the publication
of the letters, not so much on account of the volume which had been seized,
as because it was the precursor of a much more important correspondence
with Swift, the late Lord Oxford, the Bishop of Rochester, and Lord
Bolingbroke.[96] When P. T. disappeared from the scene, Pope is found to
have inherited his ideas and to be animated by the desire to complete the
schemes his enemy left unfulfilled. "Since I saw you," he wrote to Lord
Oxford, June 17, 1735, "I have learnt of an excellent machine of Curll's, or
rather his director's, to engraft a lie upon, to make me seem more concerned
than I was in the affair of the letters. It is so artful an one that I longed to
tell it you—not that I will enter into any controversy with such a dog. But I
believe it will occasion a thing you will not be sorry for relating to the
Bishop of Rochester's letters and papers." There are no further particulars to
explain in what degree Pope had acknowledged to Lord Oxford that he was
"concerned in the affair of the letters,"[97] nor does any record remain of the
artful device of Curll, or of the new director who had succeeded to P. T. and
Smythe. The want of all foundation for the allegations against the
bookseller is probably the cause of the vagueness of the allusions. The
single palpable circumstance is that, in spite of his lamentations at the
publication of his letters, Pope was already designing to send a fresh
instalment of them to the press. Whatever may have been the "excellent
machine" to which he darkly referred, Curll had furnished him with the
pretence he sought. The bookseller put forth a new edition of the printed
copies he purchased from P. T., and called it the first volume of "Mr. Pope's
Literary Correspondence." Partly, perhaps, to vex Pope, and partly to attract
purchasers, he affixed the same title to future volumes, which were
principally a medley of trash that had no relation to the poet. Among the

promised contents of the second volume were "Atterbury's Letters to Mr.
Pope." Pope cited the announcement as a reason for publishing his
correspondence with the bishop, which P. T. had enumerated among "the
much more important correspondence" that was intended to follow, and
which, the poet, in precise agreement with him, declared was "of a nature
less insignificant" than the printed collection.[98] The coincidence of
opinion between these bitter antagonists is especially remarkable, because
others have not been struck with the superiority of the letters of Atterbury.
Mr. Croker thought them, with one or two exceptions, dull, pedantic, and
common-place, and Warton complains that they are, many of them,
crowded to affectation with trite quotations from Horace and Virgil. The
excuse for making them public was weak in the extreme. On the 12th of
June Cooper replied to Curll's advertisement of his second volume by a
counter-advertisement, and offered him ten pounds for any letter of
Atterbury to Pope, or of Pope to Atterbury, of which he could produce the
original or a voucher. P. T.'s copy, if it existed, must have been demanded
when he made his confession, and it is among the circumstances which
show this confession to have been a fiction, that the poet in his Narrative
omitted to mention the surrender of the important transcript, and never
subsequently alluded to its existence. Without copies or originals Curll
could not violate the secrecy for which Pope affected to be anxious. The
poet, in fact, did not put forth his pretence for printing the correspondence
till he had received practical evidence of the poverty of the bookseller's
resources. Curll's volume was published on the 14th of July,[99] and Pope's
advertisement did not come out till the following day. It was drawn up on
the 13th,[100] when he had probably seen an early copy of the book, or he
would have waited till the next morning, when he could have read in
conjunction with the rest of the public the letters which Atterbury was
alleged to have written to him. They were three in number. The longest was
a statement printed by the bishop, and addressed to the entire world,
refuting a charge of having corrupted the manuscript of Clarendon's
History. The remaining two were pronounced by Pope to be forgeries, and
of these one had already appeared in a Biographical Dictionary,[101] and the
other consisted chiefly of poetical quotations. Not a line had oozed out from
his private papers, and the argument for divulging them was gone. A man
who was eager to drag them into day might use the incident as a pretext, but
anybody who did not court publicity would have left them in their obscurity

upon the discovery that they continued safe from prying eyes and
transcribing fingers. Pope's practice and professions were as usual at
variance. He raised a cry of distress at the publication of his letters by P. T.,
and laid hold of the first hollow excuse for completing the obnoxious
design, and spreading before the world that portion of his correspondence
which P. T. had been unable to smuggle into print, in consequence of Curll's
unexpected revelation of the plot.
Pope stated in his advertisement, that along with his correspondence with
the Bishop of Rochester he should publish such of the letters as were
genuine from the surreptitious volume, and added, that the work would be
printed "with all convenient speed."[102] But speed was not convenient. The
project slept till March 26, 1736, when he writes to Fortescue, "Your too
partial mention of the book of letters, with all its faults and follies, which
Curll printed and spared not (nor yet will spare, for he has published a
fourth sham volume yesterday), makes me think it may not be amiss to send
you—what I know you will be much more pleased with than I can be—a
proposal for a correct edition of them, which at last I find must be offered,
since people have misunderstood an advertisement I printed some time ago,
merely to put some stop to that rascal's books, as a promise that I would
publish such a book." His excuse for the delay in redeeming his pledge of
supplying an authentic edition, is a curious instance of the absurdity to
which a man of genius may be reduced, when, unable to divulge his true
reasons, he has recourse to invention. "People" could not have
"misunderstood" the advertisement as "a promise that he would publish
such a book," for the promise was distinct, and there was no room left for
misunderstanding in the matter. But if we allow that an advertisement in the
newspapers, asserting that he was under a necessity of putting out a genuine
edition, which would be printed with all convenient speed, was only
designed to be read as a threat for the purpose of stopping Curll's trade, it is
plain that Curll must have become acquainted with an interpretation which
was apparent to the rest of the world, and would have paid no attention to a
menace that was not intended to be executed. Unless Pope desired that the
public should believe he was serious, the whole proceeding was objectless.
He was long in learning the misconstruction which had been put upon his
words. While the announcement was fresh, and likely to have been a topic
of conversation, he remained completely passive, and it was not till after an

interval of more than eight months that he discovered he was supposed to
have given a pledge, and must immediately redeem it. He had forgotten that
he had betrayed to Fortescue that he was in earnest at the time the
advertisement appeared. On August 2, 1735, a fortnight after it was issued,
Pope wrote to him, and asked to have back his letters; "for," said he, "I find
my collection, such as it is, must be hastened, or will not be so effectual." It
had not yet occurred to him to maintain that his promised publication was a
feint. The true cause of his procrastination has been suggested by the critic
in the Athenæum. He had distributed portions of his extensive
correspondence with Caryll among other groups, and addressed several of
the letters to men of higher position or greater fame. He must have rejected
the fictitious compound from his genuine edition, or waited till Caryll, who
was sinking with age and illness, was in his grave. The latter was the course
which Pope preferred. His friend was no doubt dying at the close of March,
1736, and on the 6th of April he expired. With him disappeared the sole
difficulty which stood in the way of the new edition, and the poet from that
moment was active in its prosecution.
It is amusing to observe the indifference and distaste which Pope feigned
for an undertaking that was entirely within his own discretion. He began by
announcing that the work would be printed with speed. He then protested he
did not mean what he said, and only yielded because others had erroneously
inferred, that by advertising in the papers that he would immediately print a
book he intended to signify that a book would be printed. He next resolved
to publish by subscription, which was a mode of levying forced
contributions through the canvass of the author and his friends. He hoped
nevertheless that the subscription would fail, in order that he might be
excused from an act to which he had been over-persuaded.[103] His hope
that support would be withheld had grown to a belief when he wrote to
Allen, on the 30th of April, and Allen, who had sought his acquaintance
from admiration of the benevolence and goodness of heart which pervaded
his letters, offered to bear the cost of the impression. The public by their
backwardness afforded Pope the opportunity he professed to desire of
dropping the work, but the patronage of an individual was sufficient
encouragement. He at once replied that he would "not serve his private
fame entirely at another's expense," but that he would "accept the assistance
in any moderate degree," which meant that he would allow Allen to defray

the outlay which was in excess of the amount subscribed.[104] Time wore
on, the letters were three-quarters printed, and the subscribers were few.[105]
In his first receipts the poet had stated that if he did not proceed with the
book the money should be returned on demand after midsummer.[106] The
unwilling public pleaded the uncertainty as a reason for not putting down
their names. He admitted that the doubt they expressed was a pretence, and
informed Allen that to deprive them of the pretext he had substituted
receipts in which he promised to deliver the volume by Lady Day.[107] His
object, he said, was to save Allen's purse. The reluctance had ceased to be
with the poet. He began by consenting to print a book he would rather not
have printed, that he might oblige the world, and ended by compelling the
world to subscribe to a book they would rather not have purchased, that
they might oblige Pope.
The subscription was a guinea for a quarto volume, and the donation of
Allen, which Pope acknowledged in his will, was probably paid in part on
this occasion. The copyright was purchased by Dodsley,[108] and from these
united sources of emolument the book produced, as Johnson had heard,
"sufficient profit."[109] It appeared on May 18, 1737, in folio and quarto,
and a little later in octavo, that the various sizes might range with previous
editions of the poet's works. In the preface he enters into a history of the
fate which had attended his letters, and of the circumstances which
compelled him to publish them, but with a studious avoidance of every
question which had been raised by the collection of 1735. He says it is
notorious what means have been taken to procure his correspondence, and
disposes of the single instance which required explanation by enumerating
among the methods "the transacting with people who dealt without names
in the dark." He says that several letters have been ascribed to him which he
did not write, and specifies examples, none of which appeared in the book
sold to Curll. He says that the piratical editions contain various passages
"which no man of common sense would have printed himself," and this he
could assert with truth, because the greater part of the Cromwell series
owed their publicity to Mrs. Thomas alone. He declares that he had not
authorised any of the surreptitious impressions, but forbore to allege that
the primitive impression was surreptitious, and shunned all allusion to its
birth and parentage. He laments the need which exists for his own volume,
and when he proceeds "to state the case fairly in the present situation," none

of his reasons appertain to the work of P. T. He indulges in general
declamation upon the enormity of procuring letters by disreputable
contrivances, but carefully avoids affirming that any of those which first
saw the light in 1735 were obtained in the manner he deprecates. He assures
us, indeed, that his epistolary effusions are "emanations of the heart, and not
efforts of genius," and adds, "this alone may induce any candid reader to
believe their publication an act of necessity rather than vanity," which
honestly interpreted implies that he was not the person who originally sent
them to the press. The candid writer, however, omitted to inform the candid
reader of the pains he had taken to render them worthy of his head as well
as of his heart, and the falsification of the premises destroys the credibility
of the inference. The silence of Pope upon the P. T. collection is, under the
circumstances, equivalent to a confession of guilt. He gives an account of
the surreptitious publication of his letters to Cromwell. He states the reason
of the publication of his letters to Wycherley. He reverts once and again to
what he justly called the sham volumes of Curll. He records the minutest
wrong he can detect in the execution of any of the hostile schemes. But
though the conduct of P. T. was the most flagrant of all; though the poet was
believed to be the contriver of the plot, and his enemies taunted him with
the fraud; though he professed to have learnt the details of the mystery, and
half a dozen sentences, if he was innocent, would have set him right with
both friends and foes; though the collection of 1735 was in its nature and
extent far more important than the rest, and though it was the basis and
primary cause of the edition he was ushering into the world, he yet relates
no particulars, he offers no opinion, he ventures upon no denial. He
endeavours instead to mask his evasion of the subject, and tries to confound
the main point with subsidiary topics. There are wilful misrepresentations in
his preface, and he was not restrained in his language by his homage to
truth; but he had been baffled by the disclosures of Curll, and he was afraid
to risk specific assertions which had been already exposed.
His correspondence with Atterbury, and several other letters, were printed
for the first time in the avowed edition of Pope. He omitted as well as
added, and left out some of the letters to and from Wycherley, some of the
letters to and from Cromwell, some of the letters to ladies, and a few
scattered letters from the remaining groups. In the letters he republished he
here and there erased a sentence which had appeared in the volume of 1735,

or inserted a sentence which was new. The minuter verbal alterations are
numerous, but many of them are only corrections of errors of the press. In
all essential particulars the collection of P. T., a little more sifted, is
reproduced in the quarto of 1737. Pope had profited in the interval by the
criticisms of the public. He set aside the portions of his correspondence
which were condemned, he endeavoured to rectify the inconsistencies into
which he had been betrayed in its reconstruction, and he sometimes altered
a word or a phrase in the final revision to which he subjected the work. The
changes leave it apparent that the Pope text and the P. T. text are identical in
their origin, and neither of them are the text of the actual letters of the poet.
His selection affords an imperfect test of the parts which he disowned as
being counterfeited. He said in his advertisement of July 15, 1735, that he
would reprint whatever was genuine in the surreptitious editions; but he
relinquished this design, and wrote to Allen that "he was determined to
leave out every syllable that could give the least ill example to an age apt to
take it, or the least offence to any good or serious man."[110] He accordingly
stated in his preface that he had not only omitted the letters which "were not
his," but those which "were not approved of by him." Without committing
himself to an assertion which might be refuted, he probably wished to
obtain the benefit of the first alternative for letters which he had rejected
under the last. Nevertheless in his eagerness to particularise any real
forgery, he in effect accredited the entire collection of P. T. He had far
greater interest in showing that it was not authentic than in damaging the
trumpery volumes of Curll, and his forbearance to select a single instance of
imposition from its pages is a plain proof that none existed for which he
himself was not responsible. The charge of interpolation, which he had
twice put forth in his advertisements,[111] and subsequently repeated to
Allen,[112] was still more openly abandoned; for he tells us in his preface
that the passages he omitted were "improper, or at least impertinent to be
divulged to the public," and he no longer pretended that they were any of
them spurious. He did not, in short, disown in his genuine edition one
sentence of the volume of 1735, but practically receded from his previous
allegations, which were mis-statements intended to persuade Caryll that he
was not answerable for the garbling of the letters, and the world that he was
not a party to their publication.

His acts continued to confirm his guilt. A little while after the quarto was
published there appeared the 5th and 6th volume of the octavo edition of
Pope's works, which the title-page says "consists of Letters, wherein to
those of the author's own edition are added all that are genuine from the
former impressions, with some never before printed."[113] This edition bears
internal evidence of having been printed concurrently with the quarto itself.
A sheet signed *Dd, the pages of which are numbered from 215 to 222, is
interpolated in the quarto between the two last leaves of Dd, and the
numbers are of necessity repeated on the succeeding eight pages. The
interpolated letters of the quarto are equally an interpolation in the octavo,
where they follow p. 116 of Vol. VI., on a duplicate half-sheet signed *I,
and the paging is repeated on the half-sheet which follows. Consequently
the octavo must have been struck off before the letters were interpolated in
the quarto, or they would not have been printed in the octavo on an
interpolated half-sheet. A second insertion tells the same tale. A few letters
are added at the end of the quarto with the announcement that they had been
published "since the foregoing sheets were printed off." These letters appear
in like manner at the end of the octavo after finis. At the very moment,
therefore, that Pope was compelling his reluctant friends to subscribe to his
expurgated quarto, he was clandestinely printing an octavo edition in which
he put back the whole of the omitted letters he allowed to be genuine, and
his imperfect quarto was simply a fraud upon the purchasers for the purpose
of accrediting his feigned reprobation of the P. T. volume.
One Watson, who assumed for the occasion the name of T. Johnson, printed
a piratical edition of the new octavos. Dodsley filed a bill against him in
Chancery on November 25 for the invasion of the copyright of Pope's
edition in folio. On October 31, Dodsley had entered at Stationers' Hall,
"The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., Vol. V. and Vol. VI. The second
edition corrected. 8vo." He had omitted to enter the previous edition of the
octavos, and in a letter which Watson wrote on November 30 he objected
that the folio was not the book he had pirated, and that the octavo volumes
were only entered at Stationers' Hall on October 31, which he says "was at
least a full month after the publication of the edition complained of, and
Pope's own first edition entirely sold before the octavo was entered." His
meaning was that since the first edition of the octavo had not been entered,
the entry of the second edition, which was subsequent to the piracy, came

too late to secure the copyright. The greater part, however, of Watson's
volumes were identical with the text of the folio which had been entered on
May 18, and Watson did not persevere in his defence. He consented to
deliver up the 1646 copies in his possession on the receipt of 25l., and to
give Pope a bond in which he undertook to pay a penalty of 100l. if he ever
again invaded his rights by printing any of his works.[114]
Pope's prohibition of Watson's work, coupled with his own publication of
the octavos, is fresh evidence of the insincerity of his professed
dissatisfaction with the P. T. selection. His apology for replacing in the
octavos the letters he had rejected was that they were in process of being
reinstated in a piratical edition of the quarto.[115] Pope had the power, which
he used, to stop piratical publications, and at the same time he absurdly
made the piracy the plea for publishing himself the condemned letters he
had cast aside. His mode of relieving his disgust at their appearance, and of
giving effect to his eager desire for their suppression was to lay hold of a
hollow excuse for reprinting them.
While Pope proceeded against Watson he submitted to the piracies of Curll.
His conduct once more betrayed that he was the author of the P. T. plot.
Curll had all along persisted in printing the P. T. letters. He immediately
seized the new letters in the quarto, and inserted them in his fifth volume of
"Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence." He was not content with usurping
Pope's property. He insulted, defied, and accused him. Pope had the
strongest motive in self-vindication to grapple with the charges of Curll,
and he shrunk from the contest. He resented the infringement of his
copyright by an indifferent person, and he could not willingly have endured
to be despoiled by his mocking antagonist, and sit down quietly under the
contumely and wrong. The bill filed against Watson discovers the cause of
his forbearance. There we find that Pope in applying for an injunction was
obliged to state that his quarto edition was the first publication of his letters
"with his consent, direction, or approbation,"[116] and if he had filed a
similar bill against Curll, the bookseller would have proved that he had
purchased the P. T. edition, and that Pope had printed and sold it. Curll
announced in September, 1735, that he had filed a bill against Smythe to
compel the fulfilment of his contract, and he made Gilliver a party to the
suit in consequence of his confession that Pope had purchased of him the

old sheets of the Wycherley, and directed the rest of the P. T. collection to be
printed to match them.[117] Smythe was a shadow who could not be reached.
The facts remained, and Pope could not attempt to convict Curll of piracy
without being himself convicted of having sold him the work. He had been
worsted on this very point when he fought with his best weapon, the pen,
and he did not dare to renew the conflict in a court of law where allegations
could neither be passed over in silence, nor be met by evasions and
quibbles. Any doubt that the motive for his toleration was fear was done
away by his filing a bill against Curll the instant he pirated the Swift
Correspondence which was entirely distinct from the P. T. transaction.
Pope had shown earlier that he was afraid to join issue with Curll before a
legal tribunal. Curll inserted an advertisement in "Fog's Journal" of July 26,
1735, in which he accused Pope of having printed the P. T. collection, and
of telling falsehoods in self-defence. The proprietor of "Fog's Journal" was
induced by a threat of prosecution to apologise for the insertion of the
advertisement, and Curll immediately reprinted it in the second volume of
Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence, accompanied by a scornful account of
Pope's interference. Pope did not venture to accept the taunting challenge.
His vapouring ceased when he was dared to fight. He menaced the
publisher of a newspaper, who would not brave a trial in a cause which was
not his own, and tamely retreated before the real offender in person.
The octavo edition of 1737 enables us to put the veracity of Pope in
repudiating the P. T. collection to yet another proof. In May and July, 1735,
he published advertisements protesting that several letters ascribed to him
in the P. T. volume were not his.[118] He prefixed to the octavo of 1737 a
catalogue of surreptitious editions, in which he repeated that the P. T.
publication "contained several letters not genuine."[119] He had hitherto
been loud in exclaiming against the P. T. forgeries without being imprudent
enough to name them. His caution relaxed as time wore on, and he had the
courage to state on the title-page of the first octavo edition of 1737 that he
had "added to the letters of the author's own edition all that are genuine
from the former impressions." The spurious letters in the P. T. collection
were thus declared to be the letters which were excluded from the octavo
edition of 1737. They were seven in number. Three were letters, or extracts
of letters, from Wycherley, two belonged to the section headed "Letters to

Several Ladies," and two were letters to Gay. Unless they were really
forgeries, Pope told and retold emphatic lies to discredit the P. T. collection,
and establish his innocence, and the deceit would leave no doubt of his
criminality.
Four letters out of the seven we know to have been genuine. The three
letters of Wycherley were on the sheets transferred from the edition of his
posthumous works which was published by Pope, and copies of two of
them are among the Oxford papers. One of the suppressed letters to ladies
exists in duplicate, and was sent by Pope to Miss Blount, and to Miss
Marriot, the friend and neighbour of his coadjutor Broome. The letters are
both originals in the handwriting of Pope. There are no means of verifying
the remaining three letters, nor is it necessary to test them, when more than
half the pretended forgeries are found to be authentic. Once again we have
absolute evidence that his accusation of forgery was an acted clamour to
screen himself. He finally adopted all the letters but seven, and his assertion
that these seven were fabrications was a falsehood.
Besides the necessity Pope was under of rejecting some of the P. T. letters to
bear out his mendacious charge of forgery, he had particular reasons for
disclaiming three at least of the four letters which proceeded from his own
pen. The letter he addressed to Miss Blount and Miss Marriot was a
disquisition on a human monstrosity exhibiting in London. He had said in
his Essay on Criticism that "vile obscenity should find no pardon." He was
among the offenders he pronounced unpardonable, and often revelled in
dull and studied indecorums which he mistook for wit. The laboured letter
he esteemed so highly that he sent it to two of his female correspondents
was more than ordinarily gross and stupid. The fancied humour appeared to
the public revolting coarseness, and he cast out the letter because it excited
disgust and contempt.
The next letter Pope rejected consisted of a satirical and false description of
Blenheim. He represented a fraction of the house to be the whole, and
founded upon his mis-statement the reflection, "I think the architect built it
entirely in complaisance to the taste of its owners; for it is the most
inhospitable thing imaginable, and the most selfish." A second sarcasm on
the Duchess in the P. T. volume was obliterated in the octavo of 1737.
"Cleland," Pope writes to Gay, "is at Tunbridge. He plays now with the old

Duchess of M——, nay, dines with her after she has won all his money." In
the octavo of 1737 he erased the name, and left the passage to be applied to
any old duchess who was then alive. He had obviously some inducement to
renounce his abuse of the Duchess of Marlborough, and the probable cause
was that a friendly intercourse had grown up in the interval. He speaks of
her to Swift in 1739 as paying "great court to him."[120]
His desire to disavow an ebullition of enmity which had been succeeded by
renewed cordiality, was his apparent motive for cancelling a letter
addressed to Gay. Fielding relates that no person during "the reign of King
Alexander" would read a work which had not his license, and "this license
he granted to only four authors—Swift, Young, Arbuthnot, and Gay—his
principal courtiers and favourites."[121] It chanced that one of the courtiers
was in disgrace when the P. T. volume appeared, and Pope introduced a
sneer at his egotism and pomposity. "In a word," he says to Gay, "Y——g
himself has not acquired more tragic majesty in his aspect by reading his
own verses than I by Homer's." The offence of Young was a species of
remonstrance he sent to the monarch under the guise of advice. Pope
completed his Essay on Man in 1734, and Young urged him in "a pressing
letter to write something on the side of revelation in order to take off the
impression of those doctrines which the Essay seemed to convey." Harte, a
minor courtier of king Alexander, told Warton that the sensitive monarch
"took the letter amiss."[122] He was annoyed at the censure implied in the
exhortation, and retaliated by ridiculing the self-importance of his monitor.
When Pope was taxed with personalities he could not defend, he never
scrupled, where it was possible, to deny that he alluded to the person who
remonstrated. When evasion was impracticable, and the work had not been
avowed, the easiest course was to repudiate the authorship.
These were the circumstances which chiefly governed Pope's selection of
the P. T. forgeries. Had there been a single fabricated letter he would have
hastened to name it, just as he specified in his preface to the quarto some
fictitious letters which were not in the P. T. publication. The P. T. letters
being authentic, he was afraid to disclaim in print particular letters which
surviving persons might know to be his, and he could not venture to
advance beyond the indirect statement that the octavo of 1737 "contained
all the letters that were genuine from former impressions." Trusting that no

one who could convict him would be at the trouble to collate the editions,
he thought himself safe from exposure, and he could privately appeal, with
little risk of detection, to the disclaimer on his title-page when he had
merely to disown a letter in his individual intercourse with the Duchess of
Marlborough or Young. He did not care to increase the hazard of discovery
by repeating his title-page. He dropped it in the second edition of the
octavo, and the assertion that he had printed "all the letters that are genuine
from the former impressions" dwindled down to the assurance that "there is
not one but is genuine."[123]
The controversies on Pope's character have naturally drawn forth
uncompromising language both from defenders and accusers. Those who
believed him incapable of the acts imputed to him could but conclude that
he was bitterly calumniated. Those who believed that the charges were true
could but brand him with reprobation. The offences were not of a nature to
be softened by apologies. De Quincey was in a lenient mood when he wrote
his sketch of Pope's Life, and his more favourable impressions necessarily
carried with them the conviction that the "disgraceful imputation" against
Pope of having made Curll his tool and victim was "most assuredly
unfounded."[124] Speaking, on another occasion, of Pope's attack on Hill
and the Duke of Chandos, he says, "Evil is the day for a conscientious man
when his sole resource for self-defence lies in a falsehood."[125] De Quincey
was ignorant of the history of the letters, and he would have altered his
opinion if he had known that Pope in self-defence had been prodigal of the
falsehoods which are the last refuge of guilt.
There still remains the small episode of the six letters unconnected with the
P. T. volume, which were declared by Pope to be spurious in his preface to
the quarto. Four of them purported to be from Pope to Miss Blount, and two
to be letters of Atterbury to Pope. Those to Miss Blount were forwarded to
Curll by a correspondent who signed himself S. E. The bookseller published
them in the third volume of "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence," and
announced that he had discovered them to be translations from Voiture. S.
E. only professed to send copies, which are now in the Bodleian Library at
Oxford. Mr. Carruthers states correctly that the size and quality of the paper
is precisely the same as in the genuine letters of the poet, and that the
handwriting appears to be his "a little disguised." The letters bear on their

face the marks of their origin, and Pope acted according to usage in
endeavouring to delude Curll that he might afterwards build a charge upon
his own deceptions. There is, however, a second claimant for the honour of
having devised the cheat. In an edition of Pope's works, which belonged to
Douce the antiquary, some one has copied an extract from a letter of Mr. J.
Plumptre, dated May 1, 1744, in which he informs his wife that their son
Charles, who was afterwards Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, London, and
Archdeacon of Ely, was the author of the trick.[126] The incident was nine
years old when Mr. Plumptre proudly acquainted Mrs. Plumptre with the
secret. He mentioned that the letters were sent to Curll by the penny post,
and the original cover in the Bodleian Library shows that they were not sent
by post at all. He said that his son translated them, and Pope had proclaimed
that they were borrowed from a published translation. The account is false,
and the pretended extract from the letter may be itself apocryphal, for its
authenticity is guaranteed by no external testimony. The similarity of paper
and handwriting, coupled with the pressing necessity Pope was under to
supply himself with examples of fabrication, strongly indicate that the
person who profited by the imposition contrived it.
Pope affirmed in his preface that the two letters ascribed to Atterbury had
never been seen by the bishop or himself, and to show the absurdity of the
fraud he adds that "they were advertised even after that period when it was
made felony to correspond with him." At length, in 1739, one of the letters
was adopted in a reprint of Cooper's octavos, and undoubtedly by the order
of the poet himself, since it was included in the collection he delivered to
Warburton. "We have ventured," says a note in the Cooper edition, "to insert
this letter, which was plainly intended for Mr. Pope, though we are
informed that on second thoughts it was not judged proper to send it him. A
copy was preserved and published soon after in the English additions to
Bayle's Dictionary, under the article of Atterbury." Pope's assertion, in the
preface to the quarto, that the letter was fabricated, was either a reckless
charge or a falsehood, and there are strong grounds for believing that he
was all along aware that the letter was genuine. In the catalogue of
surreptitious editions we are told of Curll's second volume that it has no
letters to Mr. Pope, "but one said to be Bishop Atterbury's, and another in
that bishop's name, certainly not his." The distinction drawn between the
two amounts to an admission that the former might be authentic; and this is

confirmed in the conclusion of the catalogue, where a reprint of the P.T.
collection is described as containing the "forged letter," not letters, "from
the Bishop of Rochester," though this very reprint contained them both.
They were introduced into all the reprints themselves in a manner which
showed that they were not considered of equal authority. In Curll's work,
they are represented to be alike by Atterbury, and to be addressed alike to
Pope. In the reprints of the P. T. collection, the letter which Pope ultimately
accepted is alone given as written by Atterbury, or addressed to the poet. Its
fellow has asterisks to represent the person to whom it was sent, and neither
asterisks nor name to represent the sender. Pope's ally, Cooper, is supposed
to have been concerned in the volume to which the Atterbury epistles were
first transferred from the publication of Curll, and it is obvious that no
bookseller would have originated the alteration, and that no other person
would have prompted it who had not a peculiar interest in the
correspondence of the poet, and who was not aware that these stray
productions would be at once appended to a current P. T. impression. The
distinction between the letters was made in the reprints of the P. T.
collection before Pope published the preface to the quarto, in which he
affirmed that both were counterfeited. He made the distinction in the
catalogue almost immediately after the quarto appeared. He did not the less
preserve the passage in his preface unchanged in every edition of his
correspondence, and never uttered a single word of recantation. He allowed
the charge of forgery to be circulated till it had served his purpose; and
then, without an allusion to his former language, imported the letter into his
works with the complacent announcement "that it was plainly intended for
Mr. Pope."
The reason assigned by Pope why a letter must be forged which he
afterwards admitted to be genuine, was one of his usual deceptions. By the
Bill of pains and penalties against Atterbury it was declared to be felony to
correspond with him in his exile after June 25, 1723. Pope disregarded the
enactment with little risk of discovery, and perhaps without much danger of
punishment if his harmless intercourse was detected. He condoled with the
bishop on the death of his daughter, Mrs. Morice; and the bishop thus
commenced his reply, which is dated Montpelier, November 20, 1729: "Yes,
dear sir, I have had all you designed for me, and have read all, as I read
whatever you write, with esteem and pleasure. But your last letter, full of

friendship and goodness, gave me such impressions of concern and
tenderness, as neither I can express, nor you, perhaps, with all the force of
your imagination, fully conceive." This again must have drawn forth a
response from the poet, for Atterbury says in an answer without date, "I
venture to thank you for your kind and friendly letter, because I think
myself very sure of a safe conveyance, and I am uneasy till I have told you
what impressions it made upon me. I will do it with the same simplicity
with which I wrote to you from Montpelier upon a very melancholy
occasion." These extracts testify that the letter which Curll published of
November 23, 1731, was not a solitary instance, and that other letters had
passed between the poet and Atterbury "even after that period when it was
made felony to correspond with him." The proof which Pope urged with
triumphant scorn to demonstrate that the letter of November 23 must be
counterfeited was therefore an absolute fraud. His disingenuousness did not
end here. He printed Atterbury's letter of November 20, 1729, at the same
time that he reproduced the letter published by Curll, and said in a note,
—"This also seems genuine, though whether written to Mr. P. or some
learned friend in France, is uncertain; but we doubt not it will be acceptable
to the reader." To support the alleged uncertainty he omitted the passages
which showed that it was addressed to a sickly poet in England. The
complete letter was inserted by Mr. Nichols in the "Epistolary
Correspondence of Atterbury," and his version is confirmed by a copy
among the Oxford papers at Longleat. The bishop died in February, 1732;
and if in 1739 Pope thought it unsafe to admit that he had held
communication with him in his banishment upon literary and domestic
topics, he might have left the letter to be published by Warburton, and not
have violated truth for the sake of hurrying it before the world.
Such was the series of stratagems which ushered in and accompanied the
collection of 1735, from its first appearance in the volume of P. T. to its
final shape in the volumes of Cooper. Pope's skill in deception was not
equal to his passion for it. Audacity was the chief characteristic of his
contrivances, and equivocation and lying his weapons of defence. When a
trick or a subterfuge was detected, and could no longer be denied, he yet
remained unabashed, and dropping all allusion to the points which had been
proved against him, he continued to rely upon the falsehoods or fallacies
which had been less completely exposed. His pertinacity in reiterating that

he was sinned against when he was sinning, derived support from his
literary fame, which gave currency to his representations, and in some
degree gained credit to them. But his duplicity and his artifices were known
to many, and it would be difficult to say whether his effrontery or his
hypocrisy was most conspicuous when he affixed to the preface to the
quarto of 1737 the punning motto, Vellem nescire literas, bewailed in the
preface itself the necessity for the publication, hoped that no honest man
might be reduced to a similar dilemma, talked with injured indignation of
thefts, forgeries, and piracies, and exhorted the legislature to provide a
remedy against the evil. His tone was not moderated by the suspicions he
had roused, and the humiliations he had undergone. They had just as little
effect in abating his love of treachery, or blunting his appetite for epistolary
fame, and he was no sooner clear of one plot than he engaged in another of
the same description, and for the same ends.
His correspondence with Swift appeared in 1741. The English edition was a
sequel to the quarto of 1737, and formed part of what was called on the
title-page, "The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, in Prose, Vol. II." In a
prefatory notice to the reader, the letters are stated to have been "copied
from an impression sent from Dublin, and said to have been printed by the
Dean's direction," an impression, it is added, "which was begun without our
author's knowledge, and continued without his consent." Pope held the
same language in private to Allen and Warburton, and professed to be
extremely annoyed at the step. His account has been almost uniformly
accepted as true till the critic in the Athenæum showed that the publication
of the correspondence with Swift was no exception to the previous
proceedings of the poet, and that, as in the case of the Wycherley letters of
1729, and the miscellaneous collection of 1735, he himself had sent the
manuscripts to the press, and charged the act upon others.
On November 28, 1729, Pope protested to Swift that it was many years
since he endeavoured to play the wit in his familiar correspondence. He
assured the Dean that as he had a greater love and esteem for him than for
others, so he wrote to him with even more than ordinary negligence. "I
smile to think," he continues, "how Curll would be bit were our epistles to
fall into his hands, and how gloriously they would fall short of every
ingenious reader's expectations." Warburton tells us that Pope valued
himself upon this abstinence from all effort to be brilliant;[127] but his

pretence of sinking the author in the friend gained no credit from Swift,
who took care to show his incredulity. "I find," he replied on February 26,
1730, "you have been a writer of letters almost from your infancy; and, by
your own confession, had schemes even then of epistolary fame. Montaigne
says that if he could have excelled in any kind of writing it would have been
in letters; but I doubt they would not have been natural, for it is plain that
all Pliny's letters were written with a view of publishing, and I accuse
Voiture of the same crime, although he be an author I am fond of. They
cease to be letters when they become a jeu d'esprit." Pope seems to have
suspected that this half-direct, half-oblique criticism was suggested by his
recent collection and arrangement of his correspondence, and he denied, in
his answer of April 9, that he was open to the censure. "I am pleased," he
observed, "to see your partiality, and it is for that reason I have kept some of
your letters, and some of those of my other friends. These if I put together
in a volume for my own secret satisfaction in reviewing a life passed in
innocent amusements and studies, not without the good will of worthy and
ingenious men, do not therefore say I aim at epistolary fame. I never had
any fame less in my head; but the fame I most covet, indeed, is that which
must be derived to me from my friendships." The poet as usual adapted his
assertions to the exigencies of the moment; for it was not for "his own
secret satisfaction in reviewing a life passed in innocent amusements and
studies," that he had deposited a duplicate of the volume with Lord Oxford,
or kept it in readiness "against the revival of slanders, and the publication of
surreptitious letters." This suppression of facts and motives could have had
no effect in deluding Swift. Once on September 3, 1735, when his faculties
were waning, and his powers rose and fell with his malady, he echoed back
Pope's former language. "Neither," he said, "did our letters contain any
turns of wit, or fancy, or politics, or satire, but mere innocent friendship. I
believe we neither of us ever leaned our head upon our hand to study what
we should write next." But by the 21st of October he had already returned
to his old conviction, and after mentioning the publication of the poet's
correspondence by Curll, he added, "I believe my letters have escaped being
published because I writ nothing but nature and friendship, and particular
incidents which could make no figure in writing,"—a plain intimation that
the opposite qualities had, in his opinion, caused the letters of Pope to be
communicated to the world.

The poet made the volume of 1735 the plea for pressing Swift to return him
his letters. He had ceased to smile at the thought how Curll would be bit by
getting hold of them, and earnestly demanded that the Dean should "secure
him against that rascal printer."[128] If it is admitted that Pope was the
publisher of the P. T. collection, his accusations against the rascal printer
were groundless, and his fears were feigned. He was endeavouring, under
cover of a false pretence, to obtain possession of his letters to Swift, and it
was easy to foresee that when he had succeeded in his object the secret
store would soon be laid open to the public. He had previously forced his
other friends to surrender his correspondence by the clamorous
apprehensions he expressed of Curll. The letters which were safe in their
guardianship had not been long committed to his keeping when they came
forth from the shop of this very individual, and Pope was now urging the
fact as a reason why fresh letters should be transferred from a custody
which had been effectual to a custody which had proved to be insecure.
Swift, perhaps, by this time, had begun to penetrate the designs of his
friend, and he declined to comply with his request. "You need not fear any
consequence," he wrote September 3, 1735, "in the commerce that hath so
long passed between us, although I never destroyed one of your letters. But
my executors are men of honour and virtue, who have strict orders in my
will to burn every letter left behind me. Yet I am loth that any letters from
you and a very few friends should die before me." No answer could have
been less pleasing to Pope than to be told that his letters were doomed to
destruction. His eagerness to rescue them must have been increased by the
announcement, and he offered, if Swift would let him have them at once, to
send him copies. The poet's excuse for a proposal which defeated his
professed purpose, was "merely that the originals might not fall into the
hands of Curll, and thereby a hundred particulars be at his mercy."[129] The
particulars would have been as much at Curll's mercy in the copies as in the
originals they replaced, unless Pope intended to disavow the transcripts he
had himself furnished, which shows how much value is to be attached to his
assertion that parts of the collection of 1735 were forged. His remonstrances
induced Swift to promise that the letters should not be committed to the
flames; but he persevered in refusing to surrender them while he lived. "As
to what you say of your letters," he wrote April 22, 1736, "my resolution is
to direct my executors to send you all your letters well sealed and
pacquetted, and leave them entirely to your disposal. These things are all

tied up, endorsed and locked in a cabinet, and I have not one servant who
can properly be said to write or read. No mortal shall copy them, but you
shall surely have them when I am no more." Since Swift persisted in
believing that he could protect private papers from Curll quite as efficiently
as the poet, who had signally failed in the attempt, Pope reversed his
petition, and disclosing his real intention, begged that he might have them
to print. "I told him," he says, in his account to Lord Orrery, "as soon as I
found myself obliged to publish an edition of my letters to my great sorrow,
that I wished to make use of some of these, nor did I think any part of my
correspondence would do me a greater honour, and be really a greater
pleasure to me, than what might preserve the memory how well we loved
one another. I find the Dean was not quite of the same opinion, or he would
not, I think, have denied this." When Pope affected in 1729 to depreciate his
correspondence with Swift, that he might mask his design in gathering
together his other letters, he had even smiled to reflect "how gloriously our
epistles would fall short of every ingenious reader's expectations." He now
maintained that "our epistles" would confer upon him a vast deal of honour,
which he could not suppose would be obtained by balking expectation. But
though none of these inconsistencies are immaterial, the most important
circumstance, and one which bears upon the whole of the subsequent
evidence, is that Pope was pining for the publication of the letters, and
Swift would not consent to it.
An event happened opportunely to assist the solicitations of the poet.
Towards the close of 1736 Curll printed a couple of letters to Swift, of
which the first was written by Pope, and the second by Bolingbroke. The
bookseller announced that they were transmitted to him from Ireland,
together with several other valuable originals, and Pope on the 30th of
December employed this practical proof to convince the Dean that the
correspondence was not safe in his custody. The two letters, as they were
called, were in fact a joint epistle; for not only does the portion of
Bolingbroke purport to be a continuation of the portion of the poet, but
Swift, who had been absent, says in the reply, which on his return home he
addressed to Pope, "I found a letter from you with an appendix longer than
yours from Bolingbroke." The letter and its appendix were printed by Curll
at the period when Pope had exhausted his arguments to induce Swift to
resign the correspondence, and the occurrence was so well timed for the

purposes of the poet, and the device so much in accordance with his
practices, that it is impossible not to suspect that he contrived the injury as a
means of extorting the redress. The original of his share of the epistle still
exists,[130] and shows that the published version has been edited in his usual
fashion. The variations, in the aggregate, could not have arisen from
carelessness, and they are not of a kind which an independent person could
have had any motive to introduce from design. The appendix of
Bolingbroke had been in the power of Pope, who might have transcribed it,
together with his own contribution, before it was sent; but he declared that
he never possessed a copy of either,[131] and small as is the credit due to his
protestations, he may have spoken the truth in this particular, and been
guilty not the less. The Dean was accustomed to lend his acquaintances a
volume in which he had stitched specimens of the letters of his eminent
friends.[132] The joint letter of August, 1723, was preserved,[133] when the
letters of Pope to Swift for a considerable period before and after were lost
or destroyed, and it is likely that it escaped the common fate by its insertion
in the volume of selections. There it was easily accessible, and as Worsdale,
the reputed mock-clergyman, who had personated Smythe, was sometimes
resident in Dublin, his old employer had a trusty, or at any rate a trusted
agent, ready to his hand. Curll did not print any more of his boasted
originals, and he probably only spoke on the faith of promises which had
been made him with a view to compel compliance from the Dean, by
persuading him that traitors had admission to his cabinet.
The announcement of the publication by Curll of the joint letter of August
23 had not the desired effect upon Swift. In his reply he took no notice of
the circumstance, and Pope, finding that nothing he could urge would shake
his resolution, addressed, in the beginning of March, 1737, a statement of
the case to Lord Orrery, who was then in Ireland, and engaged him to
second his entreaties. Lord Orrery obtained a promise from Swift that the
correspondence should be returned, and offered to be the bearer of it. The
Dean accordingly acquaints Pope, July 23, 1737, that "when his lordship
goes over, which will be, as he hopes, in about ten days, he will take with
him all the letters I preserved of yours." "I cannot," said Swift, in making
the communication, "trust my memory half an hour," and this passage was a
proof that he did not exaggerate his infirmity. Lord Orrery had set sail in the
middle of June, and under the same date that Swift wrote from Ireland that

his lordship would go over in about ten days, his lordship wrote to Swift
from England, "Your commands are obeyed long ago. Dr. King has his
cargo, Mrs. Barber her Conversation, and Mr. Pope his letters." Mrs.
Barber's Conversation was the manuscript of the "Polite Conversation" of
Swift, which she had asked permission to print for her own advantage, and
the cargo for Dr. King was the manuscript of the "History of the Four Last
Years of Queen Anne," which the Dean was anxious to print for his own
credit. But much as it was in his thoughts at this time, he only remembered
his settled intention to send the papers—whether history, conversation, or
letters—by Lord Orrery, and the act by which the intention was fulfilled had
already faded from his mind. The understanding of Swift was rapidly
yielding to his mournful malady, and the first faculty to suffer was his
memory.
The letters of Pope were therefore in his own keeping, and out of the power
of Swift, before July 23, 1737. The Dean, however, informed him that "by
reading the dates he found a chasm of six years," and that he had searched
for the missing correspondence in vain. Pope did not abandon the hope of
recovering it, and Swift, apparently in reply to his applications, wrote on
August 8, 1738, to acquaint him that every letter received from him for
twenty years and upwards had been sealed up in bundles, and consigned to
the custody of Mrs. Whiteway, whom he describes as "a very worthy,
rational, and judicious cousin of mine." Mrs. Whiteway, who had none of
the papers, had a short time before kept Swift from sending a similar
fictitious account, but the idea had taken deep root in his mind, and rightly
conjecturing that he would reiterate it, she engaged Lord Orrery to inform
Pope that she had neither got any of the correspondence herself, nor had the
slightest knowledge where it was.[134] On the present, as on the former
occasion, Swift showed her what he had written, and on the 24th of August
he subjoined a postscript in which, after saying that he would correct, if it
were possible, the blunders committed in his letter, he simply added that his
cousin had assured him that "a great collection of your/my letters to me/you
are put up and scaled, and in some very safe hand." The counter-assurance
of Mrs. Whiteway to Lord Orrery that she had no knowledge of the
collection, shows that the corrected version was as fanciful as the original
statement. Swift's language in 1738 would imply that the chasm in the
correspondence no longer existed, and that no part of the series had yet

been transmitted to England; but it was the language of a man labouring
under the misapprehension and obliviousness produced by disease, and
could have little weight in opposition to the testimony that Pope had
received back a packet of his letters in the previous year. Any doubt which
could have existed on the point is done away by the admission of Pope
himself. Mrs. Whiteway had refused in 1740 to send back some of his
letters by the mother of the Mr. Nugent, who afterwards became Lord Clare,
because the poet had authorised her to entrust them to a Mr. M'Aulay. "I
believe," Pope wrote to Mr. Nugent, "they had entertained a jealousy of
you, as the same persons did before of my Lord Orrery. They then
prevented the Dean from complying to any purpose with my request. They
then sent a few just to save appearances, and possibly to serve as a sort of
plea to excuse them of being taxed with this proceeding, which is now
thrown upon the Dean himself."[135] The "proceeding" was the committing
the correspondence to the press, and Pope, on his own part, to avoid being
taxed with it, was privately putting forth the plea that the bulk of his letters
had not been returned to him. The confession that he had received a few is a
complete answer to the delusion of Swift, and they must have been more
than a very few, or they would not have been sufficient "to save
appearances." Setting aside the representations of the poet, upon which no
dependence can be placed, except when he bears witness against himself,
there is nothing to oppose, and much to confirm the idea that they were the
identical "few" which were published in the quarto of 1741.
When Swift first collected the letters in May, 1737, he mentioned that they
were not much above sixty, and in July, when they had been sent away, and
he described his past act in the language of intention, he said they were not
above twenty-five. His account in July, when the correspondence was no
longer under his eye, and when his failing memory made him forget the
departure of Lord Orrery, is far less reliable than his account in May when
he was fresh from the task of sorting the letters. A smaller number than he
specified appeared in the quarto which, exclusive of the answers of the
Dean, contains only forty. This upon an average does not amount to two a
year, and the poet, when he had an end to serve, would not have scrupled to
call even sixty "few" in comparison with the many that had been written.
Swift imagined that the missing letters might have been lost on some of
those occasions when he had been compelled to entrust his papers to

friends, and Pope may honestly have believed that they were detained by
designing persons; but they were never published, while those which were
printed have a chasm of seven years, from June, 1716, to August, 1723, or
only one year more than the Dean detected in the series he got ready to
despatch to Twickenham. The new correspondence, like Pope's previous
volumes, was merely a selection, and there is but a single letter of the poet
to Swift in 1714, none whatever in 1715, and again but a single letter in
1716. The suppression of the letters in 1717, as in 1715, or even a slip of
memory or a slip of the pen with the Dean, both of which had become a
frequent occurrence, will account for the slight discrepancy between the
chasm in the printed volume, and the chasm which Swift announced. The
letter of August, 1723, is the joint letter of Pope and Bolingbroke, which
was sent corrected to Curll, and this is followed by a second gap from
August, 1723, to September 14, 1725. The extensive hiatus in the
correspondence of which Pope was forewarned by Swift, must in all reason
be supposed to be the chief deficiency of which Pope complained, though in
language coloured to suit his purpose; and when a similar blank exists in the
quarto, there is a strong presumption that the letters which he acknowledged
had been sent to save appearances, were the same letters of which the book
was composed. A kindred circumstance supports the conclusion. The last
letter of Pope in the quarto is dated March 23, 1737, which falls in with the
fact that the collection was gathered together in May and transmitted to him
in June; but if the volume of 1741 had proceeded from Swift, it would be a
curious coincidence, that not a single line written by the poet since the time
when his correspondence was returned to him should have found its way
into the work.
It is against the innocence of Pope that in his public statements he kept out
of sight the fact that he had received back a certain portion of the
correspondence, and designedly conveyed the impression that the whole of
it remained with Swift. In the advertisement to the quarto it is said that Pope
could not be prevailed upon to revise the volume printed in Dublin; but that
he had furnished the London booksellers with a few more of the letters of
the Dean a little to clear up the history of their publication. The reader is
informed that he will see this history in one view if he observes the
passages marked by inverted commas. The story they reveal is that Swift
ultimately promised to send the correspondence, that he collected it for the

purpose, and ended by sending none of it. The Dean's communication of
August 8 is produced as exhibiting the final result, and Pope marked with
inverted commas the declaration, "I can faithfully assure you that every
letter you have favoured me with, these twenty years and more, are sealed
up in bundles and delivered to Mrs. Whiteway." The sense in which the poet
wished the passage to be understood is defined in the table of contents.
"The entire collection of his and Mr. Pope's letters for twenty years and
upwards found, and in the hands of a lady, a worthy and judicious relation
of the Dean's.—This a mistake, not in hers, but in some other safe hands." A
note was added by Pope to the letter for the purpose of strengthening the
case against Swift; but not one syllable did he let drop to indicate that the
Dean was deceived in supposing that the series remained unbroken, and that
no part of it had been sent back. The testimony of another witness, which
had the appearance of corroborating the error, was produced by the poet.
The assertion in the postscript that Mrs. Whiteway vouched for "a great
collection being in some very safe hand," seems to have beguiled him into
the belief that the missing letters had turned up, and Lord Orrery having
lately come from Ireland he applied to him on the subject. Lord Orrery
answered, that Mrs. Whiteway knew nothing of the letters, that he was
satisfied they were neither lost nor burnt, and that his attempts to discover
where they were deposited had been fruitless. To us, who are aware that
Lord Orrery had been the bearer of an instalment of the correspondence, it
is plain that he is referring to that portion of it which could not be found
when he carried over the remainder. To those who had only before them the
version contained in the quarto, and who merely read of an intention to send
letters by him in July, 1737, which had not been forwarded in August, 1738,
his general expressions in answer to Pope would appear to apply to the
whole of the correspondence, and seem a confirmation of the delusion of
Swift. The poet made himself responsible for the misconceptions of the
Dean by marking them with inverted commas, by supporting them with
specious subsidiary evidence, and attesting that they embodied the history
of the publication; and since they leave an impression which he knew to be
false upon the precise particular which implicates himself, his disingenuous
sanction of the error must be considered to be the act of conscious guilt.
"I should think with you, madam," Lord Orrery wrote to Mrs. Whiteway,
"that some of Mr. Pope's servants had stolen the letters, did not many

appear from various people to the Dean, of which Mr. Pope cannot be
supposed either to have seen the copies or originals." With our present
information, the letters in the collection which are not from the pen of Pope
tell the other way, and contribute in a powerful degree to fix the publication
on him. The replies of Swift, together with much of Swift's correspondence
with Gay, are included in the volume, and it will be found upon
examination that all these materials were likely to have been furnished by
the poet, and that part of them could have been furnished by nobody else.
He has twice touched upon the subject in the annotations to the quarto. The
first note is attached to the heading, "Letters of Dr. Swift to Mr. Gray," and
states that they were "found among Mr. Gay's papers, and returned to Dr.
Swift by the Duke of Queensberry and Mr. Pope." The second note is
appended to that portion of the postscript of August 24, 1738, in which the
Dean mentions "a great collection of your/my letters to me/you." "It is
written," subjoins the poet, "just thus in the original. The book that is now
printed seems to be part of the collection here spoken of, as it contains not
only the letters of Mr. Pope, but of Dr. Swift, both to him and Mr. Gay,
which were returned him after Mr. Gay's death, though any mention made
by Mr. P. of the return or exchange of letters has been industriously
suppressed in the publication, and only appears by some of the answers."
The case of Gay is first to be considered. There is not an allusion in any of
the "answers," either to the exchange of the letters which passed between
Gay and Swift, or the return of the letters which Swift addressed to Gay. An
exchange, at all events, had not taken place. The letters of Gay were
retained by Swift, and after the death of the Dean they were printed from
the originals. Three only are contained in the quarto of 1741, and these are
joint productions of Gay and Pope,[136] which would naturally have been
made over to the latter when he reclaimed the whole of his correspondence
with Swift. If the Dean was the culprit we must believe that while
publishing, or permitting others to publish, his own letters to Gay, he
deliberately excluded every one of Gay's replies, with the exception of the
three in which Pope had a share. If Pope was the culprit the peculiarity is
explained. He published the three letters which, being in part his own
writing, had been sent back to him in 1737, and he published no others
because the rest of the letters of Gay were not in his possession.

As the Duke of Queensberry was living, the introduction of his name is a
species of guarantee that Swift had received back his letters to Gay; but the
conclusion does not follow, which Pope intended to be drawn, that the Dean
must therefore have supplied them to the printer. "One thing," says Swift to
Gay, Nov. 20, 1729, "you are to consider, because it is an old compact, that
when I write to you, or Mr. Pope, I write to both." On the death of Gay the
correspondence passed a second time through Pope's hands, and with his
habit at that period of getting the letters of his intimates, as well as his own
letters, transcribed for future use, it may readily be imagined that he would
not miss the opportunity of securing a valuable collection, in which he may
be said to have had a common property with his departed friend[137]. Hence
it happens that copies of all Swift's letters to Gay, together with one that
was not printed, are preserved among the Oxford manuscripts, and with this
evidence that the entire series was not less in the power of Pope than of
Swift, suspicion must incline to the one who had made elaborate
preparations for publication, and who had shown himself eager for it. The
suppression too of Gay's replies, contrary to the general rule observed in the
work, would here again favour the opinion that the letters of Swift were
sent to the press by the person to whom the replies were inaccessible, and
not by the person who had the correspondence on both sides at his
command.
The assertion that the letters were returned which Swift addressed to Pope,
is next to be examined. According to the poet his surrender of them appears
from some of the answers of Swift; but the single passage by which it is
implied, is that in which the Dean speaks of "a great collection of [your/my]
letters to [me/you]." The very letter in which the sentence occurs
commences with a lament by Swift that he has "entirely lost his memory,"
and the strange double form in which he describes the correspondence
seems chiefly to indicate a consciousness that his recollection of its nature
was uncertain and confused. On one half of the subject he had manifested
his misconceptions a few days before. He had forgotten the chasm in the
series of Pope's letters, had forgotten that any of them had been restored to
their author, had forgotten Mrs. Whiteway's denial that she possessed them,
and when she again corrected him, continued to fancy they were deposited
with some person he knew not whom, in some place he knew not where.
His notions respecting his letters to Pope were not likely to be better

founded than his notions respecting the letters of Pope to him. But more
than this, he only professed to make the statement upon the authority of his
cousin, and his cousin disavowed all knowledge of the collection. Far from
being aware that the Dean had received back his letters to Pope, she
expressed her conviction that the materials for the printed volume could not
have been drawn from Ireland, just because those letters formed part of it.
[138]
The literal interpretation of a single phrase of Swift, in a letter which
bears internal evidence of the grievous extent of his malady, being
negatived by the authority upon which it claims to be based, there still
exists the ambiguous assurance of Pope that he returned the correspondence
after the death of Gay, which happened in December, 1732. The replies,
however, of Swift in the quarto, instead of stopping at this date, extend to
August, 1738, and those of the last half-dozen years must have remained
with the poet. The Dean had said in 1717, that he kept no copies of letters.
Mrs. Whiteway testified that he had never taken a copy during the twelve
years she had been at his elbow, "excepting of a letter to a lord-lieutenant or
a bishop, whom he feared might make an ill use of it;" and as for the letters
to Pope she had seen him write them, and send them off immediately.
Letters of which Pope had the originals, and Swift no copies, must plainly
have owed their publicity to Pope.
There is another inconsistency which makes it very doubtful whether the
poet could have sent back the earlier letters of Swift any more than the later.
After informing the Dean, on December 30, 1736, that the joint letter of
August, 1723, had been recently printed by Curll, Pope went on to say,
"Your answer to that letter, he has not got; it has never been out of my
custody; for whatever is lent is lost, wit as well as money, to these needy
poetical readers." Here we have Pope avowing that he retained in 1736 an
answer of the Dean, which belonged to the year 1723. There is no
indication that it was an exception to the rest of the correspondence, and the
presumption therefore is that none of the letters which Pope received from
Swift had been restored upon the death of Gay in 1732. The poet's assertion
is rendered more suspicious by the absence of all allusion to the
circumstance in the arguments which he addressed through Lord Orrery to
Swift, in March, 1737, with a view to convince him that his refusal to return
Pope's own letters was unjust. No plea could have had greater force than the

statement that Pope had already sent back the letters of Swift, and was only
asking the Dean to deal by him as he had dealt by the Dean.

Although we were to suppose, against the evidence, that the poet had given
up the whole of the originals, he must still have retained copies. He
avowedly inserted six letters of the Dean in the quarto to clear up the
history of the publication, and four of the number belong to the years 1732
and 1733, which shows that Pope continued to have the command of the
correspondence at the period of its appearance in 1741. Indeed copies of
five of the published letters of Swift to Pope, with eight that are
unpublished, are in the Oxford papers, and since none of the six, which the
poet contributed to the quarto, are among them, more must have existed,
unless he had kept the originals. That he had never parted with them is the
just conclusion from the facts,[139] and his note is one of those instances in
which he had recourse to the licence he allowed himself of "equivocating
genteelly." The letters of Swift to Gay may be presumed to have been
returned to Swift, when the Duke of Queensberry examined Gay's papers
after his death. The expressions in the Dean's child-like postscript of August
24 gave a colour to the notion that he had also got back his letters to Pope.
The admission suggested to the poet to draw up a note which, read by the
ordinary rules of language, affirms that the letters to himself were returned,
as well as the letters to Gay, but in which the return of the letters, by a
forced construction, might be made to apply to Gay alone, who is the
immediate antecedent. This accounts for the death of Gay having been fixed
upon for the era of the alleged restoration to the Dean of his correspondence
with Pope, though there was no connection between the events, and though
the choice of so early a date left unexplained the appearance in the quarto of
the subsequent letters of Swift. That "any mention made by Mr. P. of the
return or exchange of letters should be industriously suppressed" by Mr. P.
"in the publication," was a necessary consequence, or it would have been
manifest that the only letters which had been returned were those of Gay.
By evasions like these the poet satisfied a conscience that held a lie to be
justifiable, provided it was couched in language which could be wrested by
the deceiver into a different sense from what it bore to the deceived.
The correspondence between Swift and Bolingbroke completed the series,
which Pope complained was printed without his consent. Of the eight letters
from Bolingbroke, seven were written in conjunction with the poet. These
joint compositions, like the partnership letters of Gay, are exactly those
which would have been returned to Pope. One of the number furnishes

evidence, which almost amounts to a demonstration, that the collection of
1741 proceeded from himself. When he brought out the avowed edition of
his letters in 1737, he inserted at the end of the volume a letter of Swift, a
letter of his own, and the joint letter from himself and Bolingbroke, of
which Curll had obtained a copy. This little supplement was ushered in by a
notice which says, "Since the foregoing sheets were printed off, the
following letters having been published without the consent of their writers,
we have added them, though not in the order of time." Whatever the motive
the announcement was deceptive. The letter of Swift was his reply to the
joint letter of Pope and Bolingbroke—that very reply which the poet
boasted a month or two before could not be produced surreptitiously,
because it had never been out of his custody. Nobody else, by his own
showing, had the power to make it public, no earlier impression of it is
known to exist, and, as will be seen by comparing it with the copy from the
Oxford papers, it was printed with omissions and variations, which must
have been the act of the poet, or he would have restored the genuine
readings when he included it in his appendix. In juxtaposition with it is a
letter from Pope to Swift, dated December 10, 1725, which in like manner
has never been found in any prior publication, and which of all his letters to
the Dean is the single one we are certain was in his power when the quarto
of 1737 was in the press. He transcribed the original at the time it was
written, and sent a copy to Lord Oxford, ostensibly to let him see the way in
which he was mentioned in it, but partly, perhaps, because the poet thought
well of the production.[140] This letter of December, 1725, reappears in tho
quarto of 1741, with the addition for the first time of a postscript by
Bolingbroke. A copy of the entire performance is among the Oxford papers,
and reveals the fact that the Pope portion, and the Bolingbroke portion, are
both abridged in the published version. Yet although the persons who
brought out the collection of 1741, had the manuscript before them, or they
could not have given Bolingbroke's share of the letter, they nevertheless, by
a marvellous coincidence, print Pope's share precisely as it had been printed
by Pope himself in 1737. The conclusion is irresistible that the editor of the
quarto of 1737, was the editor of the collection of 1741. The postscript of
Bolingbroke was not written when he was in the house with Pope, but was
added subsequently when he got back to Dawley,[141] and its omission from
the volume of 1737 was due to the circumstance, that the poet had not then

received back his correspondence from Swift, and only possessed a copy of
his own carefully composed essay.
The letter of Bolingbroke to Swift, in which the poet had no share, was
commenced at Aix-la-Chapelle on August 30, 1729, and completed at
Dawley on October 5. Pope appears not to have seen it before it was sent;
for four days later, on October 9, he says to Swift, "Lord Bolingbroke has
told me ten times over, he was going to write to you. Has he or not?" The
elaborate epistle of Bolingbroke was a reply to a letter which Swift had
addressed to Pope, and the consequent interest that Pope would have had in
the answer, may have induced the author, proud of his production, to
provide him with a copy; but however he came by it, a copy was deposited
by him in Lord Oxford's library, where, as in the quarto of 1741, it is the
single example of an epistle by Bolingbroke alone. Swift had by him a
quantity of Bolingbroke's correspondence, some of which would have been
full as appropriate as the specimen that is given, and it is a weighty fact in
the question whether the Dean or the poet furnished the materials to the
printer, that the one letter selected was the one letter that Pope possessed.
The three letters which are inserted from Swift to Bolingbroke incline the
scale to the same side. The first relates in part to Pope, the conclusion of the
second is addressed to him, and the third is the answer to the letter of
August 30, 1729. It was never pretended that the Dean received back his
letters to Bolingbroke, and it was not his habit to make copies; but with our
knowledge that the poet and Bolingbroke had much of their correspondence
with Swift in common, we may be sure that these three letters, at least, had
been in the hands of Pope, and if he did not retain the originals, it would in
1729, the year to which they all belong, have been in accordance with his
common practice to transcribe them.
Thus what was printed of the correspondence, and what was not printed,
concur to show that Pope must have been the source from which it was
derived. The history of the circumstances under which the publication took
place will confirm this inference. Pope asserted that the quarto was "copied
from an impression sent from Dublin." There is now proof in abundance
that the Dublin edition, which came out as the seventh volume of Swift's
works, was copied from an impression sent from England. Mr. Deane Swift,
a cousin of his famous namesake, and the son-in-law of Mrs. Whiteway,
informed Mr. Nichols, in 1778, that "he was the only person then living

who could give a full account how Faulkner's seventh volume, that is, how
Swift's and Pope's correspondence came to be, not first printed, but first
published in Ireland."[142] The italics are Mr. Swift's own, and the fact on
which he laid such especial emphasis is at once attested and explained by
the statement of Faulkner himself to Dr. Birch in August, 1749. "Mr. Pope,"
he said, "sent to Ireland to Dr. Swift, by Mr. Gerrard, an Irish gentleman,
then at Bath, a printed copy of their letters, with an anonymous letter, which
occasioned Dr. Swift to give Mr. Faulkner leave to reprint them at Dublin,
though Mr. Pope's edition was published first."[143] Faulkner also solicited
the sanction of Pope, and we have the poet's summary of the application, in
the letter he wrote to Mr. Nugent on August 14, 1740: "Last week I received
an account from Faulkner, the Dublin bookseller, that the Dean himself has
given him a collection of letters of his own and mine, and others, to be
printed, and he civilly asks my consent, assuring me the Dean declares them
genuine, and that Mr. Swift, Mrs. Whiteway's son-in-law, will correct the
press, out of his great respect to the Dean and myself. He says they were
collected by some unknown persons, and the copy sent with a letter
importing that it was criminal to suppress such an amiable picture of the
Dean, and his private character appearing in those letters, and that if he
would not publish them in his lifetime others would after his death." It is
manifest from these particulars that Faulkner was not then aware that Pope
himself had sent the correspondence to Swift, and the conviction was only
forced upon his mind by subsequent events. But the bookseller could not be
mistaken on the point that the letters were handed to him in print. As he
later told Dr. Birch that the Dean had given him leave to reprint them
because they were printed already, so he proclaimed that his volume was a
reprint at the time. He inserted at the end of his first edition the few new
letters which were added in the quarto of 1741, and says that he found them
in the London impression "after he had reprinted the foregoing sheets."
Faulkner had no sort of motive to deceive. Whether the letters were in type
or in manuscript he had equally received them from Swift, and obtained his
authority to publish them.
If further testimony is required it is supplied by Pope. To the mention of
Mrs. Whiteway in Lord Orrery's letter of 1738 the poet appended a note in
which he says, "This lady since gave Mr. Pope the strongest assurances that
she had used her utmost endeavours to prevent the publication—nay, went

so far as to secrete the book, till it was commanded from her, and delivered
to the Dublin printer, whereupon her son-in-law, D. Swift, Esq., insisted
upon writing a preface to justify Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it,
and to lay it upon the corrupt practices of the printers in London; but this he
would not agree to, as not knowing the truth of the fact." It was therefore a
book, and a printed book, which was delivered to Faulkner, since if the
collection transmitted to the Dean had been in manuscript, Mrs. Whiteway
and her son-in-law would not have laid it upon the corrupt practices of the
printers, and it must have been transmitted from England, or they would
neither have laid it upon the printers of London, nor have proposed "to
justify Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it." The story was told him
while it could be refuted if it was false; but he did not venture to question
the existence of the printed volume, and had nothing more to say than that
he did not personally know that it was due to the corrupt practices of the
London booksellers. He might have gone further, and stated that he knew
the booksellers to be innocent.
The assertion of Faulkner, that it was Pope who sent this volume to Swift, is
equally supported by unexceptionable evidence. The collection of 1735 was
secretly printed and sold to Curll, and when a secretly printed work turns
out to be the origin of the collection of 1741, the nature of the device
proclaims its author. But the circumstance which most implicates Pope is
his anxiety that it should not transpire that a printed volume had been sent
to Swift at all. He informed his friend Allen that he had endeavoured to put
a stop to the work, and that this had drawn forth replies from the "Dean's
people—the women and the bookseller." With their statements before him,
he kept back from Allen the main fact that the Dublin volume was taken
entirely from a printed copy, and speaks instead as if it was taken from the
originals. He adds that it is too manifest to admit of any doubt how many
tricks have been played with the Dean's papers, and accused his "people" of
secreting them as long as they feared he would not permit them to be
published. This dishonest substitution of "originals" and "papers" for the
printed book is a convincing proof that Pope had some motive,
incompatible with innocence, for his studious perversion of the truth. The
desire to obliterate the traces of his delinquency reappears in the preface to
the quarto. He writes with implied censure of Swift for his sanction of the
Dublin edition, and has the disingenuousness to conceal that he had merely

allowed Faulkner to reproduce in Ireland a volume which had been printed
in England—a volume over which the Dean had no control, and which
being printed, he knew would inevitably be published.
The artful wording of the very note in which Pope refers to the printed book
betrays his desire to keep the fact out of sight. His statement could
enlighten no one who was previously ignorant. It was not from choice that
he promulgated, however obscurely, the allegation of Mrs. Whiteway that
the work had its origin in London. But he was forced upon one of two evils,
and he selected the least. Mrs. Whiteway knew that the letters must either
have been printed by Pope, or have found their way to the press by the
corruption of those who had access to his papers. She acquitted Pope, out of
courtesy, perhaps, to his own protestations, and accepted the second
conclusion, that the London booksellers had procured the manuscripts by
bribes, though she could hardly have entertained the serious belief that the
Curlls had been at the expense of purchasing and printing them, for no other
purpose than to ship a solitary copy to Ireland. She was eager to be cleared
from any possible imputation of abusing the trust which devolved on her
through the imbecility of Swift,[144] and her anxiety to absolve herself and
the Dean, is the secret of her son-in-law insisting upon writing a preface to
prove that the traitors must have been in England and not in Ireland. He
alone would have been responsible for the facts and arguments he adduced,
and they would have appeared in the edition of Faulkner, where they would
not have claimed the sanction of Pope. His ignorance could be no reason
why an independent person should not tell what he knew and believed, and
his unwillingness to be justified was in direct opposition to his conduct
through life. It was for a different cause that he interfered with the
execution of the design. Mr. Swift would have disclosed the fact that the
letters of the poet had been returned to him through Lord Orrery, in 1737,
that he had exclusive possession of the letters of the Dean, that the ground-
work of the collection was at Twickenham, that it had been printed at
London, and had come printed to Dublin. When he insisted upon fulfilling
his intention, Pope, to divert him from it, must have been driven to propose
the insertion of the exculpatory note. He drew it up in a form which would
bear one meaning to those who were acquainted with the facts, and another
to the multitude who were in the dark. He had the contradictory ends to
answer of propitiating Mrs. Whiteway and concealing the truth, and his

language, like everything he wrote on the question, is consequently vague
and evasive.
In the same letter in which Pope ignored the existence of the printed book
to Allen, and pretended that the Irish edition was taken directly from the
originals, he further asserted that the "Dean's people" had at length
consented to give up the manuscripts. If the originals were really in their
possession there would be strong grounds for concluding that the
conspirators were at Dublin. If, on the contrary, the allegation of the poet
was a wilful untruth, this additional misrepresentation must lead us to
conclude that he was the author of a fraud from which he defended himself
by falsehood. Mrs. Whiteway had, it is true, commissioned Mr. Nugent to
acquaint him that she had secured several of his letters. Mr. Nugent, having
delivered the message in March, 1740, informs her in April that he was
authorised to receive them, and begs her to transmit them to him in London
by a safe hand.[145] She evidently preferred that they should go direct to
their owner, and wrote to Pope in May, that she would forward them by the
first trustworthy messenger who would deliver them to Pope himself. It was
agreed between them that Mr. M'Aulay should be the person; but they were
ultimately sent to Lord Orrery, at his country seat in Ireland, in January or
February, 1741, and were, no doubt, conveyed by him to their final
destination when he visited England in March. The critic in the Athenæum
plausibly conjectures that they were the letters which had been written since
the transmission of the collection in June, 1737, and the late period at which
they were received would account for none of them appearing in the quarto,
which was published by the middle of April, 1741.
When Pope, at the beginning of August, 1740, heard from Faulkner that the
Dean had given him permission to print, or rather to reprint, the
correspondence, he expressed his conviction to Mr. Nugent, who was still
meddling in the business, that the offer of returning the letters was a feint.
"I presume now," he added, "that she would have sent but a few of no
consequence, for the bookseller tells me there are several of Lord
Bolingbroke's, &c., which must have been in the Dean's own custody."[146]
Mrs. Whiteway had merely undertaken to return to Pope the letters which
were written by Pope, and it is not apparent why the printing of several of
the letters of Bolingbroke should have involved the conclusion that she was
practising a feint, and would only have sent a few of no consequence. The

incongruity of the observation seems to have been the result of the guilt
which dictated it. The poet was aware that the originals promised him were
a comparatively small number, which had no connection with the printed
letters, and he was meeting the circumstance by anticipation, in the
probable event of its reaching the ears of Mr. Nugent. The rest of the
correspondence was already in his possession, and he assigned a foolish
reason why Mrs. Whiteway would not have sent it, because the real reason
could not be stated.
It was several months subsequent to this communication to Mr. Nugent, and
after he had received the comments of Mrs. Whiteway on the volume which
came from England, that he opened his griefs to Mr. Allen. The letter is not
dated; but a letter to Warburton, which gives a portion of the same
information as a piece of novel intelligence, bears the date of February 4,
1741. "They now offer," Pope tells Allen, "to send me the originals, which
have been so long detained, and I will accept of them, though they have
done their job." A few months later he reverted to the subject and says to
Allen, "It will please you to know that I have received the packet of letters
safe from Ireland by the means of Lord Orrery."[147] He has not the candour
to acknowledge that the letters were voluntarily tendered him by Mrs.
Whiteway long before the printed collection had been heard of. He wished
to have it believed that they had only been offered to him since the
booksellers "had done their job," and the motive for this deception must
have been the desire to identify the letters from Mrs. Whiteway with the
letters in Faulkner's volume, while he had a secret consciousness that they
had nothing in common. It might be conjectured, indeed, that he was
speaking of a distinct occurrence, and that Lord Orrery was the bearer of
two sets of letters, though Pope mentions only one, if it were not certain, as
I shall now proceed to show, that the originals of the printed collection sent
to Dublin were never offered to him at all.
After the collection had been consigned to Faulkner, Mrs. Whiteway wrote
her sentiments at large to Lord Orrery. She asked him, with reference to a
letter of Pope's, if he believed the collection genuine, and slight as were her
doubts, the question would have been absurd if she had professedly the
originals of the correspondence in her hands. She declared her conviction
that the poet had been betrayed by his own servants, and since the letters
extended over three and twenty years, she could not have imagined that

they had all the while been intercepted on their road to the post, but must
have assumed that they had been abstracted from the cabinets in which they
were stored away at Twickenham. The main stress of her argument against
the theory that the work had been concocted in Ireland, was laid upon the
presence of the letters of the Dean, which Pope alone could command, and
not upon the letters of Pope, which might have been copied while they
remained in the possession of Swift; but she pointed out the improbability
of the supposition by remarking that no use had been made of the book in
which Swift had stitched specimens of the correspondence of various
eminent men, and which was peculiarly accessible from his habit of
circulating it among his friends. In particular, she noticed that she had
formerly his permission to take from it a letter of Pope, and she
triumphantly remarks that this letter had not been printed. The boast could
have had no force if all the printed correspondence had been the same
correspondence she had promised to return. The notion that she had offered
to send back the originals of the collection of 1741 is inconsistent with
every part of her defence—a defence in which she was not afraid to
challenge contradiction, since she authorised Lord Orrery to pass it on to
Pope. Neither could the originals have been offered by Faulkner; for both at
the time and afterwards he asserted that his volume was only a reprint. Pope
may even be said to bear testimony against himself. He was eager to make
it appear that the work was composed of materials which must have been
drawn from the papers of Swift, and he took advantage of the erroneous
phrase in Swift's postscript of August 24, to add, in a note, "The book that is
now printed seems to be part of the collection here spoken of." The
announcement that the "Dean's people" had acknowledged that they
possessed a large proportion of the originals would have decided the
question, and the silence of the poet is an admission that he dared not repeat
in public, where it would meet the eye of the persons implicated, the fable
he had palmed off upon Allen in private. Nay, when stating in the quarto
that Mrs. Whiteway and her son-in-law charged the whole proceeding upon
the corrupt practices of the London printers, he still did not venture to retort
that the originals had never left the custody of the "Dean's people," who
detained them in Dublin until, according to his own expression, the Dublin
printers had "done their job." The fact was, that Allen had intimated his
apprehension that Pope would be suspected of being concerned in the
publication, and Pope replied that "the whole thing was so circumstanced

that this could never be the case." To stifle the suggestion, he based a
falsehood upon a foundation of truth, and spoke of the letters which Mrs.
Whiteway had offered to send him, in the beginning of 1740, as though they
had been the originals of the printed correspondence. His invention of a
fiction to establish his innocence, is a sure indication of his guilt.
The Dean's people promised Pope the copy of the correspondence, that he
might correct and expunge what he pleased. "I dare not," he wrote to Allen,
"even do this, for they would say I revised it." His mind immediately veered
from decision to uncertainty, and in the next sentence but one he states that
"he knows not whether to make any use of the permission or not." A little
further, and he comes to the conclusion that until he sees the letters he can
form no judgment of the proper measures to be pursued. "The excessive
earnestness," he adds, "the Dean has been in for publishing them makes me
hope they are castigated in some degree; or he must be totally deprived of
his understanding." Lord Mansfield deposed, from the personal information
of Pope, that his imperfect memory of their contents increased his anxiety
to stop the publication.[148] In the midst of his apprehensions, his
knowledge of Swift's incapacity, and his conviction that it would be insanity
to allow the correspondence to go forth in its integrity, he yet resolved not
to expurgate the copy, and then doubted whether he would expurgate it or
not. This easy kind of hesitation, which has none of the appearance of
genuine alarm, was what might be expected in a man who had already
revised the letters to his heart's content, and was poorly performing a
borrowed part. Though he ended by refusing to retouch a text of his own
preparing, he employed the interval while the sheets were submitted to his
criticism in forestalling the Dublin edition. Mr. D. Swift believed that the
correspondence was first published in Ireland. Faulkner asserted that it was
first published in England, and Faulkner, who could not well be mistaken,
was right. No advertisement of the Irish volume is to be found in the
"Dublin News Letter" till some time after the English volume was on sale,
and no copy exists in the public libraries, or after long search could be
heard of from the second-hand booksellers, which does not contain the
additional matter inserted in the quarto.[149] In the prefatory notice to the
quarto itself we are told that the letters are taken "from an impression sent
from Dublin, and said to be printed by the Dean's direction." This was the
impression which had been privately forwarded to Pope, and the language

seems to have been carefully selected to avoid the assertion that there had
been a publication of the work. The poet's scheme may be discerned in the
account he gave to Allen. He informed him that the book, being most of it
printed, was "put past preventing," but that he was "trying all the means
possible to retard it." In plain words, he was manœuvring to keep back the
Irish edition till his rival reprint was in the market. When he had succeeded
in his device, he repeated his old tactics of advertising that the surreptitious
collection was the cause of his own, and at the same time bespoke the
preference for his reprint by announcing that it would contain "several
additional letters."[150]
Apart from these additions, the quarto of Pope is a reproduction, with some
variations, of the Dublin impression, and a few notes which Faulkner had
doubtless found in the volume sent from England, are said in the quarto to
be taken from Faulkner. Nevertheless there is strong internal evidence that a
portion of the quarto had an independent origin, and had been printed off
before the Irish edition was received. The correspondence consists of 209
pages, which are numbered consecutively from 1 to 115. At this point the
letters of Swift to Gay commence, and instead of the numbers proceeding in
regular order, they go back to page 89, and are thence continued without
any break to the final page, 182. That the arrangement is not a
typographical mistake is clear from the signatures of the sheets being in
accordance with the paging,—a coincidence which was barely possible if
the figures had been a misprint. The correspondence of Swift with Gay
begins on sheet N, which is the letter of the alphabet that answers to page
89 in a quarto volume, and this keeping between the letters and the figures
is preserved throughout. But there is a second coincidence which is
absolutely fatal to the idea that the confusion in the paging was an error of
the press. The quarto edition was accompanied by an edition in folio, which
was the same impression with the matter parcelled out into pages of greater
length, and with the requisite changes in the numbering of the pages and the
signatures of the sheets. In spite of the change there is the identical
peculiarity that distinguishes the quarto. The numbers run on unbroken
from 1 to 108, when we arrive at the letters to Gay. Here we recommence
with page 85, and starting from this new basis the figures proceed in regular
succession to the end. The sheet at page 85 is marked Y, the proper letter for
the folio size, and as in the quarto the signatures, in every instance,

correspond with the pages. The defect cannot be explained by the
supposition that the work had been divided into portions, which were
printed separately for the sake of expedition. With the text of the Dublin
copy to guide his calculations, no compositor could have committed the
error of pronouncing that matter which covers 115 pages could he contained
in 88. The evident cause of the anomaly is that, after the quarto in its
original form had passed through the press, Pope saw reason to cancel the
opening part of the volume which preceded Swift's correspondence with
Gay. The materials in their second form occupied more space than in their
first, and instead of filling only 88 pages in the quarto, and 84 in the folio,
run on to 115 in the one, and 108 in the other. The consequence is that the
pages in excess bear the same numbers with the succeeding uncancelled
pages which could not be altered. The process is rendered further apparent
by the signatures to the sheets. In both folio and quarto, those on the surplus
pages, in the cancelled division of the volume, have an asterisk affixed to
denote that the signatures had been already employed;[151] but though the
sheets have this mark of repetition, they are placed in the volume before the
uncancelled sheets which retain the primitive signatures, and which did not
admit of any change. In the quarto, again, a half sheet precedes the letters to
Gay, which could not have happened unless it had been a subsequent
interpolation, when the matter was insufficient to make the sheet complete.
The half-sheet, the duplicate paging, and the duplicate signatures, are all the
result of the insertion of fresh materials after the work was struck off, and
betray that there was an earlier form of the quarto of 1741, which contained
less than the Dublin edition, and which, therefore, being prior to it, is a
proof that the correspondence was originally printed by Pope. The letters in
the quarto are numbered, and since the series is unbroken throughout, the
original cancelled division must ostensibly have comprised as many letters
as when it was subsequently enlarged. But a letter to Gay, dated Nov. 23,
1727, is found by the copies preserved in the Oxford papers, to be
compounded of three distinct letters, and this system of fusion would have
permitted the introduction of large additions without deranging the
continuity Of the numbers, which Pope would have been anxious to
preserve. The cancels he made to suit his varying views were in accordance
with his practice. The miscellaneous prose works, which follow the letters,
have in one place alone a cancel of upwards of a hundred pages. Equally
characteristic was the desire to preserve any of the old sheets which could

be retained, regardless of the blemish to the book, and the trace they might
afford of his manœuvres. It was a repetition of the paper-sparing policy
which led him to incorporate the suppressed sheets of his Wycherley into
the volume of 1735.[152]
On the 22nd of March, 1741, Pope called upon Lord Orrery at his house in
London, and found him writing to Swift. The poet took the pen from his
hand, and continued the letter. After large professions of affection, he went
on to say, "I must confess, a late incident has given me some pain; but I am
satisfied you were persuaded it would not have given me any, and whatever
unpleasant circumstances the printing our letters might be attended with,
there was one that pleased me,—that the strict friendship we have borne
each other so long is thus made known to all mankind. As far as it was your
will, I cannot be angry at what, in all other respects, I am quite uneasy
under. Had you asked me, before you gave them away, I think I could have
proposed some better monument for our friendship, or, at least, of better
materials." Any words addressed to Swift were lost upon him now, and
Pope in reality was speaking to Lord Orrery, and to those who might
hereafter read his protestations. He had apparently forgotten that just four
years before he had complained to the same Lord Orrery, that the Dean had
denied his request when he wished to insert some of the letters in the quarto
of 1737.[153] The monument he was eager to erect to their friendship in
1737, he repudiated in 1741. He affirmed that he could have proposed a
better, but never hinted what it was; or at least of choicer materials, but
never troubled himself further about them. This was the smallest part of the
contradiction. He refused his consent to the reprint of the book sent to
Dublin, and had even tried, he told Allen, to stop it by threats of law. It is
true, he confessed to Mr. Nugent at the outset, and continued to confess to
Allen, that he had no hope of prevailing; but his efforts are not the less the
measure of his pretended disgust. Yet he instantly appropriated the
correspondence he was anxious to stifle in its birth, contrived to anticipate
the Dublin edition, incorporated the entire collection into his works, and
published it simultaneously in folio, quarto, and octavo. He stated in the
prefatory notice, that he had refused to revise the letters, because they were
committed to the press without his consent; but the annoyance which would
not permit him to revise the letters was no check to his haste in adopting, or
to his zeal in circulating them. For a man who was "quite uneasy" at their

appearance, his eagerness to countenance, to parade, and to propagate them
was amazing, and the manifest duplicity is not the least forcible of the
arguments which bring the whole contrivance home to Pope. Warburton
applauded him for the little resentment "he expressed at the indiscretion of
his old friend." He affected far more than his advocate supposed; but if it
had been otherwise it is strange that Warburton should not have perceived
that to talk of resentment was ridiculous when the poet was espousing "the
indiscretion," and was doing his utmost to disseminate the letters he feigned
a wish to suppress.
Curll republished the letters under the title of "Dean Swift's Literary
Correspondence." Pope filed a bill in Chancery against Curll on June 4,
1741. The poet not only demanded protection for his own letters, but
desired that the bookseller should be restrained from vending the letters of
Swift, who was not a party to the suit, nor had commissioned any one to
interfere on his behalf. The case was memorable both from its intrinsic
importance, and from the celebrity of the plaintiff. In his answer, on the
13th of June, Curll admitted that nobody had authorised his work. He rested
his defence on three propositions. He maintained that private
correspondence did not come within the Copyright Act of Queen Anne,
because the Act was declared in the title to be for the "Encouragement of
Learning," whereas letters on familiar subjects were not learned
productions; and because the Act was designed to protect books which were
avowedly composed for the press, whereas letters were written without the
intention of converting them into a literary commodity. He said that he was
informed, and believed, that the letters were first "printed"[154] at Dublin,
and he contended that all persons in England had a right to reproduce books
which were first "published" in Ireland. He finally argued that letters were
in the nature of a gift to the receiver, and that after they were delivered to
the Dean they became his property. On the motion to dissolve the injunction
on these grounds, Lord Hardwicke decided that they were none of them
valid. He refused to recognise a distinction between letters and other
compositions. He denied that a prior publication in Ireland could deprive an
English author of his English rights. He, above all, determined that though
the paper on which the letter was written might possibly be the property of
the receiver, the matter remained the property of the writer. For the same
reason that he admitted Pope's title to his own letters, he declined to

continue the injunction with respect to the letters addressed to him, which
had never ceased to belong to the persons who penned them.[155] The
celebrated Murray was one of the counsel for the poet,[156] and afterwards,
when Lord Chief Justice, he quoted and confirmed the decision of the
Chancellor. "The question," he said, "was whether the property was not
transferred to the correspondent. Lord Hardwicke thought not, and that the
writer was still the proprietor."[157] "Dean Swift," he said subsequently,
"was certainly the proprietor of the paper upon which Pope's letters to him
were written; but no disposition, no transfer of paper upon which the
composition is written can be construed a conveyance of the copy, without
the author's express consent to print and publish, much less against his
will."[158] Just and valuable as is the rule of law which prohibits the
publication of a letter without the permission of its author, the manner in
which Pope invoked it was singular. According to his statement it was Swift
that had prepared and put forth a correspondence, in which more of the
letters were from the pen of the Dean than from the pen of the poet. Pope,
while professing to be vexed beyond measure at this exposure of private
papers, asked for an injunction, not for the purpose of suppressing them, but
to obtain a monopoly of the sale. He was not even content to reclaim his
personal share in the publication of the friend whom he upbraided for the
act. He tried to prevent any one except himself from profiting by Swift's
part of the book, and at the same time that he was endeavouring to secure
goods which did not belong to him, he reproached their owner for
displaying them. His conduct once more betrayed the truth he laboured to
conceal. He was the compiler of the collection, and instinctively regarded a
rival edition as an invasion of his rights. His proceedings were unnatural, if
Swift was the sole originator of the work; but if it had a different source we
can perceive why Pope was jealous of the least interference with property
which, from the outset, he considered to be exclusively his own.
A fatality attended the correspondence of Pope. Curll, in defiance of him,
printed his letters to Cromwell. Lord Oxford, in spite of his disapproval,
printed his letters to Wycherley. An unknown person, by unknown means,
obtained the whole of the collection of 1735, printed it secretly at his own
expense, and sold it for a song. To render the history uniform and complete,
Swift, who would not permit Pope to print their letters, printed them
himself, while Pope, changing sides with him, remonstrated and threatened.

That nothing might be wanting to the singularity of the case, the three last
sets of letters stole into the world when they were under the vigilant
guardianship of the poet, and the two last sets got abroad after the abiding
paroxysm of terror, engendered by the indiscretion of a single dissolute
friend, had induced him to wrest his correspondence from friends of every
degree for the purpose of securing it from the possibility of publication.
Mrs. Whiteway remarked to Lord Orrery, that among the letters in the
Dean's stitched book were numbers from the greatest men in England for
genius, learning, and power,—from Bolingbroke, Oxford, Bathurst, and
Peterborough; from Addison, Congreve, Prior, Parnell, and Gay. She said
these were as easily pilfered, and would have been as interesting to the
world, as the letters of Pope and Swift;[159] but nobody invaded the sanctity
of the private correspondence of the poet's contemporaries, even when the
papers were open to half the gossips of Dublin. He stood alone in a
misfortune which happened to him no less than four times, and which it is
to be feared would have happened a fifth if he had lived long enough to
accumulate the materials for a fresh volume. He relaxed his correspondence
with Caryll in 1729, and with Swift in 1737, as a means to compel them to
resign his former letters, and to both he used the same expression,—that "he
did not write upon the terms of other honest men."[160] The fallacy of the
parallel was in the epithet. If he had resembled other men in their honesty
he might have shared in their immunity from the alleged treachery of
friends like Oxford and Swift, and of enemies like Curll.
Of all the deceptions which the poet practised to get his correspondence
under the eye of the world, his dealings towards Swift are the worst. He had
failed to gain his consent to putting forth the letters while any judgment yet
remained to him; but no sooner had he sunk into dotage than, trusting to his
inability to detect the cheat, Pope beguiled him into sanctioning the
publication by sending him the volume ready printed, with a flattering
exhortation, the echo of what he had written on a former occasion,[161]
"importing that it was criminal to suppress such an amiable picture of the
Dean and his private character."[162] The moment Swift fell into the pit his
friend had dug for him, his friend denounced him for the act. "I think," he
wrote to Mr. Nugent, "I can make no reflections upon this strange incident
but what are truly melancholy, and humble the pride of human nature,—that
the greatest of geniuses, though prudence may have been the companion of

wit (which is very rare) for their whole lives past, may have nothing left
them at last but their vanity. No decay of body is half so miserable!"
Extraordinary language to come from the pen of the man whose vanity,
without any excuse from the decay of his faculties, had made him eager to
print the letters in 1737, and who had been only thwarted in his desire
because Swift was wanting in the vanity by which he himself was impelled,
—infamous language when the deed he reprobated was his own, and Swift
the innocent dupe; and when having traded successfully in the mental
afflictions of his friend, he proceeded to hold up his victim, as the criminal.
But the simulated indignation is less revolting than the simulated fondness.
"When the heart is full of tenderness," he said to the Dean, in the letter of
March 22, 1741, "it must be full of concern at the absolute impotency of all
words to come up to [it]. I value and enjoy more the memory of the
pleasure and endearing obligations I have formerly received from you than
the perfect possession of any other. Think it not possible that my affection
can cease but with my last breath. If I could think yours was exhausted I
should grieve, but not reproach you. If I felt myself even hurt by you I
should be confident you knew not the blow you gave, but had your hand
guided by another." The hand which guided him was the same hand that
was at that moment aiming a blow at his reputation. Taking advantage of his
cruel malady and prostrate understanding, Pope was even then
endeavouring to fasten upon him the stigma of his own personal treachery,
and this pretended magnanimity in forgiving a deed which he had contrived
and instigated was in itself a calumny and a fraud.
If any doubt could exist that it was Pope who put forth the collection of
1735, and the Swift collection of 1741, we have still in the quarto of 1737
his own avowed version of a large portion of his correspondence. He
published it with the express object of correcting the corrupt text of
spurious editions, and there remains the inquiry whether he published it
truly. When he burnt three-fourths of it, and deposited copies of the rest in
the library of Lord Oxford, he professed to have preserved the originals
from which the copies were taken. Lord Bolingbroke discovered a great
number of returned letters among his papers after his death, and told Dr.
Heberden that they contained many alterations and corrections, which he
supposed had been made with the intention of printing them some time or
other.[163] From this it would be inferred that those which had been printed

were not part of the collection, and that the poet had found it inexpedient to
retain vouchers, which would condemn if they did not acquit him.
Unfortunately the whole of the manuscripts were destroyed by Lord
Bolingbroke, and beyond the unsatisfactory information conveyed in his
remark, nothing can now be known of them. The literal interpretation of his
language is favoured by the evidence yet within our reach, and we should
conclude that Pope had not kept originals which would have revealed
alterations in the published letters of a far more serious nature than any
which Bolingbroke appears to have suspected.
John Caryll, a Roman Catholic country gentleman residing in Sussex, was
among the intimate correspondents of Pope for twenty-five years, from
1710 to 1735. The poet wrote to him on Nov. 19, 1712, and asked to have
the "whole cargo of his epistles returned," which he said might be of use "in
a design he had lately engaged in." This design was probably to furnish
some essays to the "Guardian," which commenced on the 12th of March,
1713. He promised to restore the letters when he had done with them, and
his friend at once complied with his desire. After the surreptitious
publication of his correspondence with Cromwell, Pope, in December,
1726, renewed his petition to Caryll to make over to him "all such papers as
he had too partially preserved;" but the object of the request this time was
"to put them out of the power of Curll." The poet announced that he would
send back those which could do no hurt to the character of himself, his
friend, or any other person; that he would retain those which "would serve
to bear testimony of his own love for good men, or theirs for him;" and
implied, as a consequence, that he would destroy those which did not fall
under either of these heads. By this division the insignificant letters alone
would have been restored to Caryll, and whether he was mistrustful of the
use to which Pope might apply the remainder, or whether he was anxious to
preserve intact the memorials of his intimacy with a celebrated man, he did
not think fit to accede to the demand. A diminution in the frequency and
cordiality of their correspondence ensued, and lasted for upwards of two
years. Caryll at length complained, and Pope replied in February 1729, that
he could not open his mind to his acquaintances unless they would return
him at the end of every year "the forfeitures of his discretion, and commit to
his justice what he trusted only to their indulgence." Upon this intimation
that compliance was to be the condition of intimacy, Caryll yielded the

point, and the receipt of the letters was acknowledged by the poet on the 8th
of April. The Sussex squire defeated the purpose for which they were
extorted by copying the greater part of the collection. He persevered in the
practice till near the close of his life. The last letter from Pope which he
caused to be transcribed is dated July 17, 1735, and he died on the 6th of
April, 1736. When his grandson sold the hereditary estate in 1767, and
retired from England to the continent, the family papers were left behind,
stowed away in boxes, where they remained for nearly three quarters of a
century. They then came into the possession of Mr. Dilke, and have since
been presented by his grandson, Sir Charles W. Dilke, to the British
Museum. Among the manuscripts were a dozen folio books, containing the
farm and domestic accounts, and in a volume similar in appearance Mr.
Dilke discovered the copies of the letters of Pope, together with copies of
others from the Dukes of Berwick, Beaufort, and Norfolk, from Dryden,
Wycherley, Steele, Roger Lestrange, St. Evremond, and Le Grand. The
external and internal evidence leaves no doubt of their authenticity. One
unexpected confirmation of their genuineness turned up in an autograph
letter of Pope to the younger Caryll, dated Nov. 8, 1712, and which was
sent by Mr. Tuckwell to Mr. Croker. The letters to the younger Caryll
remained with his widow. The few which exist are originals in the custody
of different collectors, and this letter of Nov. 8 is a link in a series of facts
that are only known through the transcripts in the Caryll folio. The recovery
of documents, which Pope did not suspect were in existence, discloses to us
his mode of dealing with his correspondence when, having no idea that it
could rise up against him, he ventured to use it without reserve.
After calling in his letters to his friends, Pope proceeded to arrange them in
order, and said "they formed altogether an unimportant, but yet an innocent
history of himself." "You make, I assure you," he wrote to Caryll, July 8,
1729, "no small figure in these annals from 1710 to 1720 odd. Upon my
word, sir, I am glad to see how long, and how often, and how much I have
been obliged to you, as well as how long, how often, and how much I have
been sensible of and expressed it." Notwithstanding this assurance, Caryll
made a very small figure indeed in the published collection. Four letters
only were addressed to the "Hon. J. C., Esq." in the volume of 1735, and
these initials, in the quarto of 1737, were added to a fifth letter which had
previously been headed, "Mr. Pope to ----." One other letter, in the quarto,

bore the title to "Mr. C——"; but it was separated from the former group,
and it is from the Caryll copy that we learn how to fill up the blank. Both in
the edition of 1735 and 1737 Pope published a letter to the "Hon. James
Craggs, Esq.," which induced Roscoe to conclude that he was the person
indicated by the initials, and it is not improbable that the poet designed to
mislead his readers, especially as the claim of Caryll to be styled
Honourable was only a Jacobite assumption, derived from his being heir to
his uncle, who had been created a peer by the exiled James II. But though
Pope did not wish to repeat in public his profuse professions in private, and
appear as the familiar friend and constant correspondent of a Roman
Catholic country gentleman, he as little desired to suppress the choicer
portions of the effusions he had addressed to him. He conceived the idea of
re-directing them, and compiled from them, in whole or in part, four
fictitious letters to Blount, four to Addison, two to Congreve, and one each
to Wycherley, Steele, Trumbull, and Digby. A second letter to Digby, which
appeared in the edition of 1735, was transferred to Arbuthnot in the quarto
of 1737. Half a dozen letters at most were allotted to the initials of the
Sussex squire, while fifteen were assigned to more imposing names, and a
sixteenth was printed in a group of three to the "Hon. ——" Rather than
credit an imposition so childish, and yet so unwarrantable, we should have
recourse to the theory that Pope sometimes sent the same letter to different
persons. Swift assured him that the best system extant for the conduct of
human life might be collected from his epistles, and they certainly abound
in generalities which, like the clown's answer, that suited all questions,
might have been written to anybody. But a comparison of the printed letters
with the Caryll copies, shows that this solution is inadmissible, and the
observation of the clown, when his answer proved inopportune, is equally
applicable to the contrivance of Pope—"I see things may serve long, and
not serve ever."[164]
The "Spectator" of the 10th of November, 1712, contained some remarks by
Pope on the verses which the Emperor Hadrian composed when he was
dying. The poet asked Caryll's opinion of the criticism, and the substance of
his reply is embodied in the rejoinder of Pope. "The supposition you draw
from the suspicion that Adrian was addicted to magic, seems to me a little
uncharitable,—that he might fear no sort of Deity, good or bad,—since in
the third verse he plainly testifies his apprehension of a future state by being

solicitous whither his soul was going. As to what you mention of his using
gay and ludicrous expressions, I have already owned my opinion that the
expressions are not so, but that diminutives are often in Latin taken for
expressions of tenderness and concern." This comment is introduced, in the
printed correspondence, into the letter to Steele of November 29, 1712, and
if it was sent to him as well as to Caryll both must have objected to the gay
and ludicrous expressions of Hadrian, both must have spoken of the
suspicion that he was addicted to magic, both must have inferred from it
that he feared no sort of Deity, good or bad, and the language of both must
have been as identical as their ideas.
"I know," Pope wrote to Caryll, August 22, 1717, "you will take part in
rejoicing for the victory of Prince Eugene over the Turks, in the zeal you
bear to the Christian interest, though your cousin of Oxford, with whom I
dined yesterday, says there is no other difference in the Christians beating
the Turks or the Turks beating the Christians, than whether the Emperor
shall first declare war against Spain, or Spain declare it against the
Emperor." In the published version the passage forms part of a letter to
Edward Blount dated September 8, 1717, and either we must admit that it
was never written to him, or believe that Caryll and Blount had each an
Oxford cousin, that the poet dined with the Oxford cousin of Caryll on
August 21, and with the Oxford cousin of Blount on September 7, that both
these cousins made, at their respective dinners, the same epigrammatic
observation in the very same words, and that the extraordinary coincidence
struck Pope so little that he did not even remark upon it.
Another passage of a letter to Caryll, dated September 20, [1713] reappears
in a letter to Blount dated February 10, 1716. "I am just returned from the
country, whither Mr. Rowe did me the favour to accompany me, and to pass
a week at Binfield. I need not tell you how much a man of his turn could
not but entertain me; but I must acquaint you there is a vivacity and gaiety
of disposition almost peculiar to that gentleman, which renders it
impossible to part from him without that uneasiness and chagrin which
generally succeeds all great pleasures. I have just been taking a solitary
walk by moonshine in St. James's Park, full of reflections of the transitory
nature of all human delights, and giving my thoughts a loose into the
contemplation of those sensations of satisfaction which probably we may
taste in the more exalted company of separate spirits, when we range the

starry walks above." Thus Pope, who on his return to town in September,
1713, after a week's companionship with Rowe, took a solitary walk by
moonlight and meditated on the transitory nature of human delights, and the
happy intercourse of spirits, was led by the power of association, after
another week spent at Binfield with Rowe in February, 1716, to renew the
solitary walk by moonlight the instant he returned, and indulge in the old
contemplation on the transitory nature of human delights, and the happy
intercourse of separate spirits. What renders more singular the second
moonlight walk is that the date assigned to it was the memorable season
when the Thames was frozen over, and when the quantity of snow was as
unusual as the intensity of the cold. The thaw commenced the day before
the fragile little bard sallied out for his stroll, and he must indeed have been
lost in contemplation "of the starry walks above" not to have been checked
in his moonlight rambles by the deplorable condition of the walks below.
None of the phenomena which were attracting the attention of the rest of the
world,—the breaking up of the long and terrible winter, the deluge of
melting snow, the chilling atmosphere, the dreary prospect,—received a
passing notice from him. He saw nothing except the moonshine, despite its
watery gleam, and thought of nothing except the spirits in the stars.
In the collection of 1735 there appeared a letter to Digby, which is dated
September 10, 1724, and is compounded from two letters, to Caryll of
November 23 and December 25, 1725. In the letter of November 23, Pope
says to Caryll, "My time has been spent in a trembling attendance upon
death, which has at last seized one of our family,—my poor old nurse." This
sentence was inserted in the letter to Digby, but as the nurse did not die till
November 5, 1725, the information could not have been communicated to
him in September, 1724. The motive of the poet in altering the dates of his
letters when he assigned a fanciful address to them was probably to adapt
the chronology to the circumstances of his new dramatis personæ. His
earliest letter to Edward Blount is dated August, 1714, and when he
transferred the moonlight reverie from 1713 to 1716, he may have been
influenced by the consideration that in the former year his correspondence
with Blount had not commenced. The letter to Caryll of November 23, and
the letter to Digby of September 10, both open with the same compliment
on their return from the Continent, and the date may have been altered from
1725 to 1724 to make it harmonise with Digby's travels abroad. In

remedying one inconsistency, Pope fell into another. A new use was found
for the letter in the quarto of 1737. Arbuthnot died in February, 1735, at the
very time when there is reason to suppose that the poet printed the P. T.
collection. The final letter in the volume is from the Doctor, and it was
apparently added at the last moment. It was then too late to be thinking of a
re-distribution of the materials, and the idea was not executed, or perhaps
conceived till 1737, when the address, which had been changed from Caryll
to Digby, was once more changed from Digby to Arbuthnot. In the interval
Pope appears to have detected the anachronism. He retained the day of the
month, but struck out the year. He preserved the announcement, "death has
seized one of our family," but dropped the words "my poor old nurse." Her
death nevertheless could alone have been meant; for in the letters to Caryll,
as in the letter to Digby, several contemporaneous particulars are
mentioned, which being repeated in the letter to Arbuthnot, limit its date to
the period of the poor old nurse's decease. In both cases Pope's time had
been spent in attending upon the dying patient, in both cases he and his
mother had been ill together, in both cases these incidents had hindered his
writing, in both cases he had been questioned respecting the effect produced
upon his mind by the attacks upon his translation of the "Odyssey," and in
both cases he had been less troubled by the criticisms upon his writings than
by the imputations upon his morals, in consequence of some reports which
had been spread of his intrigues with Martha Blount. It follows that the
letter to Arbuthnot, though dated September 10, must have been written
subsequent to the death of the nurse on November 5. But there is
unanswerable evidence that at that time, and for weeks and months
afterwards, he had constant personal intercourse with the poet. He was at
his elbow, and not on the Continent,[165] and the event could not have been
communicated to him as news upon his return from any journey he ever
made to France. The year was omitted by Pope exactly because he could fix
upon none which would bear the test of examination.[166] When it is plain
that the letter could not have been addressed to Arbuthnot, it is superfluous
to dwell upon the improbability that he and Caryll should have put the same
question with regard to the "railing papers about the 'Odyssey,'" or to
enumerate the other coincidences which are beyond the range of belief. The
letter in all its shapes contains a passage which forms a strange comment
upon Pope's proceedings, and is the bitterest sentence that will ever be
pronounced upon them: "Falsehood is folly, says Homer, and liars and

calumniators at last hurt none but themselves, even in this world. In the
next, it is charity to say, God have mercy on them. They were the devil's
vice-regents upon earth, who is the father of lies, and, I fear, has a right to
dispose of his children."
On June 12, 1713, Pope wrote to Caryll, "As I hope, and would flatter
myself, that you know me and my thoughts so entirely as never to be
mistaken in either, so it is a pleasure to me that you guessed so right in
regard to the author of that 'Guardian' you mentioned." On June 23 he wrote
again, and said, "Your last is the more obliging as it hints at some little
niceties in my conduct which your candour and affection prompt you to
recommend to me." Both these sentences are inserted in an undated letter to
Addison, which is compiled from three letters to Caryll, and no one could
credit that Caryll and Addison had independently, and almost
simultaneously communicated their guesses to Pope that he was the author
of a particular essay in the "Guardian," and at the same time "hinted at little
niceties in his conduct." The remainder of the letter to Addison is full of
inconsistencies. The result of the imposition is to confound dates, events,
opinions, and persons. Addison knows Pope and his thoughts so entirely as
never to be mistaken in either; Addison's candour and affection prompt him
to advise Pope in little niceties of conduct, and the perfect knowledge, the
affection, the candour, and the advice, which are represented as proceeding
from the most exquisite genius of the age, all appertain to an obscure
country gentleman whose intimacy could not confer, in the eyes of the
world, any lustre upon his friend. The whole of the letters to Addison are an
absolute fiction. Four out of the five are from the Caryll correspondence,
and the internal evidence is opposed to the genuineness of the fifth. The
deception is aggravated by the erroneous aspect it imparts to the celebrated
quarrel. In the letters which preceded the commencing rupture Pope appears
as the zealous champion and bosom associate of the man he afterwards
maligned, and we are left to suppose that the vaunted generosity on one side
had been met by envy and hostility on the other. It is of virtual forgeries like
these, which were specially concocted for the public, that the poet had the
hardihood to say in his preface, "Many of them having been written on the
most trying occasions, and all in the openness of friendship, are a proof
what were his real sentiments, as they flowed warm from his heart, without
the least thought that ever the world should be witness to them." He not

only pretended that they derived a value from being the spontaneous
expression of his feelings as they rose, but pledged his word that his motive
in treasuring them up was to supply an authentic register of historical,
literary, and personal events, and especially to provide a corrective to the
misrepresentations of less scrupulous chroniclers. "I think more and more
of it," he said to Lord Oxford, September 15, 1729, when dwelling upon the
value of the collected letters and the importance of preserving them, "as
finding what a number of facts they will settle the truth of, both relating to
history and criticism, and parts of private life and character of the eminent
men of my time." In the preface to the quarto of 1737 he made a statement
of the same nature, and protested that the letters he kept were selected from
the letters he destroyed, "merely as they preserved the memory of some
friendships which would be ever dear to him, or set in a true light some
matters of fact from which the scribblers of the times had taken occasion to
asperse either his friends or himself." He volunteered the declaration to
Lord Oxford when he was engaged in the manufacture of the
correspondence which was to falsify the facts he pretended it "would settle
the truth of," and he renewed the assertion in public as a prelude to the
fabrications themselves.
The Wycherley correspondence furnishes fresh illustrations of the
malpractices of the poet. For Pope's own share in it the published version is
our only authority. The originals of Wycherley's part in it were placed in
Lord Oxford's library in October, 1729, and withdrawn in June, 1735; but
there still exist among the Oxford papers copies of six out of the eighteen
published letters, besides six which are unpublished.[167] Imperfect as is the
series, it is sufficient to show the infidelity of the work Pope put forth to the
world. The letter borrowed from the Caryll group may conveniently be
considered in connection with the rest. It was probably not included in the
original volume of the Wycherley correspondence, which Pope published in
1729, for it is printed in the edition of 1735 on an interpolated half sheet
signed * c. This is placed between sheet b and sheet c, and the numbers of
its four pages—11 to 14—are repeated on sheet c. The space being greater
than was required the letter has been divided into an unusual number of
paragraphs, which are double the ordinary distance from each other, and as
this device for spreading out the matter only brought it three or four lines
over the top of the fourth page the remainder is left blank, contrary to the

plan adopted in the rest of the book.[168] Pope we may presume had not
completed in 1729 his task of reconstructing his letters to Caryll, and first
introduced the manufactured letter into the old sheets of the Wycherley
when he incorporated them into the volume of 1735. A single circumstance
is enough to prove that the letter is fictitious. It is made up of extracts from
two letters to Caryll of July 31, 1710, and January 25, 1711, and in the
former of the two the poet quotes a remark from the "Tatler" on the reason
why women are vainer than men. The passage is repeated in the letter to
Wycherley which is dated June 23, 1705, nearly four years before the
"Tatler" commenced, and Pope imagined he had obliterated the
anachronism by changing the phrase "the 'Tatler' observes of women" into
the general formula "it is observed of women."
The concoction of the letter to Wycherley out of the letters to Caryll is
attended by the usual distortion of facts. The extract from the letter of July
31 is an expostulation against Caryll's extravagant compliments. A few
months after the date which Pope assigned to the passage when he applied it
to Wycherley, the old dramatist had addressed a kindred remonstrance to
Pope. "I must confess," he wrote March 22, 1705-6, "you try my patience,
as you say in the beginning of your letter, not by the many lines in it, but
the too many compliments you make me for nothing, in which you prove
yourself, though a sincere friend, a man of too much fiction; for I have not
seen so much poetry in prose a great while, since your letter is filled with so
many fine words and acknowledgments of your obligations to me, the only
asseverations of yours I dare contradict; for I must tell you your letter is like
an author's epistle before his book,—written more to show his wit to the
world than his sincerity or gratitude to his friend, whom he libels with
praise, so that you have provoked my modesty even whilst you have
soothed my vanity; for I know not whether I am more complimented than
abused, since too much praise turns irony, as too great thanks for small
favours turns ingratitude, or too much ceremony in religion hypocrisy."[169]
Pope thought fit in the published letters to reverse the parts. He ascribed the
adulation to Wycherley, and the rebuke of it to himself. He gives a false air
of manly independence to his youthful character, and does it at the expense
of his friend.
The extract from the letter to Caryll of January 25, 1711, which forms the
second portion of the made-up letter to Wycherley of June 23, 1705, is a

comment on the eulogy lavished by Caryll on some verses of the poet. The
change of name and date flattered in a double manner the vanity of Pope,—
the applause appeared to proceed from a celebrated wit instead of from a
country squire, and to be bestowed upon a lad of seventeen instead of upon
a man who was nearly twenty-three. He always aspired to the credit of
precocity, and some of his falsifications seem to have had no other purpose
than to exaggerate his juvenile fame. Wycherley wrote to him on February
19, 1708-9, and spoke of the genius which promised him immortality, of his
great, vigorous and active mind. In a postscript it is mentioned that the
"Miscellany," which contained Pope's Pastorals, would not be out for three
weeks.[170] Pope suppressed, amongst other passages, the allusion which
fixed the period at which the panegyric was penned, and altered the year to
1706-7, for no perceptible reason except that he wished to antedate the
praise. There can be little doubt that his opening letter to Wycherley was
manufactured or misplaced with a similar object. It is printed in the edition
of 1735 on an interpolated half sheet, marked *b, the pages of which are
correctly numbered from 1 to 4. As the first page of sheet b which follows is
numbered 3, it is evident that it was originally preceded by only two pages,
which must have been cancelled, and the present letter put in their place.
[171]
This new letter is dated December 26, 1704, and contains his
reflections on a compliment which he alleges had been paid to him by
Wycherley—that his compositions were above the attacks of envious
critics. "It is pleasant to remark," says Dr. Johnson, "how soon Pope learned
the cant of an author, and began to treat critics with contempt, though he
had yet suffered nothing from them."[172] He did not in fact publish a single
line till more than four years later, and with our present evidence that the
letter was an interpolated after-thought, we cannot but suspect that
Wycherley's premature compliment, and Pope's premature cant both
belonged to a subsequent period, or perhaps were fabricated for the press.
"The author's age then sixteen," says the poet in a note, and in this
ostentatious announcement we have the motive to the act. The opinion of
Warburton, that the letters of the boy displayed all the characteristics of the
man, is an argument the more that they were the productions of the man and
not of the boy.
"I have received," writes Wycherley, in an unpublished letter, dated
December 6, 1707, "yours of the 29th of November, which has so much

overpaid mine in kindness that, as Voiture says, I doubt whether the best
effects of those fine expressions of your friendship to me can be more
obliging than they themselves; and for my humility you talk of, you have
lessened while you magnify it, as by commending my good nature with so
much more of yours you have made me almost incapable of being grateful
to you; for you have said so many kind things of me you have hardly left
me anything of the same kind to return you, and the best actions are not
capable of making you amends for so many good words you have given me,
by which you justly magnify them and yourself by saying they are sincere,
so that you have obliged me to be vain rather than not think you a Plain
Dealer. Thus, even against your own opinion, your freedom with me proves
not you a fool, but me so, especially if I could think half the good you say
of me my due. As for the good book you sent me I took it as kindly as the
reprimand from the good man, which I think you heard, and was that I
should not stand in my own light."[173] Pope printed his letter of November
29, to which this letter was a reply, and it touches upon none of the topics to
which Wycherley refers. There are none of the fine expressions of
friendship, none of the many honied words, none of the encomiums on his
correspondent's good nature and humility. He reproves him, on the contrary,
in rather a lofty tone for his excessive acknowledgments for trifling
services, tells him he will continue the revision of the poems the old
dramatist had submitted to him, insists that he must be permitted to alter
and add as well as omit, and in answer to an observation of Wycherley, that
"the sprightliness of wit despises method," assures him that if method is
neglected his verses had better be converted into separate maxims in prose.
As Pope's letter does not contain one syllable upon the subjects to which
Wycherley alludes in his reply, so the reply takes no notice of the subjects
which monopolise the epistle of Pope. Though he had discoursed
exclusively upon the remodelling of Wycherley's poems, Wycherley himself
disdains to offer in return a single word of thanks, of encouragement, of
acquiescence, or dissent. The omission cannot be explained by the
supposition that the copy was abridged. Whatever passages might have
been left out, those would certainly have been retained which confirmed
under Wycherley's own hand the particulars which were Pope's professed
justification for printing the letters, and his excuse for depositing them in
the library of Lord Oxford.

The Wycherley correspondence concludes with a letter from Pope dated
May 2, 1710. A coldness then ensued of which Dr. Johnson gives this
account: "The fondness of Wycherley was too violent to last. His esteem of
Pope was such that he submitted some poems to his revision, and when
Pope, perhaps proud of such confidence, was sufficiently bold in his
criticisms and liberal in his alterations, the old scribbler was angry to see
his pages defaced, and felt more pain from the detection than content from
the amendment of his faults. They parted, but Pope always considered him
with kindness, and visited him a little time before he died."[174] The
statement is incomplete. Pope engaged in the revision as early as April,
1706, when he describes to Wycherley the nature of the emendations he has
made: "Some parts I have contracted as we do sun-beams to improve their
energy and force; some I have taken quite away, as we take branches from a
tree to add to the fruit; others I have entirely new expressed, and turned
more into poetry." In November, 1707, he informs his friend that he has
subjected the poem on "Dullness" to the same process, that he has
condensed the piece one half, suppressed deficiencies, heightened the
language, and smoothed the versification. Far from being angry at these
"bold criticisms and liberal alterations," the old scribbler was profuse in his
thanks, and replied to Pope's request, that he would keep the assistance a
secret, by declaring that he always does, and always will own to whose
genius and judgment he is indebted for the improvement of his unmusical
numbers and harsher sense. Between three and four years afterwards he
submitted a fresh set of poems to Pope's castigation, and in two successive
letters of April 1 and April 11, 1710, entreats him to show no mercy in his
corrections; "for I had rather," he says, "be condemned by my friend in
private, than exposed to my foes in public." Pope answered that the
repetitions were more numerous than he anticipated, and that crossing them
out defaced the copy to a degree that he feared would be displeasing. "Let
me know," he added, "if I am to go on at this rate, or if you would prescribe
any other method." Wycherley rejoined that tautology was the last fault of
which he would be guilty, that he thought with care he could remove the
blemish, and that he would not occupy Pope in a task which might "prevent
his writing on new subjects of his own." "All," he continues, "that I desire
of you is to mark in the margin, without defacing the copy at all, any
repetition of words, matter, or sense, which if you will be so kind as to do
for me, you will supply my want of memory with your good one, and my

deficiencies of sense with the infallibilities of yours,—which if you do you
will most infinitely oblige me, who almost repent the trouble I have given
you, since so much." The comment on Pope's strong criticism is equally
cordial: "As to what you call freedom with me, which you desire me to
forgive, you may be assured I would not forgive you unless you did use it;
for I am so far from thinking your plainness a fault or an offence to me that
I think it a charity and an obligation, which I shall always acknowledge
with all sort of gratitude to you for it, who am therefore, dear Mr. Pope,
your most obliged humble servant." Dr. Johnson overlooked the rude ordeal
to which Wycherley's vanity had been exposed in April, 1706, and the proof
he then gave that he had not in his character the slightest tincture of irritable
impatience at the wholesale correction of his works. He implored a renewal
of the rigour when he invoked, with full experience of the treatment he was
to expect, the same good offices in April, 1710, and the anger which
Johnson imputes to him on that occasion at the detection of his faults is not
only in singular contradiction to the whole of his previous conduct, but is
belied, as we have seen, by his letter to Pope. The notion that he was
offended at the freedom of his friend's remarks was an inference drawn
from the tone of Pope's reply, and not from the language of Wycherley
himself.
"I am sorry," Pope commences, "you persist to take ill my not accepting
your invitation, and to find, if I mistake not, your exception not unmixed
with some suspicion." The letter of Wycherley is dated April 27, 1710, and
if the contents of the letter of Pope, which is dated May 2, did not show that
it was the answer, all doubt would be removed by the fact that it was headed
"The Answer" by the poet, both in the octavo of 1735, and the quarto of
1737. This led to the conclusion that Wycherley, while professing to receive
the strictures on his verses with kindness, had at the same time manifested
in his letter some displeasure which his friend thought proper to omit, and
which connected their quarrel with the secret soreness of the author at the
candour of the critic.[175] Pope did indeed suppress the beginning and the
end of Wycherley's communication; but the passages he kept back betray
the falsity of his own insinuation. "I answered," the letter begins, "yours of
the 15th, which I think was the last I had from you, about three days after
my receiving it; but having not yet received any answer to it from you, I
doubt your old pain of the head-ache has prevented it, which gives me a

great deal of concern for you, insomuch that I have had thoughts of making
you a visit before my journey into Shropshire, which has been delayed by
delays and disappointments to me out of the country." The end is as
follows: "My most humble service pray to Sir William Trumbull, and your
good father and mother, whilst I can assure you from hence all the world
here are your servants and friends. I know not but I may see you very
suddenly at Binfield after all my broken promises."[176] Instead, therefore,
of Wycherley being annoyed at Pope's refusal to accept his invitation, it was
Wycherley who was designing to visit Pope; and instead of his persisting to
take ill any part of his friend's conduct, his language was throughout
expressive of cordiality and kindness.
The first intimation of a rupture is in a letter of Pope to Cromwell, on
August 21, 1710, in which he says, "Since Mr. Wycherley left London, I
have not heard a word from him, though just before, and once since, I writ
to him, and though I know myself guilty of no offence but of doing
sincerely just what he bid me." On October 28, he reverts to the subject, and
protests by everything that is holy that he is not acquainted with the cause
of the estrangement. He goes on, however, to state that he did not suppose
any man could have been so suspicious as not to credit his own experience
of a friend, and avers that he had done nothing which deserved to be
concealed—a defence which seems to indicate a consciousness that
Wycherley had heard some disparaging report. It was subsequently asserted
by Pope's enemies, and never contradicted by Pope, that the alienation was
produced by a copy of satirical verses he had written on the man he affected
to caress. His offensive reply of May 2, to the genial letter of April 27,
might alone explain the resentment of Wycherley, if the ungracious answer
in its printed shape could be received as authentic. But I have shown that
the opening sentence, in which Pope regrets that his correspondent persisted
in taking ill his not accepting an invitation, is altogether fictitious, and with
the evidence before us in the critical epistle of November 29, 1707, that he
replaced his complimentary effusions by unvarnished truths, we may
suspect that the uncompromising tone of his final letter was softened in the
original, and that the published version is merely another instance of his
anxiety to conceal the deference he had shown to Wycherley before the
celebrity of the old dramatist had been eclipsed by the fame of the youthful
poet. The almost eastern style which Pope adopted towards him a year and a

half after the close of their correspondence, may be seen in one of his
genuine epistles to Cromwell, which was printed by Curll. "I am highly
pleased," the poet writes, November 12, 1711, "with the knowledge you
give me of Mr. Wycherley's present temper, which seems so favourable to
me. I shall ever have such a fund of affection for him, as to be agreeable to
myself when I am so to him, and cannot but be gay when he is in good
humour, as the surface of the earth, if you will pardon a poetical similitude,
is clearer or gloomier, just as the sun is brighter or more overcast."
Whatever may have caused the sun to be overcast, there could have been
little ground of complaint against Wycherley, or Pope would not have
fabricated the pretence that he had provoked his anger by declining an
invitation.
On the appearance of Theobald's edition of the Posthumous Works of
Wycherley, the poet poured out his indignation to Lord Oxford. "I foresaw,"
he said, October 6, 1729, "some dirty trick in connection with my friend
Wycherley's papers which they were publishing, and nothing can at once do
justice so well to him and to me, who was by him employed in them, as the
divulging of some parts of his and my letters." At the moment that he was
penning this denunciation against "dirty tricks in relation to Wycherley's
papers," though no trick had been practised, he was busily engaged in
aspersing his friend by garbling the papers he professed to divulge out of
justice to his memory. His motives were not malignant. He was simply
desirous to do credit to himself, but to effect this end he did not scruple to
falsify their private correspondence, and under the plea of justifying a man
who was in his grave, took advantage of his death to libel him in safety.
When with our scanty means of testing the fidelity of the letters, we find
that part of them were misplaced, distorted, and invented, the rest of the
series must be received with distrust, and some which cannot be proved to
be fabricated are among the most suspicious of the whole.
Where the originals of Pope's letters were in hostile hands, as was the case
with his letters to Cromwell and to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he was
compelled to be sparing in his operations. He omitted sentences and altered
phrases, but could not venture upon wholesale perversions of the truth. Of
the bulk of the letters he published we have neither the originals nor reliable
copies; but when we chance to light upon the materials from which he
worked, we find, as might be expected, that he was not more conscientious

in his use of them than in his reckless falsification of his correspondence
with Wycherley and Caryll. The volume of 1735 concludes with a letter
from Arbuthnot, dated July 17, 1734, and in the quarto of 1737 we have the
pretended reply of the poet. Among the Arbuthnot papers in the possession
of Mr. Baillie, is the actual answer sent by Pope, and it turns out that the
printed substitute is an elaborate composition that has hardly any
resemblance to the genuine text. He must have revised the letter of
Arbuthnot as well as remodelled his own. "I am almost displeased," he
remarks in the real, not in the counterfeit reply, "at your expression 'scarcely
any of those suspicions or jealousies which affect the truest friendships;' for
I know of not one on my part." He accordingly erased from Arbuthnot's
letter the expression he disapproved, and fathered upon him the unqualified
assertion, "I think since our first acquaintance there has not been any of
those little suspicions or jealousies that often affect the sincerest
friendships." To what extent he may have carried this principle of altering
the opinions of his correspondents to fit his personal views cannot be
discovered. A single instance of the artifice in a man so unscrupulous
destroys all confidence in the documents which rest on his unsupported
authority, and there is often reason to suspect that he gives us not what
others said, but what he thought it advantageous to himself that they should
say.
In comparison with this perversion of facts, the attempt of Pope to improve
his letters, regarded as literary productions, would be of trifling moment, if
it did not present another example of the audacious falsehoods he imposed
upon the world. Speaking in the preface to the quarto of 1737 of the
correspondence he reprinted from what he calls the surreptitious editions,
he says "for the chasms in it, we had not the means to supply them, the
author having destroyed too many letters to preserve a series." He intends
us to infer that the selection was not his own, though the passage is virtually
an admission that the collection of P. T. was the collection deposited with
Lord Oxford, or there could not have been such an identity between them as
that none of the gaps in the P. T. volume could be filled up from the bound
book in the Oxford library. "Nor," he continues, "would he go about to
amend them, except by the omission of some passages improper, or at least
impertinent to be divulged to the public, or of such entire letters as were
either not his, or not approved of by him." He would have us believe that

they had been dragged before the world in their first crude state, without a
single subsequent touch from his pen, though he had previously amended
them with studious care—had culled the best passages, blended extracts
from two or three letters into one, and constantly corrected composition
which had been originally laboured. Some of his ambitious epistles, like his
letter to Arbuthnot of July 26, 1734, were no doubt mere essays, which
were only written when they were committed to the press. In the quarto of
1741, he repeated the device he had employed in the quarto of 1737. He
pretended in both cases that the correspondence he printed himself had been
printed by others without his knowledge, and in defiance of his wish. He
next adopted and republished the letters he affected to repudiate, and having
already revised them to the uttermost, asserted that he could not be induced
to revise them at all. So completely had truth with him been swallowed up
in vanity. "Had he," he tells us in the preface to the quarto of 1737, "sat
down with a design to draw his own picture, he could not have done it so
truly, for whoever sits for it, whether to himself or another, will inevitably
find his features more composed than his appear in these letters; but if an
author's hand, like a painter's, be more distinguishable in a slight sketch
than a finished picture, this very carelessness will make them the better
known from such counterfeits as have been, and may be, imputed to him."
He did everything he professed to have left undone. The careless sketch was
a studied portrait got up for exhibition, and the minutest details had been
disposed with a view to flatter the likeness and increase the effect.
In the conduct of Pope to Bolingbroke there are points of resemblance to his
conduct in the case of the correspondence, which render the evidence a
material supplement to the present inquiry. Bolingbroke allowed him to get
put into type the political letters on "The Spirit of Patriotism," on "The Idea
of a Patriot King," and on "The State of Parties," under the promise that the
pamphlet should be confined to five or six persons, who were named by the
author. Pope fulfilled his pledge by causing a separate edition of 1500
copies to be struck off, and enjoined the printer to lay by the sheets "with
great secresy till further orders."[177] In the dangerous manœuvre of printing
covertly the original volume of the Swift correspondence which he sent to
the Dean, he may, perhaps, have remained concealed from the inferior
agents, and have conducted the details of the business through the medium
of Worsdale. In the instance of the pamphlet he was not afraid to put

himself into the power of the printer, who, says Bolingbroke, "kept his word
with him better than he kept his with his friend."[178] The poet not only
committed a breach of trust in preparing a work for sale which he received
upon the condition that it should remain strictly private, but he had the
boldness to tamper with the substance of the work, and in the impression,
which was ultimately designed for the public, "he took upon him to divide
the subject, and to alter and omit passages according to the suggestions of
his own fancy."[179] From Warburton we learn that Pope "frequently told his
acquaintance that Lord Bolingbroke would at his death leave his writings to
his disposal,"[180] and the changes he introduced by anticipation into the
single instalment within his power show the manner in which he designed
to discharge his functions, and strengthen the suspicion that he may have
falsified the letters of his correspondents as well as his own. Johnson, in
censuring Lyttelton for publishing the posthumous edition of Thomson's
poem on "Liberty," in an abridged form, condemns a practice "which, as it
has a manifest tendency to lessen the confidence of society, and to confound
the characters of authors, by making one man write by the judgment of
another, cannot be justified by any supposed propriety of the alteration or
kindness of the friend."[181] The freedom used by Pope was especially
reprehensible from the concealment he practised. The copy of the pamphlet
which he sent to Bolingbroke, and the other privileged persons, did not
exhibit the modified text, and though the occurrence took place several
years before the death of the poet he never, in all that time, whispered one
word upon the subject to the author of the tracts, from which it is clear that
he neither intended him to learn what he had done, nor expected him to
approve the changes he had made. It was not till he was in his grave that his
deception was divulged by the application of the printer to Bolingbroke for
instructions how to dispose of the impression. Warburton argued that Pope
must have wished his friend to have a knowledge of the clandestine edition
and clandestine alterations, or he would have ordered the work to be
destroyed during his final illness,[182] as if, in the lingering hope that life
would be protracted a little longer, it had not happened times out of number
that men had deferred burning tale-telling papers till their minds were
diverted from the duty by the lassitude of sickness, and as if such
procrastination was not in the highest degree probable when the poet had
been first at the pains of revising the work, and next at the cost of an edition

of 1500 copies.[183] He may even have believed that his secret, under any
circumstances, was safe with the printer. A theory which has been verified
by endless examples is a more credible alternative than to assume that Pope
had designed to leave behind him evidences of a dishonesty which he had
not dared to disclose during years of familiar intercourse, and which,
notwithstanding that Bolingbroke was perpetually at his side, he did not
venture to reveal in his dying hours when he might have palliated his
motives, and obtained pardon for his fault. But if we admit the supposition
of Warburton, and allow that he had ultimately arrived at the resolution of
suffering the course of events to betray the misdoings he had not the
courage to confess, there will still remain the facts, which Warburton never
questioned, that he pretended to Bolingbroke that some half dozen copies
had alone been printed, when he had printed a distinct edition of 1500; that
he handed an impression to the author which was taken faithfully from the
manuscript, while the impression he hid from him was garbled and
adulterated; and that, having concealed the double treachery for years, he
left the world without an allusion to the wrongful act he had committed.
Johnson justly considered that the resentment of Bolingbroke at this
violation of faith was with reason "more acrimonious in proportion as the
violator had been more trusted or loved," for the professions which win
confidence increase the baseness of betraying it; but with equal justice
Johnson condemned the "thirst for vengeance" which excited Bolingbroke
"to blast the memory" of the man who had lived with him in a constant
interchange of affection, and who, both in public and private, had paid him
the tribute of his heartiest homage and applause.[184]
The scrutiny to which the lives of celebrated men are subjected is one of the
severest penalties they pay for fame. Their private weaknesses have often
been exposed with wanton cruelty; but the delinquencies of Pope are public
acts by which he himself has challenged inquiry. He endeavoured to pass
off a sophisticated correspondence for genuine, and the interests of truth
demand that the deception should be exposed. He laboured to throw his
own misdoings upon innocent men, and justice requires that his victims
should be absolved, and the discredit, augmented beyond measure by the
perfidy and deceit, be laid where it is due. He was the bitter satirist of
individuals out of an assumed indignation at everything base, and his claim
to adopt this lofty strain, his sincerity in it, and his fairness, are all involved

in his personal dealings. The office of an editor is neither that of an
advocate nor of an accuser. He is a judge, whose only client is truth. I have
endeavoured to investigate the facts with impartiality, and narrate them with
fidelity, and if I have anywhere failed, it is from unconscious, not from
wilful error; but having once been satisfied of the guilt of Pope, I do not
pretend to think that genius is an extenuation of rascality. He rightly refused
others the benefit of the plea, and said in the Essay on Man, whoever is
"wickedly wise is but the more a fool, the more a knave." The sketch which
Lord Macaulay has given of his character, when describing his conduct on
the appearance of Tickell's version of the first book of the Iliad, is not too
severe for the treacheries and falsehoods which were the instruments of his
malevolence, cowardice and vanity. "An odious suspicion had sprung up in
the mind of Pope. He fancied, and he soon firmly believed, that there was a
deep conspiracy against his fame and his fortunes. The work on which he
had staked his reputation was to be depreciated. The subscription, on which
rested his hopes of a competence, was to be defeated. With this view,
Addison had made a rival translation; Tickell had consented to father it, and
the wits at Button's had consented to puff it. We do not accuse Pope of
bringing an accusation which he knew to be false. We have not the smallest
doubt that he believed it to be true; and the evidence on which he believed it
he found in his own bad heart. His own life was one long series of tricks, as
mean and as malicious as that of which he had suspected Addison and
Tickell. He was all stiletto and mask. To injure, to insult, and to save
himself from the consequences of injury and insult by lying and
equivocating, was the habit of his life. He published a lampoon on the Duke
of Chandos; he was taxed with it; and he lied and equivocated. He
published a lampoon on Aaron Hill; he was taxed with it; and he lied and
equivocated. He published a still fouler lampoon on Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu; he was taxed with it; and he lied with more than usual effrontery
and vehemence. He puffed himself, and abused his enemies, under feigned
names. He robbed himself of his own letters, and then raised the hue and
cry after them. Besides his frauds of malignity, of fear, of interest, and of
vanity, there were frauds which he seems to have committed from a love of
fraud alone. He had a habit of stratagem, a pleasure in outwitting all who
came near him. Whatever his object might be, the indirect road to it was
that which he preferred. For Bolingbroke, Pope undoubtedly felt as much
love and veneration as it was in his nature to feel for any human being. Yet

Pope was scarcely dead, when it was discovered that from no motive,
except the mere love of artifice, he had been guilty of an act of gross
perfidy to Bolingbroke."[185] Many of the falsehoods and perfidies I have
detailed have come to light since Macaulay wrote, and there are more
behind which will appear in their proper place in Pope's life and works.
There have been no lack of men whose moral conduct was in an almost
inverse ratio with their intellectual gifts; but there never was an author of
equal genius, who habitually practised such despicable deceptions for such
paltry purposes;

"Who for this end would earn a lasting name,
Join moral infamy to mental fame,
Would tear aside the friendly veil of night
To stand degraded in a blaze of light."

His crooked policy was ineffectual, even when his worst devices were
undetected. Few believed that he was vexed at the publication of his letters,
or that they were careless effusions, or that the virtues he paraded in them
were the just reflection of his mind. Both men and compositions will seem
to be what they are, and the poet's protestations did not prevent the world
from discovering that his epistles were laboured, that many of his
sentiments were feigned, and that he eagerly promoted the publications he
pretended to deplore.
Having finished a discussion which from its nature will be dull to many,
and from its length will be wearisome to all, I turn to speak of the present
edition of the Correspondence. The last edition published in the lifetime of
Pope comprised, according to Mr. Croker's calculation, 354 letters. These,
Mr. Croker states, were increased by Warburton to 384, by Warton to 502,
by Bowles to 644, and by Roscoe to 708, or exactly double the number that
were included in the last edition of the poet. The present edition will contain
more new letters than were collected by Warburton, Warton, Bowles, and
Roscoe combined, and many of them are of immeasurably greater
importance in determining the character and conduct of Pope than any
which have previously appeared. There are others among them which,
under ordinary circumstances, would be too trivial to be printed; but
particulars, which are separately insignificant, have assisted in dispelling
some of the mystery or exposing some of the deceptions in which it was the

poet's pleasure to involve his life, and as nobody can pronounce with
certainty what facts may be of service to future inquirers, I have thought it
better to add a few superfluous pages than to run the risk of rejecting
materials which may prove useful hereafter. I have, in like manner, admitted
letters which had a biographical value, although they were neither written
by Pope nor to him. Second-hand statements cannot supply the place of
authentic documents, and to have dissociated the subsidiary from the main
correspondence would have frequently deprived both of the increased
importance they derive from being read in connection.
In Pope's own, and every succeeding edition, the letters are divided into
groups. The arrangement of the entire collection in one consecutive
chronological series is, in his case, neither desirable nor possible. It is not
desirable because a unity of subject often runs through his intercourse with
particular persons, and the interposition of the topics upon which he
touched with other friends, far from presenting a connected view of his
thoughts and actions, would reduce the whole to a medley of disjointed
fragments. It is not possible because many of his letters are undated, and,
though we can frequently determine their place in each class, there are no
means of settling their order when all the letters of doubtful date are thrown
together. In numerous instances the year in which they were written can at
most be discovered, and the attempt to fix their precedency within that
period would be attended with as much uncertainty as if they were shuffled
like a pack of cards.
The liberties which Pope took with his correspondence in preparing it for
publication diminish the authority of that extensive portion of it which we
owe to his printed or manuscript copies alone, and have rendered it essential
to specify the source from which, every letter is derived. Where the letter
was sent to one person and was published by Pope as if it had been
addressed to another, it is inserted in its proper place, and again in the group
to which it was falsely assigned by the writer. Unless the correspondence
was exhibited in its double form, a just idea could not easily be obtained of
the shape and colour he imparted to it, or of the relations which he
pretended to have maintained with his contemporaries. Where the direction
was not changed, and we possess both the genuine and the corrected letter,
the true version is given in the text, and any variations in his amended
version which seemed worthy of notice are pointed out in the notes. Even

here, from the nature and extent of the alterations, it has sometimes been
necessary to preserve a letter in its twofold state.
The greater part of the collection of 1735 was reproduced in the quarto of
1737; but as the texts are not always identical the earliest has been
followed, except where there is manifestly an error of the press, or where
the quarto supplies passages which are not in the volume of P. T. I had once
intended to subjoin the whole of the various readings at the foot of the page.
I abandoned the design upon finding that the vast majority of them were
verbal, and apparently unimportant changes, which could only have
interested the few curious inquirers who would always have recourse to the
original editions. I have not the less carefully collated these original
editions throughout, and have thus got rid of numerous mistakes which had
become traditional in the subsequent reprints. The notes signed "Pope,
1735," were first published in the P. T. collection, with the exception of a
few in the Wycherley group, which, though they are only known to us
through the P. T. volume, had undoubtedly appeared in 1729. Many of the P.
T. notes were transferred to the authorised impression of 1737, and they
were nearly all in the copies which the poet delivered to Warburton for
posthumous publication. The notes signed "Pope, 1737," were added in the
quarto of that year; and those signed "Cooper, 1737," are from the octavos
which bear the name of this bookseller on the title-page.
Language was current in Pope's day which would be considered grossly
indelicate in ours, and though he abounds in refined and elevated strains, he
was yet among the worst offenders of his time. "He and Swift," says Dr.
Johnson, "had an unnatural delight in ideas physically impure, such as
every other tongue utters with unwillingness, and of which every ear
shrinks from the mention." His correspondence is not altogether free from
the defect; but no editor can now efface the blots which Warburton, Warton,
and Bowles felt bound to preserve. Roscoe set aside a few sentences, and
showed by his inconsistency the uselessness of the process. He confined his
expurgations to the part of Pope's works which were little read, and where
the omissions in consequence would rarely be remarked; but did not venture
to disturb a single syllable of the far more numerous and more
objectionable passages which occur in the pieces that are in the hands of all
the world. The stains which sully so much of our beautiful literature are
unhappily indelible, and it could answer no useful end to adopt the

capricious principle of Roscoe in removing the lesser blemishes which are
seldom noticed, and leaving the worst and most conspicuous defilements
undisturbed. More freedom may be used with the unpublished letters; but I
have exercised the discretion very sparingly, and have not excluded every
coarse word, phrase, or idea, when it was characteristic of the age, the man,
and his writings, and when, though an offence against taste, it could not be
injurious to morals.
I have mentioned at the several places where their contributions are
inserted, the numerous persons to whose liberality Mr. Croker and myself
have been obliged for materials and assistance. The services rendered by
Mr. Dilke require to be noticed here. Until he published his articles in the
Athenæum little had been added to our knowledge of Pope since Johnson
produced his masterly Life. The truths which Mr. Dilke established, and the
errors he dissipated, were not more important than the change he gave to
the former superficial investigations. His rigid scrutiny became the standard
for every subsequent inquirer. He loved his studies for their own sake, and
never did a man of letters work less for personal ends. He at once placed at
my disposal his Caryll correspondence, which he had carefully annotated,
and the explanation of all its obscure allusions are due to him. He supplied
me with a multitude of letters which were widely scattered through books
and periodicals, and collated others with the originals in the British
Museum and Bodleian Library. Large masses of the letters are undated, or
dated falsely, and he was at the labour of fixing dates which sometimes
appeared to defy conjecture. He lent me his rare editions, was unwearied in
answering questions, in solving difficulties, in revising proofs, and in
communicating, without reserve, his stores of information. He was then
suffering from a long and painful illness, and he died when only the first
volume of correspondence was printed, or I should have had his generous
and invaluable aid to the end.
Mr. Bowles remarked in the course of the skirmish of pamphlets he
provoked, that the editorship of Pope's works had been to no one a bed of
roses. For the larger part of the discomforts his commentators may have
endured, Pope himself was responsible. His mysteries, his double-dealings,
his falsifications, and his quarrels have rendered half the acts of his life a
fertile theme for debate. None of the angry controversialists who mingled
fifty years ago in the fray had prepared properly for the contest, and the

insolence and assumption, the virulence and the dogmatism, were
commonly greatest with the persons whose acquaintance with the subject
was the least. The intemperate, and usually ignorant warfare, left nearly all
the vexed questions in confusion, and it is only in recent years that a new
generation of dispassionate students have begun to replace the blunders of
sciolism by facts. In the many battles yet to be fought over Pope there will
be this advantage which will be certain to produce solid results, that the
critic will be in possession of the materials for judgment, and will not have
to write without knowledge of his cause.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, Vol. iii. p. 368.
[2] Marchmont Papers, Vol. ii. p. 335.
[3] Nichols, Lit. Anec. Vol. ii. p. 165.
[4] Johnson, Lives of the Poets, Vol. iii. p. 72.
[5] Prior's Life of Malone, p. 385.
[6] Prior's Malone, p. 370.
[7] Hurd said of Warburton's Pope, that "it was the best edition that was ever given of any classic."
[8] Imit. Bk. i. Epist. vi. ver. 87.
[9] This last sentence was added by Warburton in the later editions of his Pope.
[10] Nichols, Lit. Anec. Vol. IV. p. 429-437.
[11] Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Cunningham, Vol. vi. p. 422.
[12] De Quincey, Works, ed. 1863. Vol. xv. p. 137. He usually maintained the opposite view, and
sided altogether with the "they who could see nothing in Pope but 'dust a little gilt.'" "There is
nothing," he says, "Pope would not have sacrificed, not the most solemn of his opinions, nor the
most pathetic memorial from his personal experiences, in return for a sufficient consideration, which
consideration meant always with him poetic effect. Simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of
a sincere thought, or a sincere emotion. Nothing that ever he uttered, were it even a prayer to God,
but he had a fancy for reading it backwards. And he was evermore false, not as loving or preferring
falsehood, but as one who could not in his heart perceive much real difference between what people
affected to call falsehood, and what they affected to call truth."
[13] Macaulay's Essays, 1 Vol. ed. p. 719.
[14] Athenæum, July 8, 1854, Sept. 1, Sept. 8, and Sept. 15, 1860.
[15] Mrs. Thomas to Cromwell, June 27, 1727.

[16] "Lives of the Poets," edited by Cunningham, Vol. III. p. 62.
[17] "The Curlliad," p. 22.
[18] Vol. I. p. xxxviii. Where no other work is mentioned, the references throughout this Introduction
are to the present edition of Pope's Correspondence.
[19] Mr. Croker and myself have been indebted to the kindness of the present Marquess of Bath for
the use of the Oxford papers preserved at Longleat. They are most important for the light they throw
upon the character and proceedings of Pope.
[20] Lord Oxford to Pope, Oct. 9, 1729.
[21] Pope to Lord Oxford, Oct. 16, 1729.
[22] Pope to Swift, Nov. 28, 1729.
[23] "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 62.
[24] Vol. I. p. xxxvii.
[25] The father was probably Lord Digby, and the letters were those addressed to the Hon. Robert
Digby, who died in April, 1726.
[26] Vol. I. pp. xxxvii, xxxviii.
[27] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 423.
[28] Warton's "Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 255.
[29] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 424.
[30] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 425.
[31] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 421, 423.
[32] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 441.
[33] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 422.
[34] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 422.
[35] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 425, 441.
[36] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 442.
[37] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 432.
[38] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 434.
[39] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 443.
[40] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 428.
[41] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 428, 433.
[42] "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 61. Mr. Roscoe says that no evidence for this statement appears.
Johnson is himself the evidence. He went to London in 1737, when he was 28 years of age, to try his
fortunes as an author, and became intimate with Savage, who was the ally of Pope, with Dodsley,

who published the authentic edition of the poet's correspondence, and with numerous other persons
from whom he was likely to have received reliable information upon a fact so recent. It is not to be
supposed that Johnson imagined or invented a circumstance which there is nothing to discredit.
[43] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 433, 434.
[44] Though the work is printed in two thin volumes, it was always done up as one.
[45] "Notes and Queries," No. 260, p. 485. This article is from the same pen as the articles on Pope's
correspondence in the "Athenæum."
[46] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 430. The statement occurs in a private note written at the time to Smythe,
before the bookseller had any idea of appealing to the public, or suspected that the letters were
printed by Pope himself.
[47] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 442.
[48] Vol. I. p. xxxvi.
[49] Vol. I. pp. xl. xli. All the statements to which I have referred occur in this preface of Pope to the
quarto of 1737, and some of them in many other places besides.
[50] Vol. I. p. xxxvii. Appendix, p. 419.
[51] Vol. I. p. xxxv.
[52] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 420.
[53] Vol. I. p. xxxviii. The anonymous friend was put in the place of Lord Oxford. Half the notes
relate to the Wycherley manuscripts in the Harley library, and could only have proceeded from the
author of that fiction. Pope's official editor, Warburton, signed all the notes with Pope's name.
[54] Vol. I. p. xxxv.
[55] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 445.
[56] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 444.
[57] This circumstance at once attracted the attention of Swift. "I detest the House of Lords," he
wrote to Lady Betty Germain, from Dublin, June 8, 1735, "for their indulgence to such a profligate,
prostitute villain as Curll; but am at a loss how he could procure any letters written to Mr. Pope,
although by the vanity or indiscretion of correspondents the rogue might have picked up some that
went from him. Those letters have not yet been sent hither; therefore I can form no judgment on
them." Swift's detestation of the House of Lords for not punishing a man who was proved to be
innocent of the offence with which he was charged, is an instance of the kind of justice to be
expected from violent partisans.
[58] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 445.
[59] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 429.
[60] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 429, 445.
[61] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 439.
[62] P. T. said 380, but the 3 was probably a misprint for 4.

[63] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 429.
[64] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 430.
[65] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 423.
[66] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 438. Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Vol. II. p. 261.
[67] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 435.
[68] Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 61.
[69] "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence," 12mo. Vol. II. p. vi.
[70] vol. I. Appendix, p. 446.
[71] vol. I. Appendix, p. 430.
[72] vol. I. Appendix, p. 442.
[73] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 447.
[74] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 431, 435.
[75] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 431.
[76] Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 61.
[77] "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence," 12mo. Vol. III. p. xii. Vol. I. Appendix, p. 439.
[78] The "Athenæum" of Sept. 8, 1860.
[79] When Pope put forth his preface to the quarto he could not have intended to disguise that he was
the writer of the "Narrative," or he would have been at greater pains to vary his language. If the
general resemblance had been less marked, an invention common to both productions would reveal
their common origin. In the "Narrative" we are informed that the complete collection of Pope's had
been copied into a couple of books before Theobald published his edition of Wycherley's
posthumous works, and that it was from these manuscript books that the Wycherley correspondence
was transcribed for press. This assertion was untrue. Theobald's volume came out in 1728, while
Pope's collection, as appears from his announcements to Lord Oxford, was still in the process of
formation in September, 1729, and he was only "causing it to be fairly written" in October, after his
own Wycherley volume had passed through the press. The false account is repeated in the preface to
the quarto, where we are told that the posthumous works of Wycherley were printed the year after the
copy of Pope's collection of letters had been deposited in the library of Lord Oxford, which throws
back the deposit of the letters from the close of 1729 to 1727. Since the poet revived and
authenticated an anonymous fiction respecting his personal acts, he may reasonably be supposed to
have been the author of it. The object of the imposition was to uphold the tale he had advanced in his
Wycherley volume. He had ceased to state openly that the publication was the act of Lord Oxford;
but he wished to have it believed that the letters were in the keeping of his noble friend at the time,
and to leave the impression that the notion of printing them had not originated with himself.
[80] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 420.
[81] Vol. I. p. xxxix.
[82] Warton's Pope, Vol. II. p. 339.

[83] "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 63.
[84] "Athenæum," Sept. 8, 1860.
[85] Maloniana, p. 385.
[86] "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 62.
[87] Vol. I. p. 417.
[88] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 430, 431, 443.
[89] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 431.
[90] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 431, 443.
[91] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 443.
[92] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 444, 445.
[93] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 431.
[94] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 432.
[95] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 423, 447.
[96] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 444.
[97] From a letter which Lord Oxford addressed to Swift on June 19, 1735, he would appear to have
known no more than the rest of the public. "Master Pope," he writes, "is under persecution from
Curll, who has by some means (wicked ones most certainly) got hold of some of Pope's private
letters, which he has printed, and threatens more."
[98] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 447.
[99] "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence," 12mo. Vol. III, p. x.
[100] Pope to Buckley, July 13, [1735].
[101] Art. Atterbury in "A General Biographical Dictionary translated from Bayle, interspersed with
several thousand lives never before published. By Rev. J. P. Bernard, Rev. T. Birch, Mr. John
Lockman, and other hands." Vol II. p. 447.
[102] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 447.
[103] Pope to Fortescue, March 26, 1736, and April, 1736.
[104] Pope to Allen, June 5 and Nov. 6, 1736.
[105] Pope to Allen, Nov. 6, 1736.
[106] Pope to Fortescue, April, 1736.
[107] Pope to Allen, Nov. 6, 1736.
[108] Chancery Bill, Dodsley v. Watson.
[109] Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 63.

[110] Ruffhead's "Life of Pope," p. 465.
[111] Vol. I. Appendix, pp. 423, 447.
[112] Pope to Allen, June 5, 1736.
[113] Pope probably kept back from the quarto the unpublished letters he inserted in the octavo that
their novelty might assist the sale of the edition which was intended to come out last. He would not
use the new letters without his unfailing pretext that they "were in such hands as to be in imminent
danger of being printed."
[114] These particulars are derived from the Chancery Bill Dodsley v. Watson, and from the
documents preserved by Pope's solicitor, Mr. Cole, and now in the possession of his successors in the
business, Messrs. Janssen and Co. I owe the extracts from Cole's papers to Mr. Dilke, who was
indebted for them to the present members of the firm.
[115] Vol. I. p. xliii.
[116] The words were introduced by the poet's friend and counsel Murray when he revised, or, in
legal phrase, settled the bill. The rough draft submitted to him is among the papers of Mr. Cole, and
the parallel passage only states that the letters written and received by Mr. Pope "having fallen into
the hands of several booksellers, they thought fit to print a surreptitious edition," which did not
preclude the supposition that one or more of the editions might be genuine. Whenever Pope,
throughout the business, could use equivocal language he always selected it.
[117] "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence," 12mo. Vol. III. p. xii.
[118] Vol. I. Appendix, p. 423, 447.
[119] Vol. I. p. 1. He is speaking of Curll's reprint, which has no letters that were not in the original P.
T. volume.
[120] Pope to Swift, May 17, 1739.
[121] Covent Garden Journal, No. 23, March 21, 1752.
[122] Warton's Pope, Vol. I. p. lv.
[123] The second edition of the octavo has a few more notes than the first edition. To distinguish it I
have quoted it by the title of Cooper 1737, from the name of the publisher. I had not seen the first
edition of the octavo till after Vol. I. of the Correspondence was printed, and I have erroneously
stated of one or two letters that they originally appeared in the Cooper edition of 1737 which had not
any new letters.
[124] De Quincey, Works, Vol. xv. p. 132.
[125] Works, Vol. vii. p. 66.
[126] Carruthers, Life of Pope, p. 442.
[127] Warburton's Pope, Ed. 1753, Vol. IX. p. 111.
[128] Pope to Lord Orrery, March, 1737.
[129] Pope to Lord Orrery, March, 1737.

[130] It is among the papers of his friend Lord Bathurst. The letter is undated, and was published
without any date by Curll. When Pope reproduced it in the quarto of 1737, he dated it August, 1723;
and in the quarto of 1741 he changed the date to January, 1723, which must be incorrect, since
Bolingbroke was then abroad, and did not return to England till June. Swift's reply is dated
September 20, and as it was between this period and June that the joint letter must have been written,
August is either the true date, or a close approximation to it.
[131] Pope to Lord Orrery, March, 1737.
[132] Mrs. Whiteway to Lord Orrery.
[133] It is stated in a note to the Dublin edition of the collection of 1741 that the original of
Bolingbroke's appendix had been discovered among Swift's papers since the publication of the letter
by Curll.
[134] Lord Orrery to Pope, Oct. 4, 1738.
[135] Pope to Mr. Nugent, August 14, 1740. This letter was first published in the "Gentleman's
Magazine" for August, 1849. It is printed, together with the other letters on the subject, among the
Pope and Swift correspondence in this edition.
[136] The earliest of the three letters bears in the body of the work, the heading "Mr. Gay to Dr.
Swift;" but in the Table of Contents it is entitled "From Mr. Gay and Mr. Pope," and the language in
portions of the letter itself shows that it was the production of both.
[137] "I never," said the poet to Caryll, November 19, 1712, "kept any copies of such stuff as I
write," which would be decisive of his custom at that early date, if much reliance could be placed on
his word. In 1716 he commenced correspondence with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and afterwards
published several of the letters among his "Letters to Ladies." He was then at enmity with her, and as
she retained the originals, he must either have borrowed them prior to the quarrel for the purpose of
copying them, or else must have copied them before they were sent. There is no direct evidence to
show at what time he commenced the practice of transcribing letters; but at the close of 1726 he
began to compile the collection of 1735, and thenceforward he was sure to let nothing escape which
could contribute to his design.
[138] Mrs. Whiteway to Lord Orrery.
[139] Dr. Hawkesworth published a letter from Swift to Pope, introducing his cousin, Mr. D. Swift,
and three more were published by Mr. D. Swift himself. He does not say by what means he obtained
them, but they form part of a collection of some seventy stray letters addressed by Swift to thirty or
forty different persons, who had certainly not returned them.
[140] Pope to Lord Oxford, Dec. 14, 1725.
[141] Pope to Lord Oxford, Dec. 14, 1725.
[142] Nichols's "Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century," Vol. V. p. 379.
[143] Birch MSS. Brit. Mus., quoted in Warton's Pope, Vol. II. p. 339. When Mr. Gerrard was about
to return to Ireland from Bath, Pope wrote to him, May 17, 1740, to say that he had found another
conveyance for the letter he had intended to send by him to Swift. Mr. Gerrard may nevertheless
have carried over the printed correspondence, which would not have been openly entrusted to him by
Pope, who professed to know nothing about it. The poet may have thought upon reflection that it
would look less suspicious if his avowed letter and the anonymous parcel were not transmitted by the
same bearer.

[144] Mrs. Whiteway to Lord Orrery.
[145] Pope to Mr. Nugent, March 26, 1740, and Mr. Nugent to Mrs. Whiteway, April 2, 1740.
[146] Pope to Mr. Nugent, August 14, 1740.
[147] Ruffhead's "Life of Pope," p. 469. The letter to Allen was not published till twenty-five years
after Pope's death.
[148] Millar v. Taylor, Burrow's Reports, Vol. IV. p. 2397.
[149] "Athenæum" for Sept. 15, 1860.
[150] "Whereas there is an impression of certain letters between Dr. Swift and Mr. Pope openly
printed in Dublin without Mr. Pope's consent, and there is reason to think the same hath been, or will
be done clandestinely in London, notice is hereby given that they will be speedily published with
several additional letters, &c., composing altogether a second volume of his works in
prose."—"London Daily Post" for March 24, 1741, quoted in the "Athenæum" for September 15,
1860. The advertisement displays the same cautious phraseology as was employed in the prefatory
notice to the quarto, and speaks of the Dublin volume as only printed, not published. One motive
which probably induced Faulkner to delay it was, that the work would have been incomplete without
the additional letters.
[151] Page 89 in the quarto bears, in the cancelled division, the signature M., and the later page 89
has the signature N. The cause of the difference is plain. It is the ordinary habit to begin the body of
a work on sheet B, and reserve the signature A, for the preliminary matter. This is the method
adopted with the three previous quarto volumes of Pope's works, and was followed in the original
quarto impression of the correspondence; but after the poet had cancelled the beginning of the
volume, the sheet commonly marked B was in the second state of the quarto marked A, which
occasioned the usual sheet N to become M. The discrepancy is an additional proof that the opening
sheets had been cancelled and reprinted.
[152] There were probably minor cancels which did not disturb the general arrangement, as at page
124, where there is a note which purports to be copied from the Dublin edition. The final sheet of all
was evidently printed after Faulkner's volume was in type.
[153] Pope to Lord Orrery, March, 1737.
[154] Curll, who delivered his answer upon oath, was no doubt aware that the work was not first
published in Dublin. He therefore used the evasive word "printed," and left it to his opponents to
detect the fallacy. The methods, however, by which Pope had obtained his priority would not permit
him to plead it, nor was he likely, by mooting the question, to risk the revelation of his plot.
[155] Atkyns's Reports, Vol. II. p. 342.
[156] The other counsel were Sir Dudley Ryder, then Attorney-General, and Mr. Noel. They all paid
Pope the tribute of refusing their fees.
[157] Tonson v. Collins, Blackstone's Reports, Vol. I. p. 311.
[158] Millar v. Taylor, Burrow's Reports, Vol. IV. p. 2396. "I know," Lord Mansfield observed, "that
Mr. Pope had no paper upon which the letters were written," which means that he had received this
assurance from Pope, and supposed it to be true. In one particular the memory of Lord Mansfield
deceived him. Blackstone on the authority of the preface to the quarto of 1741, stated, while arguing
the case of Tonson v. Collins, that the letters "were published with the connivance at least, if not

under the direction of Swift," to which Lord Mansfield replied, "Certainly not. Dr. Swift disclaimed
it, and was extremely angry." But this is opposed to the united evidence of Mrs. Whiteway, Faulkner,
and Pope, who all concur in testifying that Swift consented to the publication.
[159] Mrs. Whiteway to Lord Orrery.
[160] Pope to Caryll, Feb. 3, 1729. Pope to Swift, March 23, 1737.
[161] To Lord Orrery, March, 1737. "His humanity, his charity, his condescension, his candour are
equal to his wit, and require as good and true a taste to be equally valued. When all this must die, I
would gladly have been the recorder of so great a part of it as shines in his letters to me, and of
which my own are but as so many acknowledgements."
[162] Pope to Nugent, August 14, 1740.
[163] The statement is recorded by Dr. Birch in his Journal, May 14, 1751. He received the
information from Dr. Heberden, who was then attending Lord Bolingbroke in his last illness.
[164] "All's Well that Ends Well." Act II. Scene 2.
[165] In September, 1725, Arbuthnot had an illness which was expected to prove mortal. Pope, in
announcing his recovery to Swift on October 15, added, "He goes abroad again, and is more cheerful
than even health can make a man." He meant that Arbuthnot was able to go about again, which was
still one of the commonest significations of the phrase. Arbuthnot did not leave England, and from
his letter to Swift on October 17, it is clear that he had never entertained the design.
[166] Roscoe dated the letter 1726. Without recapitulating the circumstances, which are fatal to the
conjecture, it is enough to say that on September 10, 1726, Pope was unable to hold a pen, owing to
the injury he had received a day or two before when he was upset in Bolingbroke's carriage. It was
several weeks before he recovered the use of his hand. In the case of Digby there is the additional
difficulty that as the nurse did not die till after September, 1725, so he himself was dead before
September, 1726.
[167] I did not discover the letters of Wycherley at Longleat till after his correspondence with Pope
had been printed off.
[168] "Notes and Queries," No. 260, p. 485.
[169] Oxford MSS.
[170] Oxford MSS.
[171] "Notes and Queries," No. 260, p. 485.
[172] "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 9.
[173] Oxford MSS. The rest of the letter is taken up with an account of some religious fanatics.
[174] "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 10.
[175] The general impression produced by the correspondence was expressed by Spence, when he
observed to Pope, "People have pitied you extremely on reading your letters to Wycherley. Surely it
was a very difficult thing for you to keep well with him." "The most difficult thing in the world," was
Pope's reply. On another occasion he said to Spence, "Wycherley was really angry with me for
correcting his verses so much. I was extremely plagued, up and down, for almost two years with

them. However it went off pretty well at last." When Pope tampered with the written records which
he cited as evidence upon the question, we can place no reliance on his passing words.
[176] Oxford MSS.
[177] This statement is from the edition of the pamphlet published in 1749. Mallet was the nominal,
and Bolingbroke the real editor. The particulars of Pope's misconduct are related with much asperity
in a preliminary advertisement, of which the original, corrected by Bolingbroke, is in the British
Museum.
[178] Advertisement to the edition of 1749.
[179] Advertisement to the edition of 1749. In the same year Warburton put forth a short pamphlet
entitled, "A Letter to the Editor of the Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism," &c., which was reprinted,
in 1769, in the Appendix to Ruffhead's Life of Pope. In this reply Warburton extenuates, without
justifying, the act of his friend, and is more successful in his attack upon Bolingbroke for exposing
the treachery than in his defence of Pope for perpetrating it. The "Letter to the Editor of the Letters"
is chiefly valuable for its admission of the principal charges against the poet. His advocate, who had
seen both the genuine and corrupted edition of the phamphlet, allows that he had tampered with the
text. Bolingbroke had only specified alterations and ommissions. Warburton goes further, and speaks
of interpolations. In the body of Ruffhead's work it is stated that Pope altered nothing, and "only
struck out some insults on the throne and the then reigning monarch." But this is opposed to the
language of Warburton twenty years before, when the subject was fresh, and Bolingbroke was living.
—Ruffhead's Life of Pope, p. 526. Appendix, p. 573.
[180] "A Letter to the Editor of the Letters" in Ruffhead, p. 573.
[181] "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 232.
[182] "A Letter to the Editor of the Letters" in Ruffhead, p. 572.
[183] Warburton says that the expense had been considerable.—Ruffhead, 571.
[184] "Lives of the Poets," Vol. III. p. 92.
[185] Macaulay's Essays. I Vol. edit. p. 718.

THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

The clearness, the closeness, and the elegance of style with
which this preface is written, render it one of the best pieces of
prose in our language. It abounds in strong good sense, and
profound knowledge of life. It is written with such simplicity
that scarcely a single metaphor is to be found in it.—Warton.
This preface first appeared in the Works of Pope, 4to, 1717. The poet
submitted the manuscript to Atterbury, and the bishop thus replied in
December, 1716: "I return the preface, which I have read twice with
pleasure. The modesty and good sense there is in it, must please every one
that reads it. And since there is, as I said, nothing that can offend, I see not
why you should balance a moment about printing it, always provided that
there is nothing said there which you have occasion to unsay hereafter, of
which you yourself are the best, and the only judge. This is my sincere
opinion, which I give, because you ask it, and which I would not give,
though asked, but to a man I value as much as I do you, being sensible how
improper it is, on many accounts, for me to interpose in things of this
nature, which I never understood well, and now understand somewhat less
than ever I did." The suspicion which Atterbury hinted to his friend, that
some of the sentiments expressed in the preface might hereafter be quoted
against him, probably referred to the vaunts in the concluding paragraphs.
The poet paid no regard to the warning, and lived to violate nearly all his
professions. Johnson says that the preface is "written with great
sprightliness and elegance," but the praise of Warton is hyperbolical when
he terms it "one of the best pieces of prose in our language." The style is
often faulty, and never rises to any extraordinary pitch of excellence; the
"knowledge of life," which Warton calls "profound," is such as a little
experience would supply; and the "strong good sense" is interspersed with
obvious thoughts and erroneous maxims. The language of Atterbury is
sober, and even in writing to the author he was not betrayed by the partiality
of friendship into the exaggerations of Warton.

THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
I am inclined to think that both the writers of books, and the readers of
them, are generally not a little unreasonable in their expectations. The first
seem to fancy that the world must approve whatever they produce, and the
latter to imagine that authors are obliged to please them at any rate.
Methinks, as on the one hand, no single man is born with a right of
controlling the opinions of all the rest; so on the other, the world has no title
to demand, that the whole care and time of any particular person should be
sacrificed to its entertainment. Therefore I cannot but believe that writers
and readers are under equal obligations for as much fame, or pleasure, as
each affords the other.
Every one acknowledges, it would be a wild notion to expect perfection in
any work of man: and yet one would think the contrary was taken for
granted, by the judgment commonly passed upon poems. A critic supposes
he has done his part if he proves a writer to have failed in an expression, or
erred in any particular point: and can it then be wondered at if the poets in
general seem resolved not to own themselves in any error? For as long as
one side will make no allowances, the other will be brought to no
acknowledgments.[1]
I am afraid this extreme zeal on both sides is ill-placed; poetry and criticism
being by no means the universal concern of the world, but only the affair of
idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there. Yet
sure, upon the whole, a bad author deserves better usage than a bad critic:
for a writer's endeavour, for the most part, is to please his readers, and he
fails merely through the misfortune of an ill judgment; but such a critic's is
to put them out of humour; a design he could never go upon without both
that and an ill temper.[2]
I think a good deal may be said to extenuate the fault of bad poets. What we
call a genius, is hard to be distinguished by a man himself, from a strong
inclination: and if his genius be ever so great, he cannot at first discover it
any other way than by giving way to that prevalent propensity which

renders him the more liable to be mistaken. The only method he has is to
make the experiment by writing, and appealing to the judgment of others.
Now if he happens to write ill, which is certainly no sin in itself, he is
immediately made an object of ridicule. I wish we had the humanity to
reflect that even the worst authors might, in their endeavour to please us,
deserve something at our hands. We have no cause to quarrel with them but
for their obstinacy in persisting to write; and this too may admit of
alleviating circumstances. Their particular friends may be either ignorant or
insincere; and the rest of the world in general is too well-bred to shock them
with a truth, which generally their booksellers are the first that inform them
of. This happens not till they have spent too much of their time to apply to
any profession which might better fit their talents; and till such talents as
they have are so far discredited as to be but of small service to them. For,
what is the hardest case imaginable, the reputation of a man generally
depends upon the first steps he makes in the world; and people will
establish their opinion of us, from what we do at that season when we have
least judgment to direct us.
On the other hand, a good poet no sooner communicates his works with the
same desire of information, but it is imagined he is a vain young creature
given up to the ambition of fame, when perhaps the poor man is all the
while trembling with the fear of being ridiculous. If he is made to hope he
may please the world, he falls under very unlucky circumstances: for, from
the moment he prints, he must expect to hear no more truth than if he were
a prince or a beauty. If he has not very good sense (and indeed there are
twenty men of wit for one man of sense) his living thus in a course of
flattery may put him in no small danger of becoming a coxcomb: if he has,
he will consequently have so much diffidence as not to reap any great
satisfaction from his praise: since, if it be given to his face, it can scarce be
distinguished from flattery, and if in his absence, it is hard to be certain of
it. Were he sure to be commended by the best and most knowing, he is as
sure of being envied by the worst and most ignorant, which are the
majority;[3] for it is with a fine genius as with a fine fashion, all those are
displeased at it who are not able to follow it: and it is to be feared that
esteem will seldom do any man so much good, as ill-will does him harm.
Then there is a third class of people, who make the largest part of mankind,
—those of ordinary or indifferent capacities—; and these, to a man, will

hate or suspect him: a hundred honest gentlemen will dread him as a wit,
and a hundred innocent women as a satirist. In a word, whatever be his fate
in poetry, it is ten to one but he must give up all the reasonable aims of life
for it. There are indeed some advantages accruing from a genius to poetry,
and they are all I can think of,—the agreeable power of self-amusement
when a man is idle or alone; the privilege of being admitted into the best
company; and the freedom of saying as many careless things as other
people, without being so severely remarked upon.[4]
[5]
I believe if any one, early in his life, should contemplate the dangerous
fate of authors, he would scarce be of their number on any consideration.
The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth; and the present spirit of the learned
world is such, that to attempt to serve it any way one must have the
constancy of a martyr, and a resolution to suffer for its sake. 'I could wish
people would believe, what I am pretty certain they will not, that I have
been much less concerned about fame than I durst declare till this occasion,
when methinks I should find more credit than I could heretofore: since my
writings have had their fate already, and it is too late to think of
prepossessing the reader in their favour. I would plead it as some merit in
me, that the world has never been prepared for these trifles by prefaces,[6]
biassed by recommendations, dazzled with the names of great patrons,[7]
wheedled with fine reasons and pretences, or troubled with excuses.'[8] I
confess it was want of consideration that made me an author; I writ because
it amused me; I corrected because it was as pleasant to me to correct as to
write; and I published because I was told I might please such as it was a
credit to please. To what degree I have done this, I am really ignorant. I had
too much fondness for my productions to judge of them at first, and too
much judgment to be pleased with them at last. But I have reason to think
they can have no reputation which will continue long, or which deserves to
do so:[9] for they have always fallen short not only of what I read of others,
but even of my own ideas of poetry.
If any one should imagine I am not in earnest, I desire him to reflect, that
the ancients, to say the least of them, had as much genius as we; and that to
take more pains, and employ more time, cannot fail to produce more
complete pieces. They constantly applied themselves not only to that art,
but to that single branch of an art, to which their talent was most powerfully

bent; and it was the business of their lives to correct and finish their works
for posterity.[10] If we can pretend to have used the same industry, let us
expect the same immortality: though, if we took the same care, we should
still lie under a further misfortune: they writ in languages that became
universal and everlasting, while ours are extremely limited both in extent
and in duration. A mighty foundation for our pride! when the utmost we can
hope,[11] is but to be read in one island, and to be thrown aside at the end of
one age.
All that is left us is to recommend our productions by the imitation of the
ancients;[12] and it will be found true, that in every age, the highest
character for sense and learning has been obtained by those who have been
most indebted to them. For, to say truth, whatever is very good sense, must
have been common sense in all times; and what we call learning, is but the
knowledge of the sense of our predecessors. Therefore they who say our
thoughts are not our own, because they resemble the ancients, may as well
say our faces are not our own, because they are like our fathers: and,
indeed, it is very unreasonable that people should expect us to be scholars,
and yet be angry to find us so.[13]
I fairly confess that I have served myself all I could by reading; that I made
use of the judgment of authors dead and living; that I omitted no means in
my power to be informed of my errors, both by my friends and enemies:[14]
but the true reason these pieces are not more correct, is owing to the
consideration how short a time they, and I, have to live.[15] One may be
ashamed to consume half one's days in bringing sense and rhyme together:
and what critic can be so unreasonable, as not to leave a man time enough
for any more serious employment, or more agreeable amusement?
The only plea I shall use for the favour of the public, is, that I have as great
a respect for it as most authors have for themselves; and that I have
sacrificed much of my own self-love for its sake, in preventing not only
many mean things from seeing the light, but many which I thought
tolerable. 'I would not be like those authors, who forgive themselves some
particular lines for the sake of a whole poem, and vice versâ a whole poem
for the sake of some particular lines.'[16] I believe no one qualification is so
likely to make a good writer as the power of rejecting his own thoughts; and

it must be this, if any thing, that can give me a chance to be one. For what I
have published I can only hope to be pardoned; but for what I have burned I
deserve to be praised. On this account the world is under some obligation to
me, and owes me the justice in return to look upon no verses as mine that
are not inserted in this collection.[17] And perhaps nothing could make it
worth my while to own what are really so, but to avoid the imputation of so
many dull and immoral things, as partly by malice, and partly by ignorance,
have been ascribed to me. I must further acquit myself of the presumption
of having lent my name to recommend any Miscellanies,[18] or works of
other men;[19] a thing I never thought becoming a person who has hardly
credit enough to answer for his own.
In this office of collecting my pieces, I am altogether uncertain whether to
look upon myself as a man building a monument,[20] or burying the dead. If
time shall make it the former, may these poems, as long as they last, remain
as a testimony, that their author never made his talents subservient to the
mean and unworthy ends of party or self-interest; the gratification of public
prejudices or private passions; the flattery of the undeserving, or the insult
of the unfortunate. If I have written well, let it be considered that it is what
no man can do without good sense, a quality that not only renders one
capable of being a good writer, but a good man. And if I have made any
acquisition in the opinion of any one under the notion of the former, let it be
continued to me under no other title than that of the latter.[21]
But if this publication be only a more solemn funeral of my remains, I
desire it may be known that I die in charity, and in my senses, without any
murmurs against the justice of this age, or any mad appeals to posterity. I
declare I shall think the world in the right, and quietly submit to every truth
which time shall discover to the prejudice of these writings; not so much as
wishing so irrational a thing as that every body should be deceived merely
for my credit. However, I desire it may then be considered, that there are
very few things in this collection which were not written under the age of
five-and-twenty, so that my youth may be made, as it never fails to be in
executions, a case of compassion; that I was never so concerned about my
works as to vindicate them in print, believing if any thing was good it
would defend itself, and what was bad could never be defended; that I used
no artifice to raise or continue a reputation, depreciated no dead author I

was obliged to, bribed no living one with unjust praise, insulted no
adversary with ill language,[22] or, when I could not attack a rival's works,
encouraged reports against his morals. To conclude, if this volume perish,
let it serve as a warning to the critics not to take too much pains for the
future to destroy such things as will die of themselves; and a memento mori
to some of my vain contemporaries the poets, to teach them that when real
merit is wanting, it avails nothing to have been encouraged by the great,
commended by the eminent, and favoured by the public in general.[23]
Nov. 10,
1716.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] In all editions till that of Warburton it was thus: "For as long as one side despises a well meant
endeavour, the other will not be satisfied with a moderate approbation." The first sentence of the next
paragraph is expanded in the manuscript: "Indeed they both proceed in such a manner as if they
really believed that poetry was immediate inspiration. It were to be wished they would reflect that
this extraordinary zeal and fury is ill placed, poetry and criticism being by no means the universal
concern of the world. I do not say this to imitate those people who make a merit of undervaluing the
arts and qualifications without which they had never been taken notice of. I think poetry as useful as
any other art, because it is as entertaining, and therefore as well deserving of mankind."
[2] Until the edition of Warburton the reading was slightly different: "Yet sure upon the whole a bad
author deserves better usage than a bad critic; a man may be the former merely through the
misfortune of an ill judgment, but he cannot be the latter without both that and an ill temper."
[3] The instance of Pope himself is a refutation of his theory that the world was almost exclusively
composed of flatterers and detractors, and chiefly of the last. Where he could count the deniers of his
genius by tens he could number his admirers by thousands.
[4] What is here said of the privileges of the poetic character will not, I believe, bear the test of truth
and experience. Surely a poet is not particularly allowed "the freedom of saying careless things," and
his moral character and manners are to be estimated, as well as his talents, before he is entitled to a
certain station in society.—Bowles.
[5] In the MS. it followed thus: "For my part, I confess, had I seen things in this view at first, the
public had never been troubled either with my writings, or with this apology for them. I am sensible
how difficult it is to speak of one's self with decency: but when a man must speak of himself, the best
way is to speak truth of himself, or, he may depend upon it, others will do it for him. I will therefore
make this preface a general confession of all my thoughts of my own poetry, resolving with the same
freedom to expose myself, as it is in the power of any other to expose them. In the first place, I thank
God and nature that I was born with a love to poetry; for nothing more conduces to fill up all the
intervals of our time, or, if rightly used, to make the whole course of life entertaining: Cantantes licet
usque (minus via lædet). It is a vast happiness to possess the pleasures of the head, the only pleasures
in which a man is sufficient to himself, and the only part of him which, to his satisfaction, he can

employ all day long. The muses are amicæ omnium horarum; and, like our gay acquaintance, the
best company in the world as long as one expects no real service from them. I confess there was a
time when I was in love with myself, and my first productions were the children of self-love upon
innocence. I had made an epic poem, and panegyrics on all the princes in Europe, and thought
myself the greatest genius that ever was. I cannot but regret those delightful visions of my childhood,
which, like the fine colours we see when our eyes are shut, are vanished for ever. Many trials and sad
experience have so undeceived me by degrees, that I am utterly at a loss at what rate to value myself.
As for fame, I shall be glad of any I can get, and not repine at any I miss; and as for vanity, I have
enough to keep me from hanging myself, or even from wishing those hanged who would take it
away. It was this that made me write. The sense of my faults made me correct: besides that it was as
pleasant to me to correct as to write."—Warburton.
Spence relates that Pope said to Mr. Saville: "If I was to begin the world again, and knew just what I
do now, I would never write a verse." In the passage from his manuscript preface, he intimates that
he would have amused himself by writing poetry, but would have forborne to publish what he wrote.
Either he was not honest in the opinion, or he was self-deceived. He valued his fame above all
things, and left no means untried to protect and promote it.
[6] As was the practice of his master Dryden, who is severely lashed for this in the Tale of a Tub.—
Warton.
[7] Pope was not justified in his boast. He dropped the practice of fulsome dedications, but he made
the most of his distinguished friends in the body of his pieces, and though no "names of great
patrons" are given in this preface, he could not abstain from announcing in the final sentence how
much they had countenanced him. This, moreover, was to proclaim the "recommendations" he
repudiated, and in every issue of his works the preface, which contained the inconsistency, was
followed in addition by a series of Recommendatory Poems.
[8] The passage in inverted commas was first added in 1736.
[9] One of Pope's favourite topics is contempt for his own poetry. For this, if it had been real, he
would deserve no commendation; and in this he was certainly not sincere, for his value of himself
was sufficiently observed; and of what could he be proud but of his poetry? He writes, he says, when
"he has just nothing else to do;" yet Swift complains that he was never at leisure for conversation,
because he "had always some poetical scheme in his head." It was punctually required that his
writing-box should be set upon his bed before he rose; and Lord Oxford's domestic related that in the
dreadful winter of 1740, she was called from her bed by him four times in one night to supply him
with paper lest he should lose a thought.—Dr. Johnson.
[10] For the next sentence the manuscript has this passage: "But I fear it is far otherwise with modern
poets. We must bring our wit to the press, as gardeners do their flowers to the market, which if they
cannot vend in the morning are sure to die before night. Were we animated by the same noble
ambition, and ready to prosecute it with equal ardour, our languages are not only confined to a
narrow extent of country, but are in a perpetual flux, not so much as fixed by an acknowledged
grammar, while theirs were such as time and fate conspired to make universal and everlasting."
[11] In place of the remainder of the sentence he had written in the manuscript, "is but to live twenty
years longer than Quarles, or Withers, or Dennis." The doctrine of Pope was unworthy the
countryman of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. The first three had not been "thrown
aside at the end of one age," and no one who was capable of comprehending the last could seriously
believe that his reputation would be ephemeral. The hypothesis, that the writers in a dead tongue can
alone secure a worthy audience, is altogether chimerical. The literature of living languages has the
ascendancy, and Shakespeare is more read, and better appreciated, than Æschylus and Sophocles.

[12] I have frequently heard Dr. Young speak with great disapprobation of the doctrine contained in
this passage, with a view to which he wrote his discourse on Original Composition.—Warton.
The assertion of Pope is in the face of the facts. All the greatest names in modern literature have a
marked originality, and those authors who have imitated the ancients, except in subordinate
circumstances, have usually produced tame and lifeless compositions, which were speedily
forgotten.
[13] The sophistry is transparent. A man may be a scholar without being a plagiarist or an imitator.
[14] Here followed in the first edition, "and that I expect not to be excused in any negligence on
account of youth, want of leisure, or any other idle allegations." This was inconsistent with his
request, at the conclusion of his preface, that those who condemned his poems would remember his
youth when he composed them. After the omitted sentence he had added in the manuscript, "I have
ever been fearful of making an ill present to the world, for which I have as much respect as most
poets have for themselves. What I thought incorrect I suppressed; and what I thought most finished I
never published but with fear and trembling."
[15] From hence to the end of the paragraph the manuscript continues thus: "A man that can expect
but sixty years may be ashamed to employ thirty in measuring syllables, and bringing sense and
rhyme together. We spend our youth in the pursuit of riches or fame in hopes to enjoy them when we
are old, and when we are old we find it is too late to enjoy anything. I have got over the mistake
pretty early. I therefore hope the wits will pardon me if I leave myself time enough to save my soul,
and some wise men will be of my opinion even if I should think a part of it better spent in the
enjoyment of life than in pleasing the critics."
[16] This sentence was in the manuscript, but Pope omitted it in the edition of 1717, and restored it
in 1736.
[17] In the manuscript he added, "which indeed was my chief view in making it, for in the present
liberty of the press, a man is forced to appear as bad as he is, not to be thought worse." The assertion
is qualified in the text, but he could not entirely abandon the affectation of pretending that he
collected his works to escape the disgrace of the pieces which were falsely attributed to him, and not
to obtain credit from his own performances.
[18] "I am always highly delighted," said Addison in the Spectator, No. 523, Oct. 30, 1712, "with the
discovery of any rising genius among my countrymen. For this reason I have read over, with great
pleasure, the late Miscellany published by Mr. Pope, in which there are many excellent compositions
of that ingenious gentleman." The announcement referred to the first edition of Lintot's Miscellany,
and from the literary intercourse which existed between Addison, Steele, and Pope at the time, the
compilation was not likely to have been ascribed to the latter in the Spectator without sufficient
authority. The language of Pope seems carefully selected to avoid the direct denial that he was the
editor. The work was published anonymously, and he only asserts that he had "never lent his name to
recommend any miscellanies." The disclaimer was probably directed against the device adopted by
Lintot in the second edition, 1 vol. 8vo, 1714, which bore this title, "Miscellaneous Poems and
Translations. By several hands. Particularly, etc." Here followed a list of Pope's contributions, and
his alone. Underneath the list a line was drawn across the page, and below this line was printed in
capital letters, "By Mr. Pope." The complete separation between the list of pieces and the name of the
poet disconnected them to the eye, and left the impression that Pope was the editor of the entire
work. The same plan was continued till the fifth edition, 2 vols. 12mo, 1727, when Lintot grew
bolder, and inserted bastard title-pages with the words, "Mr. Pope's Miscellany." The poet, who
corrected the proofs of his own pieces for the fifth edition, assured Christopher Pitt, in a letter of July
23, 1726, that he had never had anything to do with the remainder of the work; but the private

assurance, after many years, of a man who had no regard for truth does not outweigh the assertion in
the Spectator, when coupled with the peculiar wording by which he evaded the public contradiction
of the statement.
[19] In 1721 he broke through his rule by recommending the poems of Parnell to Lord Oxford in an
Epistle in verse.—Cunningham.
[20] A few sentences before he had said, "for what I have published I can only hope to be pardoned,"
and already he has forgotten his mock modesty, and admits he has a hope that his works may prove
"a monument."
[21] The commendation of his own goodness is a theme which constantly recurs in Pope, as if he
hoped to conceal his delinquencies by his loud profession of the contrary qualities. The topic is
introduced into this preface in a forced manner, and treated with singular weakness. Intellectual
capacity and literary pre-eminence are no security for moral excellence; and it was idle to ask the
public to forget his reputation as a poet, which was his sole claim to fame, and to commemorate him
for virtues of which the world had no proof, and which, if they were real, he shared with thousands.
[22] This was written in 1716; did our author recollect this sentiment in 1729[8]?—Warton.
Warton alludes to the Dunciad, but to have "insulted adversaries with ill language" was only one out
of several particulars, in which Pope's subsequent career belied the protestations in his preface.
[23] This far-fetched excuse of Pope for rebuking the vanity of contemporary poets, was a clumsy
expedient to gratify his own vanity in proclaiming to the world that "he had been encouraged by the
great, and commended by the eminent." He had not much title to reprove the vanity of his brethren,
when, in the same sentence, he recorded the praise which the different orders of mankind had
bestowed upon himself.

PREFACE TO POPE'S WORKS.
VOL. II. 4to, 1735.

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.

All I had to say of my writings is contained in my preface to the first of
these volumes, printed for J. Tonson, and B. Lintot in quarto and folio in the
year 1717; and all I have to say of myself will be found in my last Epistle.[1]
I have nothing to add, but that this volume, and the above-mentioned
contain whatsoever I have written, and[2] designed for the press, except my
translation of the Iliad (with my preface and notes), of twelve books of the
Odyssey, with the postscript (not the notes), the preface to Shakespeare, and
a few Spectators[3] and Guardians. Whatever besides I have written, or
joined in writing with Dr. Swift, Dr. Arbuthnot, or Mr. Gay (the only
persons with whom I ever wrote in conjunction) are to be found in the four
volumes of Miscellanies by us published.[4] I think them too inconsiderable
to be separated and reprinted here; nevertheless, that none of my faults may
be imputed to another, I must own that of the prose part, the Thoughts on
Various Subjects at the end of the second volume, were wholly mine; and of
the verses, the Happy Life of a Country Parson, the Alley in imitation of
Spenser, the characters of Macer, Artimesia, and Phryne, the Verses to Mrs.
M[artha] B[lount] on her Birth-day, and a few epigrams.[5] It will be but
justice to me to believe that nothing more is mine, notwithstanding all that
has been published in my name, or added to my[6] miscellanies since 1717,
[7]
by any bookseller whatsoever.
A. Pope.

Jan. 1, 1734-[5].

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the reprint of this preface in 1740, Pope added the words, "to Dr. Arbuthnot."
[2] In the octavo of 1735, Pope omitted the words "written, and." In 1740 he again inserted them,
and omitted the words, "and designed for the press."
[3] The Messiah was first published in the Spectator, but as it was also inserted in the quarto of 1717,
the poet cannot have included it among the pieces which were not contained in either the first or
second volume of his works. His only other known contribution to the Spectator was a short letter in
No. 532, Nov. 10, 1712, on the verses which the Emperor Hadrian spoke when he was dying. The
"few Spectators" to which Pope referred have not been identified, and since he never reproduced, or
particularised them, it may be taken for granted that they were of slight importance.
[4] In the edition of 1740 Pope affixed to this sentence the clause, "or make part of the Memoirs of
Scriblerus, not yet printed." His enumeration of the Scriblerus among his genuine productions was
doubtless the consequence of his resolution to publish it, and it accordingly appeared in 1741 in the
second volume of his prose works.
[5] The passage from "I think" down to "epigrams," was left out in 1740, for Pope soon admitted into
his collected works those pieces in the Miscellanies which he here said were "too inconsiderable to
be reprinted."
[6] "Any" in the edition of 1740.
[7] He omitted "1717" in 1740. His insinuation that none of the other pieces ascribed to him were
genuine, is in his ordinary style of equivocation, and is now known to be erroneous.

RECOMMENDATORY POEMS.[1]

JOHN SHEFFIELD, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.[2]

ON MR. POPE AND HIS POEMS.

With age decayed, with courts and bus'ness tired,
Caring for nothing but what ease required;
Too dully serious for the muses' sport,
And from the critics safe arrived in port;
I little thought of launching forth again,5
Amidst advent'rous rovers of the pen:
And after so much undeserved success,
Thus hazarding at last to make it less.
Encomiums suit not this censorious time,
Itself a subject for satiric rhyme;10
Ignorance honoured, wit and worth defamed,
Folly triumphant, and ev'n Homer blamed!
But to this genius, joined with so much art,
Such various learning mixed in ev'ry part,
Poets are bound a loud applause to pay;15
Apollo bids it, and they must obey.
And yet so wonderful, sublime a thing
As the great Iliad, scarce could make me sing,
Except I justly could at once commend
A good companion, and as firm a friend,20
One moral, or a mere well-natured deed
Can all desert in sciences exceed.
'Tis great delight to laugh at some men's ways,
But a much greater to give merit praise.

ANNE, COUNTESS OF WINCHELSEA.[3]

TO MR. POPE.

The muse, of ev'ry heav'nly gift allowed
To be the chief, is public, though not proud.
Widely extensive is the poet's aim,
And in each verse he draws a bill on fame.
For none have writ (whatever they pretend)5
Singly to raise a patron, or a friend;
But whatsoe'er the theme or object be,
Some commendations to themselves foresee.
Then let us find, in your foregoing page,
The celebrating poems of the age;10
Nor by injurious scruples think it fit
To hide their judgments who applaud your wit.
But let their pens to yours the heralds prove,
Who strive for you as Greece for Homer strove;
Whilst he who best your poetry asserts,15
Asserts his own, by sympathy of parts.
Me panegyric verse does not inspire,
Who never well can praise what I admire;
Nor in those lofty trials dare appear,
But gently drop this counsel in your ear.20
Go on, to gain applauses by desert,
Inform the head, whilst you dissolve the heart;
Inflame the soldier with harmonious rage,
Elate the young, and gravely warm the sage;
Allure with tender verse the female race,25
And give their darling passion courtly grace;
Describe the Forest still in rural strains,
With vernal sweets fresh breathing from the plains.
Your tales be easy, natural, and gay,
Nor all the poet in that part display;30
Nor let the critic there his skill unfold,
For Boccace thus, and Chaucer tales have told.
Soothe, as you only can, each diff'ring taste,
And for the future charm as in the past.
Then should the verse of ev'ry artful hand35

Before your numbers eminently stand;
In you no vanity could thence be shown,
Unless, since short in beauty of your own,
Some envious scribbler might in spite declare,
That for comparison you placed them there.40
But envy could not against you succeed, }
'Tis not from friends that write, or foes that read; }
Censure or praise must from ourselves proceed. }

MR. WYCHERLEY.

TO MR. POPE, ON HIS PASTORALS.[4]

In these more dull, as more censorious days,
When few dare give, and fewer merit praise,
A muse sincere, that never flatt'ry knew,
Pays what to friendship and desert is due.
Young, yet judicious; in your verse are found5
Art strength'ning nature, sense improved by sound.
Unlike those wits whose numbers glide along
So smooth, no thought e'er interrupts the song:[5]
Laboriously enervate they appear,
And write not to the head, but to the ear:10
Our minds unmoved and unconcerned they lull,
And are at best most musically dull:
So purling streams with even murmurs creep,
And hush the heavy hearers into sleep.
As smoothest speech is most deceitful found, }15
The smoothest numbers oft are empty sound, }
And leave our lab'ring fancy quite aground.[6] }
But wit and judgment join at once in you,
Sprightly as youth, as age consummate too:
Your strains are regularly bold, and please }20
With unforced care, and unaffected ease, }
With proper thoughts, and lively images: }
Such as by nature to the ancients shown,

Fancy improves, and judgment makes your own:
For great men's fashions to be followed are,25
Although disgraceful 'tis their clothes to wear.
Some in a polished style write pastoral,
Arcadia speaks the language of the Mall;
Like some fair shepherdess, the sylvan muse,[7]
Decked in those flow'rs her native fields produce,30
With modest charms would in plain neatness please, }
But seems a dowdy in the courtly dress, }
Whose awkward finery allures us less.[8] }
But the true measure of the shepherd's wit
Should, like his garb, be for the country fit:35
Yet must his pure and unaffected thought
More nicely than the common swain's be wrought.
So, with becoming art, the players dress
In silks the shepherd and the shepherdess;
Yet still unchanged the form and mode remain,40
Shaped like the homely russet of the swain.
Your rural muse appears to justify
The long lost graces of simplicity:
So rural beauties captivate our sense
With virgin charms, and native excellence.45
Yet long her modesty those charms concealed,
'Till by men's envy to the world revealed;
For wits industrious to their trouble seem,
And needs will envy what they must esteem.
Live and enjoy their spite! nor mourn that fate,50
Which would, if Virgil lived, on Virgil wait;
Whose muse did once, like thine, in plains delight;
Thine shall, like his, soon take a higher flight;
So larks, which first from lowly fields arise,
Mount by degrees, and reach at last the skies.55

FR. KNAPP.[9]

TO MR. POPE, ON HIS WINDSOR FOREST.[10]

Killala, in the county of Mayo, in Ireland, June 7, 1715.

Hail, sacred bard! a muse unknown before
Salutes thee from the bleak Atlantic shore.
To our dark world thy shining page is shown,
And Windsor's gay retreat becomes our own.
The Eastern pomp had just bespoke our care,5
And India poured her gaudy treasures here:
A various spoil adorned our naked land, }
The pride of Persia glittered on our strand, }
And China's earth was cast on common sand: }
Tossed up and down the glossy fragments lay,10
And dressed the rocky shelves, and paved the painted bay.
Thy treasures next arrived: and now we boast
A nobler cargo on our barren coast:
From thy luxuriant Forest we receive
More lasting glories than the East can give.15
Where'er we dip in thy delightful page,
What pompous scenes our busy thoughts engage!
The pompous scenes in all their pride appear,
Fresh in the page, as in the grove they were;
Nor half so true the fair Lodona shows20
The sylvan state that on her border grows,
While she the wond'ring shepherd entertains
With a new Windsor in her wat'ry plains;
Thy juster lays the lucid wave surpass,
The living scene is in the muse's glass.25
Nor sweeter notes the echoing forests cheer,
When Philomela sits and warbles there,
Than when you sing the greens and op'ning glades,
And give us harmony as well as shades:
A Titian's hand might draw the grove, but you30
Can paint the grove, and add the music too.
With vast variety thy pages shine;
A new creation starts in ev'ry line.
How sudden trees rise to the reader's sight, }
And make a doubtful scene of shade and light, }35

And give at once the day, at once the night! }
And here again what sweet confusion reigns,
In dreary deserts mixed with painted plains!
And see! the deserts cast a pleasing gloom,
And shrubby heaths rejoice in purple bloom:40
Whilst fruitful crops rise by their barren side,
And bearded groves display their annual pride.
Happy the man, who strings his tuneful lyre,
Where woods, and brooks, and breathing fields inspire!
Thrice happy you! and worthy best to dwell45
Amidst the rural joys you sing so well.
I in a cold, and in a barren clime, }
Cold as my thought, and barren as my rhyme, }
Here on the western beach attempt to chime. }
O joyless flood! O rough tempestuous main!50
Bordered with weeds, and solitudes obscene![11]
Let me ne'er flow like thee! nor make thy stream
My sad example, or my wretched theme.
Like bombast now thy raging billows roar,
And vainly dash themselves against the shore;55
About like quibbles now thy froth is thrown,
And all extremes are in a moment shown.
Snatch me, ye gods! from these Atlantic shores,
And shelter me in Windsor's fragrant bow'rs;
Or to my much loved Isis' walks convey,60
And on her flow'ry banks for ever lay.
Thence let me view the venerable scene,
The awful dome, the groves' eternal green:
Where sacred Hough[12] long found his famed retreat,
And brought the muses to the sylvan seat,65
Reformed the wits, unlocked the classic store,
And made that music which was noise before.
There with illustrious bards I spent my days
Nor free from censure, nor unknown to praise,
Enjoyed the blessings that his reign bestowed,70
Nor envied Windsor in the soft abode.
The golden minutes smoothly danced away,

And tuneful bards beguiled the tedious day:
They sung, nor sung in vain, with numbers fired
That Maro taught, or Addison inspired.75
Ev'n I essayed to touch the trembling string:
Who could hear them, and not attempt to sing?
Roused from these dreams by thy commanding strain,
I rise and wander through the field or plain;
Led by thy muse, from sport to sport I run,80
Mark the stretched line, or hear the thund'ring gun.
Ah! how I melt with pity, when I spy
On the cold earth the flutt'ring pheasant lie;
His gaudy robes in dazzling lines appear,
And ev'ry feather shines and varies there.85
Nor can I pass the gen'rous courser by, }
But while the prancing steed allures my eye, }
He starts, he's gone! and now I see him fly }
O'er hills and dales, and now I lose the course,
Nor can the rapid sight pursue the flying horse.90
O could thy Virgil from his orb look down,
He'd view a courser that might match his own!
Fired with the sport, and eager for the chase,
Lodona's murmurs stop me in the race.
Who can refuse Lodona's melting tale?95
The soft complaint shall over time prevail;
The tale be told, when shades forsake her shore,
The nymph be sung, when she can flow no more.
Nor shall thy song, old Thames! forbear to shine,
At once the subject and the song divine;100
Peace, sung by thee, shall please ev'n Britons more
Than all their shouts for victory before.
Oh! could Britannia imitate thy stream,
The world should tremble at her awful name:
From various springs divided waters glide,105
In diff'rent colours roll a diff'rent tide,
Murmur along their crooked banks awhile,
At once they murmur and enrich the isle;
A while distinct through many channels run,

But meet at last, and sweetly flow in one;110
There joy to lose their long-distinguished names,
And make one glorious and immortal Thames.

ELIJAH FENTON.

TO MR. POPE.

IN IMITATION OF A GREEK EPIGRAM ON HOMER.[13]

When Phœbus, and the nine harmonious maids,
Of old assembled in the Thespian shades;
What theme, they cried, what high immortal air,
Befit these harps to sound, and thee to hear?
Replied the god: "Your loftiest notes employ,5
To sing young Peleus, and the fall of Troy."
The wond'rous song with rapture they rehearse;
Then ask who wrought that miracle of verse?
He answered with a frown: "I now reveal
A truth, that envy bids me not conceal:10
Retiring frequent to this laureat vale,
I warbled to the lyre that fav'rite tale,
Which, unobserved, a wand'ring Greek and blind,
Heard me repeat, and treasured in his mind;
And fired with thirst of more than mortal praise,15
From me, the god of wit, usurped the bays.
But let vain Greece indulge her growing fame,
Proud with celestial spoils to grace her name;
Yet when my arts shall triumph in the west,
And the white isle with female pow'r is blest;20
Fame, I foresee, will make reprisals there,
And the translator's palm to me transfer.
With less regret my claim I now decline,
The world will think his English Iliad mine."

DR. THOMAS PARNELL.

TO MR. POPE.

To praise, and still with just respect to praise
A bard triumphant in immortal bays,
The learn'd to show, the sensible commend,
Yet still preserve the province of the friend;
What life, what vigour must the lines require?5
What music tune them, what affection fire?
O might thy genius in my bosom shine,
Thou should'st not fail of numbers worthy thine:
The brightest ancients might at once agree
To sing within my lays, and sing of thee.10
Horace himself would own thou dost excel
In candid arts to play the critic well.
Ovid himself might wish to sing the dame
Whom Windsor Forest sees a gliding stream;
On silver feet, with annual osier crowned,15
She runs for ever through poetic ground.
How flame the glories of Belinda's hair,
Made by thy muse the envy of the fair!
Less shone the tresses Egypt's princess wore,
Which sweet Callimachus so sung before.20
Here courtly trifles set the world at odds;
Belles war with beaus, and whims descend for gods.
The new machines, in names of ridicule,
Mock the grave phrenzy of the chomic fool.
But know, ye fair, a point concealed with art,25
The sylphs and gnomes are but a woman's heart.
The graces stand in sight; a satire-train
Peeps o'er their head, and laughs behind the scene.
In Fame's fair temple, o'er the boldest wits
Inshrined on high the sacred Virgil sits,30
And sits in measures such as Virgil's muse
To place thee near him might be fond to choose.
How might he tune th' alternate reed with thee,
Perhaps a Strephon thou, a Daphnis he;
While some old Damon, o'er the vulgar wise,35

Thinks he deserves, and thou deserv'st the prize!
Rapt with the thought, my fancy seeks the plains,
And turns me shepherd while I hear the strains.
Indulgent nurse of ev'ry tender gale,
Parent of flow'rets, old Arcadia, hail!40
Here in the cool my limbs at ease I spread,
Here let thy poplars whisper o'er my head:
Still slide thy waters soft among the trees,
Thy aspens quiver in a breathing breeze!
Smile, all ye valleys, in eternal spring,45
Be hushed, ye winds, while Pope and Virgil sing.
In English lays, and all sublimely great,
Thy Homer warms with all his ancient heat;
He shines in council, thunders in the fight,
And flames with ev'ry sense of great delight.50
Long has that poet reigned, and long unknown,
Like monarchs sparkling on a distant throne;
In all the majesty of Greek retired;
Himself unknown, his mighty name admired;
His language failing wrapt him round with night;55
Thine, raised by thee, recalls the work to light.
So wealthy mines, that ages long before
Fed the large realms around with golden ore,
When choked by sinking banks, no more appear,
And shepherds only say, the "mines were here:"60
Should some rich youth (if nature warm his heart,
And all his projects stand informed with art)
Here clear the caves, there ope the leading vein;
The mines detected flame with gold again.
How vast, how copious, are thy new designs!65
How ev'ry music varies in thy lines!
Still, as I read, I feel my bosom beat,
And rise in raptures by another's heat.
Thus in the wood, when summer dressed the days,
While Windsor lent us tuneful hours of ease,70
Our ears the lark, the thrush, the turtle blest,
And Philomela sweetest o'er the rest:

The shades resound with song—O softly tread,
While a whole season warbles round my head.
This to my friend—and when a friend inspires,75
My silent harp its master's hand requires;
Shakes off the dust, and makes these rocks resound;
For fortune placed me in unfertile ground;
Far from the joys that with my soul agree,
From wit, from learning—very far from thee.80
Here moss-grown trees expand the smallest leaf;
Here half an acre's corn is half a sheaf;[14]
Here hills with naked heads the tempest meet,
Rocks at their sides, and torrents at their feet;
Or lazy lakes unconscious of a flood,85
Whose dull, brown naiads ever sleep in mud.
Yet here content can dwell, and learned ease,
A friend delight me, and an author please;
Ev'n here I sing, when Pope supplies the theme,
Show my own love, though not increase his fame.90

THE HON. SIMON HARCOURT.[15]

TO MR. POPE,

ON THE PUBLISHING HIS WORKS.

He comes, he comes! bid ev'ry bard prepare
The song of triumph, and attend his car.
Great Sheffield's[16] muse the long procession heads,
And throws a lustre o'er the pomp she leads;
First gives the palm she fired him to obtain,5
Crowns his gay brow, and shows him how to reign.
Thus young Alcides, by old Chiron taught,
Was formed for all the miracles he wrought:
Thus Chiron did the youth he taught applaud,
Pleased to behold the earnest of a god.10
But hark, what shouts, what gath'ring crowds rejoice!

Unstained their praise by any venal voice,
Such as th' ambitious vainly think their due,
When prostitutes, or needy flatt'rers sue.
And see the chief! before him laurels borne;15
Trophies from undeserving temples torn;
Here Rage enchained reluctant raves, and there
Pale Envy dumb, and sick'ning with despair;
Prone to the earth she bends her loathing eye,
Weak to support the blaze of majesty.20
But what are they that turn the sacred page?
Three lovely virgins, and of equal age;
Intent they read, and all enamoured seem,
As he that met his likeness in the stream:[17]
The Graces these; and see how they contend,25
Who most shall praise, who best shall recommend.
The chariot now the painful steep ascends,
The pæans cease; thy glorious labour ends.
Here fixed, the bright eternal temple stands,[18]
Its prospect an unbounded view commands:30
Say, wond'rous youth, what column wilt thou choose,
What laurelled arch for thy triumphant muse?
Though each great ancient court thee to his shrine,
Though ev'ry laurel through the dome be thine,
(From the proud epic,[19] down to those that shade35
The gentler brow of the soft Lesbian maid)
Go to the good and just, an awful train,[20]
Thy soul's delight, and glory of the fane:
While through the earth thy dear remembrance flies,
"Sweet to the world, and grateful to the skies."40

WILLIAM BROOME.

TO MR. POPE.[21]

Let vulgar souls triumphal arches raise,
Or speaking marbles, to record their praise,

And picture (to the voice of fame unknown)
The mimic feature on the breathing stone;
Mere mortals! subject to death's total sway,5
Reptiles of earth, and beings of a day!
'Tis thine, on ev'ry heart to grave thy praise,
A monument which worth alone can raise:
Sure to survive, when time shall whelm in dust
The arch, the marble, and the mimic bust:10
Nor till the volumes of th' expanded sky
Blaze in one flame, shalt thou and Homer die:
Then sink together in the world's last fires,
What heav'n created, and what heav'n inspires.
If aught on earth, when once this breath is fled,15
With human transport touch the mighty dead,
Shakespear, rejoice! his hand thy page refines;
Now ev'ry scene with native brightness shines;[22]
Just to thy fame, he gives thy genuine thought;
So Tully published what Lucretius wrote;20
Pruned by his care, thy laurels loftier grow,
And bloom afresh on thy immortal brow.
Thus when thy draughts, O Raphael! time invades,
And the bold figure from the canvas fades,
A rival hand recalls from ev'ry part25
Some latent grace, and equals art with art;
Transported we survey the dubious strife,
While each fair image starts again to life.[23]
How long, untuned, had Homer's sacred lyre
Jarred grating discord, all extinct his fire!30
This you beheld; and taught by heav'n to sing,
Called the loud music from the sounding string.
Now waked from slumbers of three thousand years,
Once more Achilles in dread pomp appears,
Towers o'er the field of death; as fierce he turns,35
Keen flash his arms, and all the hero burns;
With martial stalk, and more than mortal might,
He strides along, and meets the gods in fight:
Then the pale Titans, chained on burning floors,

Start at the din that rends th' infernal shores,40
Tremble the tow'rs of heav'n, earth rocks her coasts,
And gloomy Pluto shakes with all his ghosts.
To ev'ry theme responds thy various lay;
Here rolls a torrent, there meanders play;
Sonorous as the storm thy numbers rise,45
Toss the wild waves, and thunder in the skies;
Or softer than a yielding virgin's sigh,
The gentle breezes breathe away and die.
Thus, like the radiant god who sheds the day,
You paint the vale, or gild the azure way;50
And while with ev'ry theme the verse complies,
Sink without grov'ling, without rashness rise.
Proceed, great bard! awake th' harmonious string,
Be ours all Homer; still Ulysses sing.
How long[24] that hero, by unskilful hands,55
Stripped of his robes, a beggar trod our lands!
Such as he wandered o'er his native coast,
Shrunk by the wand, and all the warrior lost;
O'er his smooth skin a bark of wrinkles spread;
Old age disgraced the honours of his head;60
Nor longer in his heavy eye-ball shined
The glance divine, forth-beaming from the mind.
But you, like Pallas, ev'ry limb infold
With royal robes, and bid him shine in gold;
Touched by your hand his manly frame improves65
With grace divine, and like a god he moves.
Ev'n I, the meanest of the muses' train,
Inflamed by thee, attempt a nobler strain;
Advent'rous waken the Mæonian lyre,
Tuned by your hand, and sing as you inspire:70
So armed by great Achilles for the fight,
Patroclus conquered in Achilles' right:
Like theirs, our friendship! and I boast my name
To thine united—for thy friendship's fame.
This labour past, of heav'nly subjects sing,75
While hov'ring angels listen on the wing,

To hear from earth such heart-felt raptures rise,
As, when they sing, suspended hold the skies:
Or nobly rising in fair virtue's cause,
From thy own life transcribe th' unerring laws:80
Teach a bad world beneath her sway to bend:
To verse like thine fierce savages attend,
And men more fierce: when Orpheus tunes the lay,
Ev'n fiends relenting hear their rage away.

LORD LYTTELTON.[25]

TO MR. POPE.[26]

F
rom Rome, 1730.

Immortal bard! for whom each muse has wove
The fairest garlands of th' Aonian grove;
Preserved, our drooping genius to restore,
When Addison and Congreve are no more;
After so many stars extinct in night,5
The darkened age's last remaining light!
To thee from Latian realms this verse is writ,
Inspired by memory of ancient wit:
For now no more these climes their influence boast,
Fall'n is their glory, and their virtue lost:10
From tyrants, and from priests, the muses fly,
Daughters of reason and of liberty.
Nor Baiæ now, nor Umbria's plain they love,
Nor on the banks of Nar, or Mincio rove;
To Thames's flow'ry borders they retire,15
And kindle in thy breast the Roman fire.
So in the shades, where cheered with summer rays
Melodious linnets warbled sprightly lays,
Soon as the faded, falling leaves complain
Of gloomy winter's unauspicious reign,20

No tuneful voice is heard of joy or love,
But mournful silence saddens all the grove.
Unhappy Italy! whose altered state
Has felt the worst severity of fate:
Not that barbarian hands her fasces broke25
And bowed her haughty neck beneath their yoke;
Nor that her palaces to earth are thrown,
Her cities desert, and her fields unsown;
But that her ancient spirit is decayed,
That sacred wisdom from her bounds is fled,30
That there the source of science flows no more,
Whence its rich streams supplied the world before.
Illustrious names! that once in Latium shined,
Born to instruct, and to command mankind;
Chiefs, by whose virtue mighty Rome was raised,35
And poets, who those chiefs sublimely praised!
Oft I the traces you have left explore,
Your ashes visit, and your urns adore;
Oft kiss, with lips devout, some mould'ring stone,
With ivy's venerable shade o'ergrown;40
Those hallowed ruins better pleased to see
Than all the pomp of modern luxury.
As late on Virgil's tomb fresh flow'rs I strowed,
While with th' inspiring muse my bosom glowed,
Crowned with eternal bays my ravished eyes45
Beheld the poet's awful form arise:
Stranger, he said, whose pious hand has paid
These grateful rites to my attentive shade,
When thou shalt breathe thy happy native air,
To Pope this message from his master bear:50
"Great bard! whose numbers I myself inspire,
To whom I gave my own harmonious lyre,
If high exalted on the throne of wit,
Near me and Homer thou aspire to sit,
No more let meaner satire dim the rays,55
That flow majestic from thy nobler bays;
In all the flow'ry paths of Pindus stray,

But shun that thorny, that unpleasing way;
Nor, when each soft engaging muse is thine,
Address the least attractive of the nine.60
"Of thee more worthy were the task to raise
A lasting column to thy country's praise,
To sing the land, which yet alone can boast
That liberty corrupted Rome has lost,
Where science in the arms of peace is laid,65
And plants her palm beneath the olive's shade.
Such was the theme for which my lyre I strung,
Such was the people whose exploits I sung;
Brave, yet refined, for arms and arts renowned,
With diff'rent bays by Mars and Phœbus crowned,70
Dauntless opposers of tyrannic sway,
But pleased, a mild Augustus to obey.
"If these commands submissive thou receive,
Immortal and unblamed thy name shall live;
Envy to black Cocytus shall retire,75
And howl with furies in tormenting fire;
Approving time shall consecrate thy lays,
And join the patriot's to the poet's praise."

FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Recommendatory poems addressed to Pope are without exception dull, insipid productions,
which never rise above mediocrity, and sometimes fall below it. Only those are reprinted here which
he himself prefixed to his works. The first seven appeared in the quarto of 1717, and the remaining
two in the octavo of 1736.
[2] Legally speaking, of Buckinghamshire; for he would not take the title of Buckingham, under a
fear that there was lurking somewhere or other a claim to that title amongst the connections of the
Villiers family. He was a pompous grandee, who lived in uneasy splendour, and, as a writer, most
extravagantly overrated: accordingly, he is now forgotten. Such was his vanity, and his ridiculous
mania for allying himself with royalty, that he first of all had the presumption to court the Princess
(afterwards Queen) Anne. Being rejected, he then offered himself to the illegitimate daughter of
James II. by the daughter of Sir Charles Sedley. She was as ostentatious as himself, and accepted
him.—De Quincey.
Pope commenced the interchange of praise with the Duke of Buckingham by celebrating him in the
Essay on Criticism. The return verses of the Duke are little better than drivelling. His Essay on Satire
and Essay on Poetry are his principal works, but though one was retouched by Dryden and the other
by Pope, they are very second-rate performances. The Duke died in February, 1721, aged 72.

[3] Anne, wife of Heneage, fifth Earl of Winchelsea, and daughter of Sir William Kingsmill. She
died on Aug. 5, 1720.—Croker.
She wrote a tragedy called Aristomenes, or the Royal Shepherd, to which Pope may be supposed to
allude in his letter to Caryll of Dec. 15, 1713, where he says, "I was invited to dinner to my Lady
Winchelsea, and after dinner to hear a play read, at both which I sat in great disorder with sickness at
my head and stomach." Pope omitted her rugged, bald, prosaic verses in 1736, probably because they
were intrinsically worthless, and because the name of the author had ceased to carry any weight. In
1727 and 1732 they were printed with Pope's poems in Lintot's Miscellany, and doubtless with the
sanction of Pope himself.
[4] These verses, with the heading, "To my friend Mr. Pope, on his Pastorals," originally appeared in
1709, in the same volume of Tonson's Miscellany which contained the Pastorals themselves. In the
fifth edition of Lintot's Miscellany, 1727, and in the sixth edition, 1732, the poem of Wycherley, who
was then dead, is prefixed to Pope's pieces, and bears the title, "To Mr. Pope at sixteen years old, on
occasion of his Pastorals." This was untrue, and seems designed to convey a false idea of Pope's
precocity. The lines were not addressed to him till he was twenty, as appears from Wycherley's letter
of May 18, 1708, in which he says, "I have made a compliment in verse upon the printing your
Pastorals which you shall see when you see me." Dennis, and others, accused Pope of being the
author of the flattering tribute. The poet appealed in refutation of the charge to Wycherley's letters,
and added that the first draught, and corrected copy of the panegyric, which were still extant in the
Harley library in Wycherley's handwriting, would show "that if they received any alteration from Mr.
Pope it was in the omission of some of his own praises." Documents to which nobody had access
proved nothing. Mr. Croker considered that there was strong internal evidence from the smoothness
of the rhythm, the antithetical style, and the nature of the commendation, that Pope must have
assisted in reducing the lines to their present shape. The mannerism of both authors can be clearly
traced in them. They have the stamp of Wycherley, improved by Pope.
[5] If Wycherley had been capable of anything of the kind, this, and the previous couplet, might have
been written after the Essay on Criticism, but surely could not have been inspired by a perusal of the
manuscript of the Pastorals.—Croker.
[6] This line was omitted by Pope in 1736.
[7] From Boileau's Art of Poetry, Chant ii. v. 1.—Warton.
[8] This triplet was omitted by Pope in the edition of 1736.
[9] Francis Knapp, of Chilton, in Berkshire, Gent. He was of St. John's College, Oxford, and
afterwards demy of Magdalen College.—Cunningham.
He graduated M.A. April 30, 1695, and as he could hardly have been an M.A. before he was twenty-
five, he would have been forty-five at the date of these verses. There is a rhyming "Epistle to Mr. B
——, by Mr. Fr. Knapp, of Magdalen College, in Oxford," in Tonson's Fourth Miscellany.—Croker.
He died in, or before 1727; for in one of Lintot's advertisements of that year he is described as the
"late Rev. Mr. Francis Knapp, Dean of Killala."
[10] There are several lines in this copy of verses, which could not be endured in a common
magazine. So much is the public ear, and public taste improved.—Warton.
[11] The next six lines were left out by Pope in 1736.

[12] Hough was chosen president of Magdalen College in April, 1687, in defiance of the mandate
sent by James II. to the fellows, requiring them to elect Farmer, a profligate and a papist. The illegal
proceedings of the king in dispossessing the protestants, and filling the college with romanists,
alarmed and enraged the country, and contributed largely to the Revolution of 1688. In May, 1690,
Hough became Bishop of Oxford. He was translated to Lichfield and Coventry in 1699, and to
Worcester in 1717, where he remained till his death in May, 1743, at the age of ninety-three.
[13] By far the most elegant, and best turned compliment of all addressed to our author, happily
borrowed from a fine Greek epigram, and most gracefully applied.—Warton.
There is little merit in borrowing a compliment from the Anthology, and the felicity of its application
in the present instance may be questioned, notwithstanding the emphatic praise of Warton. The
mythological basis of the lines, which is appropriate in the Greek, becomes childish when adopted by
an English poet, and the point of the piece, which turns upon the assumption that Pope's translation
was vastly superior to the original, is too extravagant to be pleasing. Fenton was a scholar, and could
not have thought what he said.
[14] "I would add," says Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Parnell, "that the description of barrenness in his
verses to Pope was borrowed from Secundus, but lately searching for the passage, which I had
formerly read, I could not find it." The borrowed description is the only tolerable part of the poem,
which is in a clumsy strain, unlike the usual easy style of Parnell.
[15] He was only son to the Lord Chancellor Harcourt, and died in 1720.—Roscoe.
[16] It was paying pitiful homage to rank to call an indifferent versifier, like the Duke of
Buckingham, "great Sheffield," and pretend that he was the instructor and model of Pope.
[17] The comparison of the three Graces, admiring the reflection of themselves in Pope's works, to
Narcissus enamoured of his own face in the stream, is a ludicrous conceit, and the execution is on a
par with the idea.
[18] This paragraph refers to Pope's Temple of Fame.
[19] Pope's genius was not epic, and the only epic poem he composed was his juvenile effort,
Alcander, which he burnt because it was too worthless to be preserved.
[20] This and the concluding verse are from the Temple of Fame.
[21] These lines first appeared in 1726, in the translation of the Odyssey, where they were appended
by Broome to the final note. Pope inserted them in the 8vo edition of his works in 1736.
[22] This was a compliment our author could not take much pleasure in reading; for he could not
value himself on his edition of Shakespeare.—Warton.
[23] The comparison on both sides is wanting in truth. The superficial researches, and meagre notes
of Pope did not renovate Shakespeare, and no second Raphael has repainted the pictures of Raphael
the first. Fitness of praise was a merit which the writers of commendatory verses commonly
despised. Their study was to outvie each other in the grossness, and insincerity of their flattery.
[24] Odyssey, lib. xvi.—Broome.
[25] Pope inserted this tribute among the Recommendatory poems prefixed to the 8vo edition of his
works, 1736. Lyttelton was not raised to the peerage till November, 1757, twenty-seven years after
the date of his verses.

[26] Warton prefers Fenton's verses, but in my opinion these lines of Lord Lyttelton's are much
superior to all the other recommendatory verses. They are as elegant and correct in themselves, as the
sentiments they convey appear sincere, and worthy an ingenuous, cultivated, and liberal mind. There
is a small inaccuracy in one or two expressions, and perhaps it would have been better if Virgil's
speech, which forms the conclusion, had been compressed.—Bowles.

TRANSLATIONS.

ADVERTISEMENT.
The following Translations were selected from many others done by the
author in his youth; for the most part indeed but a sort of exercises, while he
was improving himself in the languages, and carried by his early bent to
poetry to perform them rather in verse than prose. Mr. Dryden's Fables
came out about that time,[1] which occasioned the translations from
Chaucer. They were first separately printed in Miscellanies by J. Tonson
and B. Lintot, and afterwards collected in the quarto edition of 1717. The
Imitations of English Authors, which are added at the end, were done as
early; some of them at fourteen or fifteen years old; but having also got into
Miscellanies, we have put them here together to complete this juvenile
volume.[2]

FOOTNOTES:
[1] In the year 1700. They were the most popular of Dryden's works, and were in the hands of every
reader when Pope was learning his art.
[2] This advertisement was first prefixed by Pope to vol. iii. of his works, 8vo, 1736. The contents of
the "juvenile volume" were The Temple of Fame, Sappho to Phaon, Vertumnus and Pomona, The
Fable of Dryope, The first book of Statius's Thebais, January and May, The Wife of Bath's Prologue,
and the Imitations of English Poets. Pope apologises for printing the Imitations by saying that they
had got into Miscellanies, which is an insinuation that the pieces had found their way to the press
without his consent. It was he himself who published them. They are inserted in the present edition
among the minor poems.

THE

FIRST BOOK OF STATIUS:

HIS

THEBAIS.
TRANSLATED IN THE YEAR 1703.

The translator hopes he need not apologise for his choice of this piece,
which was made almost in his childhood. But finding the version better
upon review than he expected from those years, he was easily prevailed on
to give it some correction, the rather because no part of this author (at least
that he knows of) has been tolerably turned into our language.[1]—Pope.
It was in his childhood only that Pope could make choice of so injudicious a
writer as Statius to translate. It were to be wished that no youth of genius
were suffered ever to look into Statius, Lucan, Claudian, or Seneca the
tragedian,—authors who, by their forced conceits, by their violent
metaphors, by their swelling epithets, by their want of a just decorum, have
a strong tendency to dazzle, and to mislead inexperienced minds, and tastes
unformed, from the true relish of possibility, propriety, simplicity, and
nature. Statius had undoubtedly invention, ability, and spirit; but his images
are gigantic and outrageous, and his sentiments tortured and hyperbolical.
One cannot forbear reflecting on the short duration of a true taste in poetry
among the Romans. From the time of Lucretius to that of Statius was no
more than about one hundred and forty-seven years; and if I might venture
to pronounce so rigorous a sentence, I would say, that the Romans can boast
of but eight poets who are unexceptionably excellent,—namely, Terence,
Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Phædrus. These
only can be called legitimate models of just thinking and writing.
Succeeding authors, as it happens in all countries, resolving to be original
and new, and to avoid the imputation of copying, become distorted and
unnatural. By endeavouring to open an unbeaten path, they deserted
simplicity and truth; weary of common and obvious beauties, they must
needs hunt for remote and artificial decorations.
It is plain that Pope was not blind to the faults of Statius, many of which he
points out with judgment and truth, in a letter to Mr. Cromwell, written in
1708[9]. After this censure of Statius's manner, it is but justice to add, that

in the Thebais there are many strokes of a strong imagination; and, indeed,
the picture of Amphiaraus, swallowed up suddenly by a chasm that opened
in the ground, is truly sublime.—Warton.
Statius was a favourite writer with the poets of the middle ages. His bloated
magnificence of description, gigantic images, and pompous diction suited
their taste, and were somewhat of a piece with the romances they so much
admired. They neglected the gentler and genuine graces of Virgil, which
they could not relish. His pictures were too correctly and chastely drawn to
take their fancies; and truth of design, elegance of expression, and the arts
of composition, were not their object.—T. Warton.
In this translation there are some excellent passages, particularly those
pointed out by Dr. Warton—"O father Phœbus," v. 829, and the exquisite
lines descriptive of evening, "'Twas now the time," &c., 474; but some of
the most striking images are omitted, some added, and some misunderstood.
Let us however confess, that the versification is truly wonderful,
considering the age of the author. It would be endless to point out more
particularly occasional errors and inaccuracies, in a composition which can
be considered no otherwise than as an extraordinary specimen of
versification, before the writer's judgment and taste were matured.—
Bowles.
According to the information which Pope gave to Spence, he commenced
an epic poem at thirteen, and wrote four books of about a thousand verses
each.[2] As his taste and judgment improved, he discovered the crudeness of
his early flights, and for a while he almost relinquished his attempts at
original composition, "My first taking to imitating," he said, "was not out of
vanity, but humility. I saw how defective my own things were; and I
endeavoured to mend my manner by copying good strokes from others."[3]
"In my rambles through the poets," he said again, "when I met with a
passage or story that pleased me more than ordinary, I used to endeavour to
imitate it, or translate it into English; and this gave rise to my imitations
published so long after."[4] In speaking of Pope's youthful efforts, Spence
uses the word "imitation" as synonymous with "translation." "Some of his
first exercises," he says, "were imitations of the stories that pleased him
most in Ovid, or any other poet that he was reading. I have one of these
original exercises now by me in his own hand. It is the story of Acis and

Galatea, from Ovid; and was translated when he was but fourteen years
old."[5] Pope appears to have sometimes employed the term imitation with
the same latitude, and probably meant by it that he endeavoured to imitate,
in the English turn of expression, the distinctive beauties of the original
Latin or Greek. "In the scattered lessons I used to set myself," he said, "I
translated above a quarter of the Metamorphoses, and that part of Statius
which was afterwards printed with the corrections of Walsh."[6] The notion,
in which Bowles and others acquiesced, that the published translations are a
true index of Pope's skill at fourteen, will not bear investigation. Of the
Metamorphoses he brought out only two little fragments, which appeared
many years later, when they had undergone a thorough revision. The rest of
the manuscript would not have been sacrificed if the version had been fit for
the public eye without the toil of recasting it. Spence, who possessed the
Acis and Galatea, did not think it worth printing as a specimen of Pope's
boyish abilities, even when the curiosity respecting his works was at its
height. The suppression of all his early pieces, which had not been
submitted to a subsequent renovation, is a plain proof of their inferiority.
The first translation which he gave to the world was the "Episode of
Sarpedon, from the twelfth and sixteenth books of Homer's Iliads." This,
and his Pastorals, appeared together, in May, 1709, in Tonson's Sixth
Miscellany, and Pope was then twenty-one.
The fragment from Homer included the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus. "It
has," said the poet, "been rendered in English by Sir John Denham, after
whom the translator had not the vanity to attempt it for any other reason,
than that the episode must have been very imperfect without so noble a part
of it." Denham at that period had a much more brilliant reputation than he
afterwards retained, and though Pope adopted the language of humility, he
must have felt an inward pride in the consciousness that he had distanced so
famous a name. His great superiority did not admit of a question, and he
must have been well aware that it was his interest to invite a comparison.
The specimen was shown in manuscript to Trumbull, who, in his
admiration, urged Pope to give a complete translation of the Iliad. The
exhortations of Trumbull did not bear fruit till 1713. "I cannot," Pope wrote
to him in the November of that year, "deny myself the pleasure of
acquainting you how great a proof I have given of my deference to your
opinion and judgment, which has at last moved me to undertake the

translation of Homer. I can honestly say Sir William Trumbull was not only
the first that put this into my thoughts, but the principal encourager I had in
it, and though now almost all the distinguished names of quality or learning
in the nation have subscribed to it, there is not one of which I am so proud
as of yours." When the first volume of the translation appeared in 1715,
Pope paid his acknowledgments in the Preface to the eminent men who had
specially patronised the work. Not only does he make no mention of
Trumbull, but he professes to have yielded to the counsel of a greater
authority, and says, "Mr. Addison was the first whose advice determined me
to undertake the task." Either the statement in the Preface, or the statement
in the letter must be inaccurate, though both Addison and Trumbull may
have recommended the scheme.
The "Episode of Sarpedon" is now incorporated in the complete translation
to which it led the way. It was not till three years after he had published the
fragment from Homer that Pope brought out his translations from the Latin,
of which the most ambitious is his version of the first book of the Thebais.
He told Spence that in his boyhood "he liked extremely a translation of a
part of Statius by some very bad hand." This work bore the title of "An
Essay upon Statius, or the five first books of P. P. Statius his Thebais. Done
into English verse by T[homas] S[tephens], London, 1648." The verse into
which Stephens did his author was for the most part rugged and prosaic, but
a few passages are happily turned, and his successor did not disdain to
borrow some lines and phrases from him. The principal advantage,
however, to Pope of Stephens's attempt was that it enabled him to interpret
the original; for his classical education had been defective, and it is clear
from his own account, that he could not, without assistance, have construed
the Thebais correctly. At eight years of age he was taught his accidence by a
priest.[7] He afterwards went to a couple of small schools, where "he lost
what he had gained" from his first instructor.[8] "When I came," he said,
"from the last of them, all the acquisition I had made was to be able to
construe a little of Tully's Offices."[9] For a few months he had another
priest for his tutor, and was then left, between twelve and thirteen, to his
own resources.[10] The foundation was slight, and he proceeded to raise
upon it a hasty superstructure. "I did not," he said, "follow the grammar, but
rather hunted in the authors for a syntax of my own; and then began
translating any parts that pleased me, particularly in the best Greek and

Latin poets. I got the languages by hunting after the stories in the several
poets I read, rather than read the books to get the language."[11] He, on
another occasion, told Spence that he thought himself the better in some
respects for not having had a regular education, since it caused him to read
for the sense, whereas schoolboys were taught to read for words.[12] The
process was fatal to scholarship. Ignorant, in a great degree, of the rules and
idioms of the Latin tongue, it was impossible he should translate with ease
or accuracy. But his peculiar training doubtless favoured the early
development of his poetic powers. He devoted his boyish years, when the
mind was most pliable, to the cultivation of his art, and this incessant
practice of versification from childhood was the cause of his precocious
excellence.
Pope's admiration for Statius continued throughout his later boyhood, and
he preferred him to "all the Latin poets, by much, next to Virgil."[13] He
soon began to turn the Thebais into English, and he affirms that his version
of the first book was made in 1703. In a note to his letter to Cromwell of
Jan. 22, 1709, he placed it earlier still, and declares that it was "done when
the author was but fourteen years old." These statements convey an
erroneous impression. It appears from the correspondence with Cromwell
that more than one-third of the translation was not in existence by January,
1709, when Pope was in his twenty-first year. The piece was not published
till 1712, when it came out in Lintot's Miscellany, and the poet at that
period was twenty-four. The portions which were not recently translated,
were newly corrected, and the whole represents the powers of the man who
completed the task, and not of the boy who commenced it.
The translation of the first book of the Thebais must be more highly
estimated as a specimen of versification than as an adequate representation
of the original. The harmony and phraseology of particular passages are
delicious, and verse and language throughout are polished in a high degree.
There is one pervading exception to Pope's metrical skill. He has recourse
incessantly to an unnatural order of words, and especially he produces his
rhymes by placing the verb after the noun it ought to precede. Of this
license Dryden says, "We were whipped at Westminster if we used it twice
together. I should judge him to have little command of English whom the
necessity of a rhyme should force upon this rock, though sometimes it

cannot easily be avoided." Pope availed himself of the false construction
with a freedom which seriously deforms and enfeebles much of his poetry.
He fell into the error before he had discrimination to perceive the blemish,
and when his judgment was more mature habit had reconciled him to the
distortion.
Warton has not exaggerated the defects of Statius, but he has underrated his
merits. The descriptions in the Thebais are vivid, and abound in picturesque
circumstances, and natural traits of character. Pope's translation is more
vague. His narrative is less perspicuous, less dramatic, less spirited, and less
life-like than the original. "There are numberless particulars blameworthy in
our author," Pope wrote to Cromwell, "which I have tried to soften in the
version."[14] He was not successful in this attempt. Where he departs from
his text he seldom tempers an extravagance, and has more often rejected a
beauty, or smoothed it down into insipidity. His juvenile taste was for
polished generalities, and he shunned circumstantial nature. He had still less
relish for primitive simplicity, and he thought that some of the incidents in
the Thebais were too humble to be endured.
"When Statius," he says, "comes to the scene of his poem, and the prize in
dispute between the brothers, he gives us a very mean opinion of it,—pugna
est de paupere regno—very different from the conduct of his master, Virgil,
who at the entrance of his poem informs the reader of the greatness of his
subject."[15] Pope was led astray by the equivocal meaning of a word. There
is no connection between the greatness of a kingdom, and the greatness of a
theme for poetic purposes. The poverty of Scotland did not detract from the
tragic grandeur of Macbeth. When the fugitive princes in the Thebais
quarrel in the vestibule, where they have taken shelter from the storm, and
fight with their fists, Pope confused the narrative by omitting the whole
account as inconsistent with epic dignity, and sacrificed the characteristics
of the original to assimilate the manners to modern usages. If his criticisms
had been well founded he should yet have kept to his text. "The sense of an
author," says Dryden, "is, generally speaking, to be sacred and inviolable. If
the fancy of Ovid be luxuriant, it is his character to be so; and, if I retrench
it, he is no longer Ovid. It will be replied that he receives advantage by this
lopping of his superfluous branches; but I rejoin that a translator has no
such right. When a painter copies from the life, I suppose he has no
privilege to alter features and lineaments, under pretence that his picture

will look better; perhaps the face which he has drawn would be more exact
if the eyes or nose were altered; but it is his business to make it resemble
the original." Pope has rendered a few passages with equal beauty and truth,
but on the whole the antique colouring, the dramatic traits, and picturesque
details are very imperfectly preserved.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] This brief introduction is from Lintot's Miscellany. In the edition of his works in 1736 Pope
omitted the final clause which follows the word "correction."
[2] Singer's Spence, p. 209, 211.
[3] Spence, p. 211.
[4] Spence, p. 146.
[5] Spence, p. 214.
[6] Spence, p. 210.
[7] Spence, p. 214.
[8] Spence, p. 146.
[9] Spence, p. 204.
[10] Spence, p. 146.
[11] Spence, p. 146, 196.
[12] Spence, p. 211.
[13] Spence, p. 209, 211.
[14] Pope to Cromwell, June 10, 1709.
[15] Pope to Cromwell, Jan. 22, 1709.

ARGUMENT
Œdipus, King of Thebes, having by mistake slain his father Laius, and
married his mother Jocasta, put out his own eyes, and resigned the realm to
his sons, Eteocles and Polynices. Being neglected by them, he makes his
prayer to the Fury Tisiphone, to sow debate betwixt the brothers. They
agree at last to reign singly, each a year by turns, and the first lot is obtained
by Eteocles. Jupiter, in a council of the gods, declares his resolution of
punishing the Thebans, and Argives also, by means of a marriage betwixt
Polynices and one of the daughters of Adrastus, king of Argos. Juno
opposes, but to no effect, and Mercury is sent on a message to the shades, to
the ghost of Laius, who is to appear to Eteocles, and provoke him to break
the agreement. Polynices in the meantime departs from Thebes by night, is
overtaken by a storm, and arrives at Argos, where he meets with Tydeus,
who had fled from Calydon, having killed his brother. Adrastus entertains
them, having received an oracle from Apollo that his daughters should be
married to a boar and a lion, which he understands to be meant of these
strangers, by whom the hides of those beasts were worn, and who arrived at
the time when he kept an annual feast in honour of that god. The rise of this
solemnity he relates to his guests, the loves of Phœbus and Psamathe, and
the story of Chorœbus. He inquires, and is made acquainted with their
descent and quality. The sacrifice is renewed, and the book concludes with a
hymn to Apollo.

THE FIRST BOOK
OF

STATIUS'S THEBAIS.
Fraternal rage, the guilty Thebes' alarms,
Th' alternate reign destroyed by impious arms,
Demand our song; a sacred fury fires
My ravished breast, and all the muse inspires.
O goddess, say, shall I deduce my rhymes5
From the dire[1] nation in its early times,
Europa's rape, Agenor's stern decree,
And Cadmus searching round the spacious sea?
How with the serpent's teeth he sowed the soil,
And reaped an iron harvest of his toil?[2]10
Or how from joining stones the city sprung,
While to his harp divine Amphion sung?[3]
Or shall I Juno's hate to Thebes resound,
Whose fatal rage th' unhappy monarch found?[4]
The sire against the son his arrows drew,15
O'er the wide fields the furious mother flew,
And while her arms a second hope contain,
Sprung from the rocks and plunged into the main.
But waive whate'er to Cadmus may belong,
And fix, O muse! the barrier of thy song20
At Œdipus: from his disasters trace
The long confusions of his guilty race:
Nor yet attempt to stretch thy bolder wing,
And mighty Cæsar's[5] conqu'ring eagles sing;
How twice he tamed proud Ister's rapid flood,25
While Dacian mountains streamed with barb'rous blood;
Twice taught the Rhine beneath his laws to roll,
And stretched his empire to the frozen pole;
Or long before, with early valour, strove,
In youthful arms, t' assert the cause of Jove.[6]30
And thou, great heir of all thy father's fame,
Increase of glory to the Latian name,

Oh! bless thy Rome with an eternal reign,
Nor let desiring worlds entreat in vain.
What though the stars contract their heav'nly space,35
And crowd their shining ranks to yield thee place;
Though all the skies, ambitious of thy sway,
Conspire to court thee from our world away;
Though Phœbus longs to mix his rays with thine,
And in thy glories more serenely shine;40
Though Jove himself no less content would be
To part his throne and share his heaven with thee;
Yet stay, great Cæsar! and vouchsafe to reign
O'er the wide earth, and o'er the wat'ry main;
Resign to Jove his empire of the skies,45
And people heav'n with Roman deities.[7]

The time will come, when a diviner flame[8]
Shall warm my breast to sing of Cæsar's fame:
Meanwhile permit, that my preluding muse
In Theban wars an humbler theme may chuse:50
Of furious hate surviving death, she sings,
A fatal throne to two contending kings,
And fun'ral flames that, parting wide in air,
Express the discord of the souls they bear:[9]
Of towns dispeopled, and the wand'ring ghosts55
Of kings unburied in the wasted coasts;
When Dirce's fountain blushed with Grecian blood,[10]
And Thetis, near Ismenos'[11] swelling flood,
With dread beheld the rolling surges sweep,
In heaps, his slaughtered sons into the deep.[12]60
What hero, Clio! wilt thou first relate?[13]
The rage of Tydeus,[14] or the prophet's fate?[15]
Or how, with hills of slain on ev'ry side,
Hippomedon repelled the hostile tide?[16]
Or how the youth[17] with ev'ry grace adorned65
Untimely fell, to be for ever mourned?
Then to fierce Capaneus thy verse extend,

And sing with horror his prodigious end.[18]
Now wretched Œdipus, deprived of sight,
Led a long death in everlasting night;70
But while he dwells where not a cheerful ray
Can pierce the darkness, and abhors the day,
The clear reflecting mind presents his sin
In frightful views, and makes it day within;
Returning thoughts in endless circles roll,75
And thousand furies haunt his guilty soul:
The wretch then lifted to th' unpitying skies
Those empty orbs from whence he tore his eyes,
Whose wounds, yet fresh, with bloody hands he strook,[19]
While from his breast these dreadful accents broke.80
"Ye gods! that o'er the gloomy regions reign,
Where guilty spirits feel eternal pain;
Thou, sable Styx! whose livid streams are rolled
Through dreary coasts, which I though blind behold:
Tisiphone,[20] that oft hast heard my pray'r,85
Assist, if Œdipus deserve thy care!
If you received me from Jocasta's womb,[21]
And nursed the hope of mischiefs yet to come:
If leaving Polybus, I took my way,[22]
To Cirrha's temple[23] on that fatal day,90
When by the son the trembling father died,
Where the three roads the Phocian fields divide:
If I the Sphinx's riddles durst explain,
Taught by thyself to win the promised reign:[24]
If wretched I, by baleful furies led,95
With monstrous mixture stained my mother's bed,
For hell and thee begot an impious brood,
And with full lust those horrid joys renewed;
Then self-condemned to shades of endless night,
Forced from these orbs the bleeding balls of sight:100
Oh hear! and aid the vengeance I require,
If worthy thee, and what thou mightst inspire.
My sons their old, unhappy sire despise,

Spoiled of his kingdom, and deprived of eyes;
Guideless I wander, unregarded mourn,105
Whilst these exalt their sceptres o'er my urn;
These sons, ye gods! who with flagitious pride
Insult my darkness, and my groans deride.
Art thou a father, unregarding Jove![25]
And sleeps thy thunder in the realms above?110
Thou fury, then some lasting curse entail,
Which o'er their children's children shall prevail:[26]
Place on their heads that crown distained with gore,
Which these dire hands from my slain father tore;[27]
Go! and a parent's heavy curses bear; }115
Break all the bonds of nature, and prepare[28] }
Their kindred souls to mutual hate and war. }
Give them to dare, what I might wish to see
Blind as I am, some glorious villainy!
Soon shalt thou find, if thou but arm their hands,120
Their ready guilt preventing[29] thy commands:
Couldst thou some great, proportioned mischief frame,
They'd prove the father from whose loins they came."
The fury heard, while on Cocytus'[30] brink
Her snakes untied, sulphureous waters drink;125
But at the summons rolled her eyes around,
And snatched the starting serpents from the ground.
Not half so swiftly shoots along in air
The gliding lightning, or descending star.
Through crowds of airy shades she winged her flight,130
And dark dominions of the silent night;
Swift as she passed the flitting ghosts withdrew,[31]
And the pale spectres trembled at her view:
To th' iron gates of Tænarus[32] she flies,
There spreads her dusky pinions to the skies.135
The day beheld, and sick'ning at the sight,
Veiled her fair glories in the shades of night.
Affrighted Atlas, on the distant shore,
Trembled, and shook the heav'ns and gods he bore.[33]

Now from beneath Malea's[34] airy height140
Aloft she sprung, and steered to Thebes her flight;
With eager speed the well-known journey[35] took,
Nor here regrets the hell she late forsook.
A hundred snakes her gloomy visage shade,
A hundred serpents guard her horrid head,145
In her sunk eye-balls dreadful meteors glow:[36]
Such rays from Phœbe's bloody circle flow,
When lab'ring with strong charms, she shoots from high
A fiery gleam, and reddens all the sky.
Blood stained her cheeks, and from her mouth there came150
Blue steaming poisons, and a length of flame:
From ev'ry blast of her contagious breath
Famine and drought proceed, and plagues, and death.
A robe obscene was o'er her shoulders thrown,
A dress by fates and furies worn alone.155
She tossed her meagre arms; her better hand[37]
In waving circles whirled a fun'ral brand:
A serpent from her left was seen to rear
His flaming crest, and lash the yielding air.[38]
But when the fury took her stand on high,160
Where vast Cithæron's top salutes the sky,
A hiss from all the snaky tire went round: }
The dreadful signal all the rocks rebound, }
And through th' Achaian cities send the sound. }
Œte, with high Parnassus, heard the voice;165
Eurotas' banks remurmured to the noise;
Again Leucothea shook at these alarms,
And pressed Palæmon closer in her arms.[39]
Headlong from thence the glowing fury springs,
And o'er the Theban palace spreads her wings,[40]170
Once more invades the guilty dome, and shrouds
Its bright pavilions in a veil of clouds.
Straight with the rage of all their race possessed, }
Stung to the soul, the brothers start from rest, }
And all their furies wake within their breast. }175

Their tortured minds repining envy tears,
And hate, engendered by suspicious fears;
And sacred thirst of sway; and all the ties
Of nature broke;[41] and royal perjuries;
And impotent desire to reign alone,180
That scorns the dull reversion of a throne;[42]
Each would the sweets of sov'reign rule devour,
While discord waits upon divided power.
As stubborn steers by brawny plowmen broke,
And joined reluctant to the galling yoke,185
Alike disdain with servile necks to bear
Th' unwonted weight, or drag the crooked share,
But rend the reins, and bound[43] a diff'rent way,
And all the furrows in confusion lay:
Such was the discord of the royal pair,190
Whom fury drove precipitate to war.
In vain the chiefs contrived a specious way,
To govern Thebes by their alternate sway:
Unjust decree! while this enjoys the state,
That mourns in exile his unequal fate,195
And the short monarch of a hasty year
Foresees with anguish his returning heir.
Thus did the league their impious arms restrain,
But scarce subsisted to the second reign.
Yet then, no proud aspiring piles were raised,200
No fretted roofs with polished metals blazed;
No laboured columns in long order placed,
No Grecian stone the pompous arches graced;
No nightly bands in glitt'ring armour wait[44]
Before the sleepless tyrant's guarded gate;205
No chargers[45] then were wrought in burnished gold,
Nor silver vases took the forming mold;
Nor gems on bowls embossed were seen to shine,
Blaze on the brims, and sparkle in the wine.[46]
Say, wretched rivals! what provokes your rage?210
Say, to what end your impious arms engage?

Not all bright Phœbus views in early morn,
Or when his ev'ning beams the west adorn,
When the south glows with his meridian ray,
And the cold north receives a fainter day;215
For crimes like these, not all those realms suffice,[47]
Were all those realms the guilty victor's prize!
But fortune now (the lots of empire thrown)
Decrees to proud Eteocles the crown:
What joys, oh tyrant! swelled thy soul that day,220
When all were slaves thou couldst around survey,[48]
Pleased to behold unbounded power thy own,
And singly fill a feared and envied throne!
But the vile vulgar, ever discontent,[49]
Their growing fears in secret murmurs vent;225
Still prone to change, though still the slaves of state,
And sure the monarch whom they have, to hate;
New lords they madly make, then tamely bear,
And softly curse the tyrants whom they fear.[50]
And one of those who groan beneath the sway230
Of kings imposed, and grudgingly obey,
(Whom envy to the great, and vulgar spite
With scandal armed, th' ignoble mind's delight,)
Exclaimed—"O Thebes! for thee what fates remain,
What woes attend this inauspicious reign?235
Must we, alas! our doubtful necks prepare, }
Each haughty master's yoke by turns to bear, }
And still to change whom changed we still must fear? }
These now control a wretched people's fate,
These can divide, and these reverse the state:240
Ev'n fortune rules no more!—O servile land,
Where exiled[51] tyrants still by turns command.
Thou sire of gods and men, imperial Jove!
Is this th' eternal doom decreed above?
On thy own offspring hast thou fixed this fate,245
From the first birth of our unhappy state;
When banished Cadmus, wand'ring o'er the main,

For lost Europa searched the world in vain,
And fated in Bœotian fields to found
A rising empire on a foreign ground,250
First raised our walls on that ill-omened plain,
Where earth-born brothers were by brothers slain?[52]
What lofty looks th' unrivalled[53] monarch bears!
How all the tyrant in his face appears!
What sullen fury clouds his scornful brow!255
Gods! how his eyes with threat'ning ardour glow!
Can this imperious lord forget to reign,
Quit all his state, descend, and serve again?
Yet, who, before, more popularly bowed?
Who more propitious to the suppliant crowd?260
Patient of right, familiar in the throne?
What wonder then? he was not then alone.
O wretched we, a vile, submissive train,
Fortune's tame fools, and slaves in ev'ry reign!
As when two winds with rival force contend,265
This way and that, the wav'ring sails they bend,
While freezing Boreas, and black Euros blow,
Now here, now there, the reeling vessel throw:
Thus on each side, alas! our tott'ring state
Feels all the fury of resistless fate,270
And doubtful still, and still distracted stands,
While that prince threatens, and while this commands."
And now th' almighty father of the gods
Convenes a council in the blest abodes:
Far in the bright recesses of the skies,275
High o'er the rolling heav'ns, a mansion lies,
Whence, far below, the gods at once survey }
The realms of rising and declining day, }
And all th' extended space of earth, and air, and sea. }
Full in the midst, and on a starry throne,280
The majesty of heav'n superior shone;
Serene he looked, and gave an awful nod,[54]
And all the trembling spheres confessed the god.
At Jove's assent the deities around

In solemn state the consistory crowned.[55]285
Next a long order of inferior pow'rs
Ascend from hills, and plains, and shady bow'rs;
Those from whose urns the rolling rivers flow;
And those that give the wand'ring winds to blow:
Here all their rage, and ev'n their murmurs cease,[56]290
And sacred silence reigns, and universal peace.
A shining synod of majestic gods
Gilds with new lustre the divine abodes;
Heav'n seems improved with a superior ray,
And the bright arch reflects a double day.295
The monarch then his solemn silence broke,
The still creation listened while he spoke,
Each sacred accent bears eternal weight,
And each irrevocable word is fate.
"How long shall man the wrath of heav'n defy,300
And force unwilling vengeance from the sky!
Oh race confed'rate into crimes, that prove
Triumphant o'er th' eluded rage of Jove![57]
This wearied arm can scarce the bolt sustain,
And unregarded thunder rolls in vain:305
Th' o'erlaboured Cyclops from his task retires,
Th' Æolian forge exhausted of its fires.[58]
For this, I suffered Phœbus' steeds to stray,
And the mad ruler to misguide the day;
When the wide earth to heaps of ashes turned,310
And heaven itself the wand'ring chariot burned.
For this, my brother of the wat'ry reign }
Released th' impetuous sluices of the main: }
But flames consumed, and billows raged in vain. }
Two races now, allied to Jove, offend;315
To punish these, see Jove himself descend.
The Theban kings their line from Cadmus trace,
From godlike Perseus those of Argive race.
Unhappy Cadmus' fate who does not know,
And the long series of succeeding woe?320
How oft the furies, from the deeps of night,

Arose, and mixed with men in mortal fight:
Th' exulting mother, stained with filial blood;[59]
The savage hunter and the haunted wood;
The direful banquet why should I proclaim,[60]325
And crimes that grieve the trembling gods to name?
Ere I recount the sins of these profane, }
The sun would sink into the western main, }
And rising, gild the radiant east again. }
Have we not seen (the blood of Laius shed)330
The murd'ring son ascend his parent's bed,
Through violated nature force his way,
And stain the sacred womb where once he lay?
Yet now in darkness and despair he groans,
And for the crimes of guilty fate atones.335
His sons with scorn their eyeless father view,
Insult his wounds, and make them bleed anew.
Thy curse, oh Œdipus, just heav'n alarms,
And sets th' avenging thunderer in arms.
I from the root thy guilty race will tear,340
And give the nations to the waste of war.
Adrastus[61] soon, with gods averse, shall join
In dire alliance with the Theban line;
Hence strife shall rise, and mortal war succeed;
The guilty realms of Tantalus shall bleed;345
Fixed is their doom; this all-rememb'ring breast
Yet harbours vengeance for the tyrant's feast."[62]
He said; and thus the queen of heav'n returned;
(With sudden grief her lab'ring bosom burned)
"Must I, whose cares Phoroneus'[63] tow'rs defend,350
Must I, oh Jove, in bloody wars contend?
Thou know'st those regions my protection claim,
Glorious in arms, in riches, and in fame:
Though there the fair Egyptian heifer fed,
And there deluded Argus slept, and bled;[64]355
Though there the brazen tower was stormed of old,[65]
When Jove[66] descended in almighty gold:

Yet I can pardon those obscurer rapes,
Those bashful crimes disguised in borrowed shapes;
But Thebes, where shining in celestial charms360
Thou cam'st triumphant to a mortal's arms,
When all my glories o'er her limbs were spread,
And blazing light'nings danced around her bed;[67]
Cursed Thebes the vengeance it deserves, may prove:
Ah why should Argos feel the rage of Jove?365
Yet since thou wilt thy sister-queen control,
Since still the lust of discord fires thy soul,
Go, raze my Samos, let Mycene fall,
And level with the dust the Spartan wall;[68]
No more let mortals Juno's pow'r invoke, }370
Her fanes no more with eastern incense smoke, }
Nor victims sink beneath the sacred stroke; }
But to your Isis all my rites transfer,
Let altars blaze and temples smoke for her;
For her, through Egypt's fruitful clime renowned375
Let weeping Nilus hear the timbrel sound.
But if thou must reform the stubborn times,
Avenging on the sons the father's crimes,
And from the long records of distant age
Derive incitements to renew thy rage;380
Say, from what period then has Jove designed
To date his vengeance; to what bounds confined?
Begin from thence, where first Alpheus hides }
His wand'ring stream, and through the briny tides }
Unmixed to his Sicilian river glides.[69] }385
Thy own Arcadians there the thunder claim,
Whose impious rites disgrace thy mighty name;[70]
Who raise thy temples where the chariot stood
Of fierce Œnomaus, defiled with blood:[71]
Where once his steeds their savage banquet found,390
And human bones yet whiten all the ground.
Say, can those honours please; and canst thou love
Presumptuous Crete that boasts the tomb of Jove?[72]

And shall not Tantalus's kingdoms share
Thy wife and sister's tutelary care?395
Reverse, O Jove, thy too severe decree,
Nor doom to war a race derived from, thee;[73]
On impious realms and barb'rous kings impose
Thy plagues, and curse 'em with such sons[74] as those."
Thus, in reproach and pray'r, the queen expressed400
The rage and grief contending in her breast;
Unmoved remained the ruler of the sky,
And from his throne returned this stern reply:
"'Twas thus I deemed thy haughty soul would bear }
The dire, though just, revenge which I prepare }405
Against a nation thy peculiar care: }
No less Dione might for Thebes contend,
Nor Bacchus less his native town defend;
Yet these in silence see the fates fulfil
Their work, and rev'rence our superior will.410
For by the black infernal Styx I swear,
(That dreadful oath which binds the thunderer)
'Tis fixed; th' irrevocable doom of Jove;
No force can bend me, no persuasion move.
Haste then, Cyllenius,[75] through the liquid air;415
Go, mount the winds, and to the shades repair;
Bid hell's black monarch my commands obey,
And give up Laius to the realms of day,
Whose ghost yet shiv'ring on Cocytus' sand,
Expects its passage to the further strand:420
Let the pale sire revisit Thebes, and bear
These pleasing orders to the tyrant's ear;[76]
That from his exiled brother, swelled with pride
Of foreign forces, and his Argive bride,
Almighty Jove commands him to detain425
The promised empire, and alternate reign:
Be this the cause of more than mortal hate:
The rest, succeeding times shall ripen into fate."
The god obeys, and to his feet applies
Those golden wings that cut the yielding skies.430

His ample hat his beamy locks o'erspread,
And veiled the starry glories of his head.
He seized the wand that causes sleep to fly,
Or in soft slumbers seals the wakeful eye;
That drives the dead to dark Tartarean coasts,435
Or back to life compels the wand'ring ghosts.
Thus, through the parting clouds, the son of May
Wings on the whistling winds his rapid way;
Now smoothly steers through air his equal flight,
Now springs aloft, and tow'rs th' ethereal height;440
Then wheeling down the steep of heav'n he flies,
And draws a radiant circle o'er the skies.
Meantime the banished Polynices roves
(His Thebes abandoned) through th' Aonian groves,
While future realms his wand'ring thoughts delight,445
His daily vision and his dream by night;
Forbidden Thebes appears before his eye,
From whence he sees his absent brother fly,
With transport views the airy rule his own,
And swells on an imaginary throne.450
Fain would he cast a tedious age away,
And live out all in one triumphant day.[77]
He chides the lazy progress of the sun,
And bids the year with swifter motion run.
With anxious hopes his craving mind is tost,455
And all his joys in length of wishes lost.
The hero then resolves his course to bend }
Where ancient Danaus' fruitful fields extend,[78] }
And famed Mycene's lofty towers ascend, }
(Where late the sun did Atreus' crimes detest,460
And disappeared in horror of the feast.)[79]
And now by chance, by fate, or furies led,
From Bacchus' consecrated caves he fled,
Where the shrill cries of frantic matrons sound,
And Pentheus' blood enriched the rising ground.[80]465
Then sees Cithæron tow'ring o'er the plain,
And thence declining gently to the main.

Next to the bounds of Nisus' realm repairs,
Where treach'rous Scylla cut the purple hairs:[81]
The hanging cliffs of Sciron's rock explores,470
And hears the murmurs of the diff'rent shores:[82]
Passes the strait that parts the foaming seas,
And stately Corinth's pleasing site surveys.
'Twas now the time when Phœbus yields to night,[83]
And rising Cynthia sheds her silver light,475
Wide o'er the world in solemn pomp she drew
Her airy chariot hung with pearly dew;[84]
All birds and beasts lie hushed; sleep steals away
The wild desires of men, and toils of day,
And brings, descending through the silent air,480
A sweet forgetfulness of human care.[85]
Yet no red clouds, with golden borders gay,
Promise the skies the bright return of day;
No faint reflections of the distant light
Streak with long gleams the scatt'ring shades of night:485
From the damp earth impervious vapours rise,
Encrease the darkness, and involve the skies.
At once the rushing winds with roaring sound
Burst from th' Æolian caves, and rend the ground,
With equal rage their airy quarrel[86] try,490
And win by turns the kingdom of the sky:
But with a thicker night black Auster shrouds
The heav'ns, and drives on heaps the rolling clouds,
From whose dark womb a rattling tempest pours,
Which the cold north congeals to haily show'rs.495
From pole to pole the thunder roars aloud,
And broken lightnings flash from ev'ry cloud.
Now smoaks with show'rs[87] the misty mountain-ground,
And floated fields lie undistinguished round.
Th' Inachian streams with headlong fury run,500
And Erasinus[88] rolls a deluge on:
The foaming Lerna swells above its bounds,
And spreads its ancient poisons[89] o'er the grounds:

Where late was dust, now rapid torrents play,
Rush through the mounds, and bear the dams away:505
Old limbs of trees from crackling forests torn,
Are whirled in air, and on the winds are borne:
The storm the dark Lycæan groves displayed,
And first to light exposed the sacred shade.[90]
Th' intrepid Theban hears the bursting sky,510
Sees yawning rocks in massy fragments fly,[91]
And views astonished, from the hills afar,
The floods descending, and the wat'ry war,[92]
That, driv'n by storms, and pouring o'er the plain,
Swept herds, and hinds, and houses to the main.[93]515
Through the brown horrors of the night he fled,
Nor knows, amazed, what doubtful path to tread;
His brother's image to his mind appears,
Inflames his heart with rage, and wings his feet with fears.[94]
So fares a sailor on the stormy main,520
When clouds conceal Boötes' golden wain,
When not a star its friendly lustre keeps,
Nor trembling Cynthia glimmers on the deeps;
He dreads the rocks, and shoals, and seas, and skies,
While thunder roars, and lightning round him flies.525
Thus strove the chief, on every side distressed,
Thus still his courage, with his toils increased;
With his broad shield opposed, he forced his way
Through thickest woods, and roused the beasts of prey,
Till he beheld, where from Larissa's[95] height530
The shelving walls reflect a glancing light:
Thither with haste the Theban hero flies; }
On this side Lerna's pois'nous water lies, }
On that Prosymna's grove and temple rise:[96] }
He passed the gates, which then unguarded lay,535
And to the regal palace bent his way;
On the cold marble, spent with toil, he lies,
And waits till pleasing slumbers seal his eyes.
Adrastus here his happy people sways,

Blest with calm peace in his declining days;540
By both his parents of descent divine,
Great Jove and Phœbus graced his noble line:
Heaven had not crowned his wishes with a son,
But two fair daughters heired[97] his state and throne.
To him Apollo (wondrous to relate!545
But who can pierce into the depths of fate?)
Had sung—"Expect thy sons[98] on Argos' shore,
A yellow lion and a bristly boar."
This long revolved in his paternal breast,
Sate heavy on his heart, and broke his rest;550
This, great Amphiaraus, lay hid from thee,
Though skilled in fate, and dark futurity.
The father's care and prophet's art were vain,
For thus did the predicting god ordain.[99]
Lo hapless Tydeus, whose ill-fated hand555
Had slain his brother, leaves his native land,[100]
And seized with horror in the shades of night,
Through the thick deserts headlong urged his flight:
Now by the fury of the tempest driv'n,
He seeks a shelter from th' inclement heav'n,560
Till, led by fate, the Theban's steps he treads,
And to fair Argos' open court succeeds.[101]
When thus the chiefs from diff'rent lands resort
T' Adrastus' realms, and hospitable court;
The king surveys his guests with curious eyes,565
And views their arms and habit with surprise.
A lion's yellow skin the Theban wears,
Horrid his mane, and rough with curling hairs;
Such once employed Alcides' youthful toils,
Ere yet adorned with Nemea's dreadful spoils.[102]570
A boar's stiff hide, of Calydonian breed,
Œnides' manly shoulders overspread.
Oblique his tusks, erect his bristles stood,
Alive, the pride and terror of the wood.
Struck with the sight, and fixed in deep amaze,575

The King th' accomplished oracle surveys,
Reveres Apollo's vocal caves, and owns
The guiding godhead, and his future sons
O'er all his bosom secret transports reign,
And a glad horror[103] shoots through ev'ry vein.580
To heav'n he lifts his hands, erects his sight,
And thus invokes the silent queen of night.
"Goddess of shades, beneath whose gloomy reign
Yon spangled arch glows with the starry train:
You who the cares of heav'n and earth allay, }585
Till nature quickened by th' inspiring ray }
Wakes to new vigour with the rising day: }
Oh thou who freest me from my doubtful state,
Long lost and wildered in the maze of fate!
Be present still, oh goddess! in our aid;590
Proceed, and firm[104] those omens thou hast made.
We to thy name our annual rites will pay,
And on thy altars sacrifices lay;
The sable flock shall fall beneath the stroke,
And fill thy temples with a grateful smoke.595
Hail, faithful Tripos! hail, ye dark abodes
Of awful Phœbus: I confess the gods!"
Thus, seized with sacred fear, the monarch prayed;
Then to his inner court the guests conveyed;
Where yet thin fumes from dying sparks arise, }600
And dust yet white upon each altar lies, }
The relics of a former sacrifice. }
The king once more the solemn rites requires,
And bids renew the feasts, and wake the fires.[105]
His train obey, while all the courts around605
With noisy care and various tumult sound.
Embroidered purple clothes the golden beds;
This slave the floor, and that the table spreads;
A third dispels the darkness of the night,
And fills depending lamps with beams of light.610
Here loaves in canisters are piled on high,
And there in flames the slaughtered victims fry.[106]

Sublime in regal state Adrastus shone,
Stretched on rich carpets on his iv'ry throne;
A lofty couch receives each princely guest;615
Around, at awful distance, wait the rest.
And now the king, his royal feast to grace,
Acestis calls, the guardian[107] of his race,
Who first their youth in arts of virtue trained,
And their ripe years in modest grace maintained;620
Then softly whispered in her faithful ear,
And bade his daughters at the rites appear.
When from the close apartments of the night,
The royal nymphs approach divinely bright;
Such was Diana's, such Minerva's face;625
Nor shine their beauties with superior grace,
But that in these a milder charm endears,
And less of terror in their looks appears.
As on the heroes first they cast their eyes,
O'er their fair cheeks the glowing blushes rise,630
Their downcast looks a decent shame confessed,
Then on their father's rev'rend features rest.
The banquet done, the monarch gives the sign
To fill the goblet high with sparkling wine,
Which Danaus used in sacred rites of old,635
With sculpture graced, and rough with rising gold.
Here to the clouds victorious Perseus flies, }
Medusa seems to move her languid eyes, }
And, ev'n in gold, turns paler as she dies.[108] }
There from the chace Jove's tow'ring eagle bears,640
On golden wings, the Phrygian to the stars:[109]
Still as he rises in th' ethereal height,
His native mountains lessen to his sight;
While all his sad companions upward gaze,
Fixed on the glorious scene in wild amaze;645
And the swift hounds, affrighted as he flies,
Run to the shade, and bark against the skies.
This golden bowl with gen'rous juice was crowned,
The first libations sprinkled on the ground,

By turns on each celestial pow'r they call;650
With Phœbus' name resounds the vaulted hall.
The courtly train, the strangers, and the rest,
Crowned with chaste laurel, and with garlands dressed,
While with rich gums the fuming altars blaze,
Salute the god in num'rous hymns of praise.655
Then thus the king: "Perhaps, my noble guests,
These honoured altars, and these annual feasts
To bright Apollo's awful name designed,
Unknown, with wonder may perplex your mind.
Great was the cause; our old solemnities660
From no blind zeal, or fond tradition rise;
But saved from death, our Argives yearly pay
These grateful honours to the god of day.
"When by a thousand darts the Python slain
With orbs unrolled lay cov'ring all the plain,[110]665
(Transfixed as o'er Castalia's streams he hung,
And sucked new poisons with his triple tongue)[111]
To Argos' realms the victor god resorts,
And enters old Crotopus' humble courts.
This rural prince one only daughter blest,670
That all the charms of blooming youth possessed;
Fair was her face, and spotless was her mind,
Where filial love with virgin sweetness joined.
Happy! and happy still she might have proved,
Were she less beautiful, or less beloved!675
But Phœbus loved, and on the flow'ry side
Of Nemea's stream, the yielding fair enjoyed:
Now, ere ten moons their orb with light adorn,
Th' illustrious offspring of the god was born;
The nymph, her father's anger to evade,680
Retires from Argos to the sylvan shade;
To woods and wilds the pleasing burden bears,
And trusts her infant to a shepherd's cares.
"How mean a fate, unhappy child! is thine?
Ah how unworthy those of race divine?685
On flow'ry herbs in some green covert laid,

His bed the ground, his canopy the shade,[112]
He mixes with the bleating lambs his cries, }
While the rude swain his rural music tries }
To call soft slumbers on his infant eyes. }690
Yet ev'n in those obscure abodes to live,
Was more, alas! than cruel fate would give,
For on the grassy verdure as he lay,
And breathed the freshness of the early day,
Devouring dogs the helpless infant tore,695
Fed on his trembling limbs, and lapped the gore.
Th' astonished mother, when the rumour came,
Forgets her father, and neglects her fame;
With loud complaints she fills the yielding air,
And beats her breast, and rends her flowing hair;700
Then wild with anguish to her sire she flies:
Demands the sentence, and contented dies.
"But touched with sorrow for the dead too late,
The raging god prepares t' avenge her fate.
He sends a monster, horrible and fell,[113]705
Begot by furies in the depths of hell.[114]
The pest a virgin's face and bosom bears; }
High on a crown a rising snake appears, }
Guards her black front, and hisses in her hairs: }
About the realm she walks her dreadful round,710
When night with sable wings o'erspreads the ground,
Devours young babes before their parents' eyes,
And feeds and thrives on public miseries.[115]
"But gen'rous rage the bold Chorœbus warms,
Chorœbus, famed for virtue, as for arms;715
Some few like him, inspired with martial flame,
Thought a short life well lost for endless fame.
These, where two ways in equal parts divide, }
The direful monster from afar descried; }
Two bleeding babes depending at her side; }720
Whose panting vitals, warm with life, she draws,
And in their hearts embrues her cruel claws.
The youths surround her with extended spears;

But brave Chorœbus in the front appears,
Deep in her breast he plunged his shining sword,725
And hell's dire monster back to hell restored.
Th' Inachians[116] view the slain with vast surprize,
Her twisting volumes and her rolling eyes,
Her spotted breast, and gaping womb embrued
With livid poison, and our children's blood.730
The crowd in stupid wonder fixed appear,
Pale ev'n in joy, nor yet forget to fear.
Some with vast beams the squalid corpse engage,
And weary all the wild efforts of rage.
The birds obscene, that nightly flocked to taste,735
With hollow screeches fled the dire repast;
And rav'nous dogs, allured by scented blood,
And starving wolves ran howling to the wood.
"But fired with rage, from cleft Parnassus' brow }
Avenging Phœbus bent his deadly bow, }740
And hissing flew the feathered fates below: }
A night of sultry clouds involved around
The tow'rs, the fields, and the devoted ground:
And now a thousand lives together fled, }
Death with his scythe cut off the fatal thread,[117] }745
And a whole province in his triumph led. }
"But Phœbus, asked why noxious fires appear,
And raging Sirius blasts the sickly year,
Demands their lives by whom his monster fell,
And dooms a dreadful sacrifice to hell.750
"Blest be thy dust, and let eternal fame
Attend thy manes, and preserve thy name,
Undaunted hero![118] who divinely brave,
In such a cause disdained thy life to save;
But viewed the shrine with a superior look,755
And its upbraided godhead thus bespoke:
"With piety, the soul's securest guard,
And conscious virtue, still its own reward,
Willing I come, unknowing how to fear;
Nor shalt thou, Phœbus, find a suppliant here.760

Thy monster's death to me was owed alone,
And 'tis a deed too glorious to disown.
Behold him here, for whom, so many days,
Impervious clouds concealed thy sullen rays;
For whom, as man no longer claimed thy care,765
Such numbers fell by pestilential air!
But if th' abandoned race of human kind
From gods above no more compassion find;
If such inclemency in heav'n can dwell, }
Yet why must unoffending Argos feel }770
The vengeance due to this unlucky steel? }
On me, on me, let all thy fury fall,
Nor err from me, since I deserve it all:
Unless our desert cities please thy sight,
Or fun'ral flames reflect a grateful light.775
Discharge thy shafts, this ready bosom rend,
And to the shades a ghost triumphant send;
But for my country let my fate atone,
Be mine the vengeance, as the crime my own.
"Merit distressed, impartial heav'n relieves:780
Unwelcome life relenting Phœbus gives;
For not the vengeful pow'r, that glowed with rage,
With such amazing virtue durst engage.
The clouds dispersed, Apollo's wrath expired,
And from the wond'ring god th' unwilling[119] youth retired.785
Thence we these altars in his temple raise,
And offer annual honours, feasts, and praise;
These solemn feasts propitious Phœbus please;
These honours, still renewed, his ancient wrath appease."
"But say, illustrious guest," adjoined the king,790
"What name you bear, from what high race you spring?
The noble Tydeus stands confessed, and known
Our neighbour prince, and heir of Calydon.
Relate your fortunes, while the friendly night
And silent hours to various talk invite."795
The Theban bends on earth his gloomy eyes,
Confused, and sadly thus at length replies:

"Before these altars how shall I proclaim,
O gen'rous prince! my nation, or my name,
Or through what ancient veins our blood has rolled?800
Let the sad tale for ever rest untold!
Yet if propitious to a wretch unknown,
You seek to share in sorrows not your own;
Know, then, from Cadmus I derive my race,
Jocasta's son, and Thebes my native place."805
To whom the king (who felt his gen'rous breast
Touched with concern for his unhappy guest)
Replies: "Ah! why forbears the son to name
His wretched father, known too well by fame?
Fame, that delights around the world to stray,810
Scorns not to take our Argos in her way.
Ev'n those who dwell where suns at distance roll,
In northern wilds, and freeze beneath the pole;
And those who tread the burning Lybian lands,
The faithless Syrtes and the moving sands;815
Who view the western sea's extremest bounds,
Or drink of Ganges in their eastern grounds;
All these the woes of Œdipus have known,
Your fates, your furies, and your haunted town.
If on the sons the parents' crimes descend,820
What prince from those his lineage can defend?
Be this thy comfort, that 'tis thine t' efface, }
With virtuous acts, thy ancestor's disgrace, }
And be thyself the honour of thy race. }
But see! the stars begin to steal away,825
And shine more faintly at approaching day;
Now pour the wine; and in your tuneful lays
Once more resound the great Apollo's praise."
"O father Phœbus![120] whether Lycia's coast[121]
And snowy mountain, thy bright presence boast;830
Whether to sweet Castalia[122] thou repair,
And bathe in silver dews thy yellow hair;
Or pleased to find fair Delos float no more,
Delight in Cynthus,[123] and the shady shore;

Or choose thy seat in Ilion's proud abodes,835
The shining structures raised by lab'ring gods;[124]
By thee the bow and mortal shafts are borne;
Eternal charms thy blooming youth adorn:
Skilled in the laws of secret fate above,
And the dark counsels of almighty Jove,840
'Tis thine the seeds of future war to know,[125]
The change of sceptres, and impending woe,
When direful meteors spread, through glowing air,
Long trails of light, and shake their blazing hair.
Thy rage the Phrygian felt, who durst aspire845
T' excel the music of thy heav'nly lyre;[126]
Thy shafts avenged lewd Tityus' guilty flame,
Th' immortal victim of thy mother's fame;[127]
Thy hand slew Python, and the dame who lost
Her num'rous offspring for a fatal boast.[128]850
In Phlegyas' doom thy just revenge appears,
Condemned to furies and eternal fears;
He views his food, but dreads, with lifted eye,
The mould'ring rock that trembles from on high.[129]
"Propitious hear our prayer, O pow'r divine!855
And on thy hospitable Argos shine;
Whether the style of Titan[130] please thee more,
Whose purple rays th' Achæmenes adore;
Or great Osiris,[131] who first taught the swain
In Pharian fields to sow the golden grain;860
Or Mitra, to whose beams the Persian bows,
And pays, in hollow rocks, his awful vows;
Mitra, whose head the blaze of light adorns,
Who grasps the struggling heifer's lunar horns."[132]

FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Dire," in the Latin sense of ill-omened.
[2] When Jupiter had carried off Europa, her father, Agenor, sent her brother Cadmus to seek her, and
commanded him not to return without his sister. Unable to find her he settled at Thebes, and built the
city. He slew the dragon, which guarded a neighbouring well, and a portion of the armed men, who
sprung up from its teeth, were reputed to be the ancestors of the Thebans.
[3] A second legend ascribed the building of the city to the wonder-working music of Amphion,
which caused the stones to pile themselves together. Both legends were subsequently blended, and
Cadmus had the credit of the upper part of the city, and Amphion of the lower.
[4] Juno visited Athamas, king of Thebes, with madness, and in his frenzy he shot his own son,
Learchus, whom he took for a young lion. Upon this his wife, Ino, who was a daughter of Cadmus,
fled with her second son, Melicertes, and threw herself and her boy into the sea.
[5] Domitian. The panegyric on this timid and cruel tyrant was disgraceful flattery. The boasted
victories over the Dacian's were in reality defeats. They compelled the emperor to sue for an
inglorious peace which was only purchased by the promise of an immediate ransom and an annual
tribute. Most of his pretended triumphs were of a similar character, and led Pliny the younger to
remark, that they were always the token of some advantage obtained by the enemies of Rome.
[6] During the contest between Vespasian and Vitellius for the empire, Domitian, at the age of
eighteen, took refuge in the temple of the Capitol to escape from the fury of the soldiers opposed to
his father. It was self-preservation and not daring which impelled him, and when the temple of
Jupiter was set on fire he again fled, and hid himself until the party of Vespasian prevailed.
[7] This line is very obscure. There is nothing corresponding to it in the Latin.
[8] From the translation of Stephens:

The time may come when a divinor rage.

[9] Pope is closer to Stephens than to the original:

funeral flames
Divided, like the souls they carry.

The rival brothers ultimately engaged in single combat, and both fell. The body of Polynices was
placed by mistake upon the funeral pile of Eteocles, and the flames rose upwards in diverging
currents.
[10] Stephens's translation:

When Dirce blushed, being stained with Grecian blood.

[11] The dirce ran on one side of Thebes, the Ismenus on the other, and they afterwards united in a
common stream. Both were mere watercourses, which were only filled by the rains of winter.
[12] The Thebans are subsequently represented by Statius as driven into the Ismenus by the Greeks,
and the hosts which were killed or drowned were carried by the river into the sea.

[13] What hero, that is, of the famous seven who went up against Thebes to dispossess Eteocles for
violating the compact to reign alternately with Polynices. The five persons whom Statius enumerates
as joining with Polynices and Adrastus, king of Argos, are Tydeus, Amphiaraus, Hippomedon,
Parthenopæus, and Capaneus.
[14] When Tydeus had received his death-wound from a javelin hurled by Menalippus, he gathered
up his failing strength, and flung a dart by which he mortally wounded Menalippus in turn. Full of
revengeful spite Tydeus begged that the head of Menalippus might be brought to him. He grasped it
with his dying hand, gazed at it with malignant joy, gnawed it in his frenzy, and refused to relinquish
his hold. This was "the rage of Tydeus," which Statius says the Greeks themselves condemned as
exceeding the recognised latitude of hate.
[15] The prophet was Amphiaraus, who predicted that all who took part in the expedition, except
Adrastus, would be destroyed. The earth opened while Amphiaraus was fighting, and swallowed up
him and his chariot. Statius paints him sinking calmly into the yawning gulf, without dropping his
weapons or the reins, and with his eyes fixed on the heavens.
[16] Hippomedon is made by Statius the hero of the conflict in the river Ismenus, where he at last
succumbs to the god of the river. The piles of dead formed a dike, which turned back the waters.
[17] Parthenopæus.—Pope.
[18] He declared that Jupiter himself should not keep him from ascending the walls of Thebes.
Jupiter punished his defiance by setting him on fire with lightning on the scaling ladder, and he was
burnt to death.
[19] Œdipus did not strike his wounds. He struck the ground, which was the usage in invoking the
infernal deities, since their kingdom was in the bowels of the earth.
[20] One of the three principal furies or avengers of crime, who inhabited the world of condemned
spirits.
[21] The great difference between raising horror and terror is perceived and felt from the reserved
manner in which Sophocles speaks of the dreadful incest of Œdipus, and from the manner in which
Statius has enlarged and dwelt upon it, in which he has been very unnaturally and injudiciously
imitated by Dryden and Lee, who introduce this most unfortunate prince not only describing but
arguing on the dreadful crime he had committed.—Warton.
[22] Laius, king of Thebes, warned by the oracle that he would be killed by his own offspring,
exposed his son Œdipus on Mount Cithæron. The infant was found by a shepherd, and carried to
Polybus, king of Corinth, who adopted him. Arrived at man's estate, he too was informed by the
oracle that he would take the life of his father, and commit incest with his mother. Believing that the
king and queen who brought him up were his parents, he determined not to go back to Corinth, and
in attempting to avert his destiny, he fulfilled it. As he journeyed towards Thebes he met his real
father, Laius, and slew him in a conflict which grew out of a dispute with his charioteer.
[23] Or the temple at Delphi, where Œdipus went to consult the oracle.
[24] The Sphinx sat upon a rock near Thebes propounding a riddle to every one who passed by, and
destroying all who were unable to explain it. The Thebans proclaimed that whoever would rid the
kingdom of this scourge should marry the widow of Laius, and succeed to the vacant throne. Œdipus,
by solving the riddle, drove the Sphinx to commit suicide, and in accepting the reward, he
unconsciously verified the remainder of the oracle.

[25] Œdipus behaves with the fury of a blustering bully, instead of that patient submission and
pathetic remorse which are so suited to his condition.—Warton.
[26] In the first edition he had written

Which shall o'er long posterity prevail.

The more forcible phrase which he substituted for "long posterity," was from Dryden's Virg. Æn. iii.
132:

And children's children shall the crown sustain.

[27] This couplet follows closely the translation of Stephens:

Put on that diadem besmeared with gore
Which from my father's head these fingers tore.

[28] Dryden's Virg. Æn. iii. 78:

Broke ev'ry bond of nature and of truth

[29] Pope uses "preventing" in the then common but now obsolete sense of "anticipating."
[30] A river in the lower world.
[31] Great is the force and the spirit of these lines down to verse 183; and indeed they are a
surprising effort in a writer so young as when he translated them. See particularly lines 150 to 160.—
Warton.
[32] The entrance to the infernal regions was said to be through a cave in the Tænarian promontory,
which formed the southern extremity of Greece.
[33] Pope has judiciously tamed the bombast image "caligantes animarum examine campos," "the
plains darkened with a swarm of ghosts." "Lucentes equos," he translates, "fair glories," omitting the
image entirely. To mount Atlas he has added an idea which makes the passage more ridiculous than
sublime. It is poorly expressed in the original; in the translation it is ludicrous; "and shook the
heavens and gods he bore." There are many images which if indistinctly seen are sublime; if
particularised they become quite the contrary. However, the translation is certainly wonderful, when
the age of the author is considered. It shows his powers of metrical language, at so early a period of
his poetical studies, though it is very unfaithful in particular passages.—Bowles.
[34] Pope's acquaintance with Latin prosody, from his confined education, was probably very small,
or he would not have used Malēa, instead of Malěa, with the line of Statius before him.—Bowles.
[35] "Well-known," because the Fury had before visited the Theban palace to instigate the crimes
and passions of which it had been the scene. The haste with which she goes, and her preference for
the terrestrial journey, even over the haunts of her own Tartarus, indicate the signal malevolence of
the mission. Hence the delight she takes in it.
[36] The original is more forcible and less extravagant. The sunken eyes of the Fury glared with a
light like that of red-hot iron—ferrea lux.
[37] This expression, which is not in Statius, is common with Dryden, as in his Virg. Æn. x. 582:

And from Strymonius hewed his better hand.
[38] Statius depicts the frenzied virulence of the Fury, by saying that she lashed the air with the
serpent. Pope has marred the description by representing the lashing of the air as the act of the
serpent itself.
[39] After Ino had drowned herself and her son Melicertes, they became marine divinities, and their
names were changed to Leucothea and Palæmon. Statius is more picturesque than Pope. When the
apparition of the Fury announced terrible evils to come, the sea was stirred to its depths. On the
outburst of the tempest, Palæmon was sailing about on the back of a dolphin, and it was then that his
mother snatched him up in her alarm, and pressed him to her bosom. To convey an idea of the
tremendous nature of the storm, Statius says that the Corinthian isthmus could hardly resist the
violence of the waves which dashed against each of its shores. This circumstance is justly styled by
Pope "most extravagantly hyperbolical," but a translator should not have omitted it.
[40] A great image, and highly improved from the original, "assueta nube."—Warton.
The first edition had a feeble prosaic line in place of the image which Warton admired:

Headlong from thence the fury urged her flight,
And at the Theban palace did alight.

[41] "Ruptæque vices" in the original, which Pope translates, "and all the ties of nature broke," but
by vices is indicated the alternate reign of the two brothers, as ratified by mutual oaths, and
subsequently violated by Eteocles.—De Quincey.
[42] The felicities of this translation are at times perfectly astonishing, and it would be scarcely
possible to express more nervously or amply the words,—

jurisque secundi
Ambitus impatiens, et summo dulcius unum
Stare loco,—

than by Pope's couplet, which most judiciously, by reversing the two clauses, gains the power of
fusing them into connection.—De Quincey.
[43] "Bound" is an improper verb as applied to "steers"; besides the simile is not exactly understood.
There is nothing about "reins" or "bounding" in the original. What is meant is that the steers do not
draw even. Pope confounded the image of the young bullocks with that of a horse, and he therefore
introduces "reins" and "bounding."—Bowles.
[44] For "armour wait," the first edition had "arms did wait."
[45] "Charger" is used in its old sense of a dish.
[46] Statius, to point the folly of the criminal ambition, goes on to represent, that the contest was
only for naked unadorned dominion in a poverty-stricken kingdom,—a battle for which should
cultivate the barren territory on the banks of a petty stream,—and for this empty privilege the
brothers sacrificed everything which was of good report in life or death. Pope weakened the moral of
Statius, and the lines which follow to the end of the paragraph are also very inferior in force to the
original.
[47] In the first edition,

Not all those realms could for such crimes suffice.

Pope might have done more to improve this prosaic couplet.
[48] Pope borrowed from the translation of Stephens:

How wast thou lost
In thine own joys, proud tyrant then, when all
About thee were thy slaves.

[49] It should be "discontented."—Warton.
[50] This couplet was interpolated by Pope and seems to have been suggested by his hostility to the
revolution of 1688. Nor does Statius call the populace "vile," or say that they are always
"discontented," or that they are "still prone to change, though still the slaves of state." Neither does
he say that they "are sure to hate the monarch, they have," but he says that their custom is to love his
successor, which is a sentiment more in accordance with experience.
[51] "Exiled" because the king who was not reigning had to leave the country during his brother's
year of power.
[52] The warriors who were the produce of the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus fought among
themselves till only five were left.
[53] "Unrivalled," as the context shows, is not here a term of commendation, but merely signifies
that the monarch had no equal in rank or power.
[54] "Placido quatiens tamen omnia vultu," is the common reading. I believe it should be "nutu,"
with reference to the word "quatiens."—Pope.
[55] Pope was manifestly unable to extract any sense from the original. It is there said that Jupiter at
his first entrance seats himself upon his starry throne, but that the other gods did not presume to sit
down "protinus," that is, in immediate succession to Jupiter, and interpreting his example as a tacit
license to do so, until, by a gentle wave of his hand, the supreme father signifies his express
permission to take their seats. In Pope's translation, the whole picturesque solemnity of the celestial
ritual melts into the vaguest generalities.—De Quincey.
De Quincey was mistaken in his inference that Pope was unable to understand the passage, for he
had the assistance of the translation of Stephens, which gives the meaning correctly:

Anon
He sets him down on his bespangled throne.
The rest stand and expect: not one presumed
To sit till leave was beckoned.

[56] The winds would have been inconvenient members of a deliberative assembly if they had taken
to howling, whistling, and sighing. Nevertheless their propensity to blow was so inveterate that, in
Statius, they are only kept quiet by their fear of Jove.
[57] Our author is perpetually grasping at the wonderful and the vast, but most frequently falls
gradually from the terrible to the contemptible.—Warton.
By "our author" Warton meant Statius, and the expression, he criticised as hyberbolical was the
"eluded rage of Jove,"—an exaggeration for which Pope alone was responsible.

[58] Hiera, one of the Æolian islands in the neighbourhood of Sicily, was supposed to be the
workshop of Vulcan. The island was volcanic, and the underground noises were ascribed to Vulcan,
and his assistants, the Cyclopes, as they plied their trade. The circumstance that the fires of the
Æolian forge were exhausted was doubtless introduced by Statius because in his day the eruptions
had ceased in Hiera.
[59] Agave, the daughter of Cadmus. Her son Pentheus appeared among the women who were
celebrating the Bacchic revelries on Mount Cithæron, and his mother, mistaking him in her frenzy
for a wild beast, like a wild beast tore him to pieces.
[60] There is no mention of "the direful banquet" in the original. "The savage hunter" alludes to
Athamas chasing and slaying his son under the delusion that he was a lion.
[61] The king of Argos.
[62] Tantalus, king of Argos, invited the gods to a banquet, and served up the boiled flesh of his own
son, Pelops.
[63] Phoroneus was commonly reputed to have been the founder of the city of Argos.
[64] Juno employed Argus to keep guard over Io, transformed by Jupiter into a cow. Mercury, being
sent by Jupiter to rescue Io, lulled Argus to sleep by melodious airs on the flute, and then cut off his
head.
[65] An oracle announced to Acrisius, king of Argos, that he would die by the hands of his grandson.
The king endeavoured to escape his fate by imprisoning his daughter, Danae, in a brazen tower, but
Jupiter obtained access to her in the shape of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of
Perseus, who fulfilled the prediction, according to the established legendary usage.
[66] The force of this taunt is weakened in Pope's translation by the change from the second person
to the third, as though the invectives of Juno had not been addressed to Jupiter himself.
[67] Jupiter visited Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, in all the majesty of the thunderer, and she was
consumed by the lightning.
[68] Homer makes Juno say that there are three cities pre-eminently dear to her—Argos, Sparta, and
Mycenæ. Samos had no less title to the distinction. It was one of the localities which contended for
the renown of having given her birth, and was, with Argos, the principal seat of her worship. Virgil
ranks Samos second among the places she delighted to honour.
[69] The river Alpheus, which takes its rise in Arcadia, loses itself underground in parts of its course,
and again reappears. This suggested the fiction that it ran in a subterranean channel, below the
bottom of the sea, to the fountain of Arethusa in Sicily, where it once more emerged to day. Pope had
less regard to the text of Statius than to Dryden's translation of Virgil's lines on the same legend in
Ecl. x. 5:

So may thy silver streams beneath the tide,
Unmixed with briny seas, securely glide.

[70] The Arcadians celebrated the worship of Jupiter with human sacrifices.
[71] He was king of Pisa in Elis, where was the celebrated Olympia, with its temple of Jupiter.
Œnomaus had ascertained from an oracle that he would perish by the agency of his son-in-law, and
he was anxious, in self-defence, to keep his daughter, Hippodamia, from marrying. As he possessed
the swiftest horses in the world he required her suitors to contend with him in a chariot-race, which

allowed them no chance of success. The prize of victory was to be his daughter; the penalty of defeat
was death, and the bones which laid unburied in the neighbourhood of Jupiter's temple were those of
the lovers of Hippodamia.
[72] The Cretans claimed to possess both the birth-place and burial-place of Jupiter.
[73] "Derived from Jove," inasmuch as Perseus, one of the kings of Argos, was the son of Jupiter and
Danae.
[74] Eteocles and Polynices.—Pope.
[75] Mercury, so called because he was born upon Mount Cyllene.
[76] Eteocles.
[77] Stephens's translation:

This were such a day
He'd spend an age to see 't.

[78] To Argos, of which Danaus had been king, whence the Argives were also called Danai.
[79] Atreus, king of Mycenæ, murdered the two sons of his brother Thyestes, and feasted their father
with dishes made of their flesh.
[80] Bacchus forced the Theban women to assemble, and give loose to the wild rites by which he
was celebrated. It was on this occasion that Pentheus was massacred by his mother.
[81] Nisus was king of Megara when it was besieged by Minos. The king's daughter, Scylla,
conceived a passion for Minos, and to ensure him the victory she plucked from her father's head a
purple hair upon which depended the preservation of himself and the city.
[82] Statius says that when Polynices was in the middle of the isthmus of Corinth he could hear the
waves beat against both its shores. "This," remarked Pope, "could hardly be; for the isthmus of
Corinth is full five miles over," and he calls the introduction of the circumstance "a geographical
error." It was his own geography that was at fault. The width of the isthmus is only three miles and a
half. Pope spoilt the incident when he transferred it to the Scironian rock. Sciron was a robber and
murderer, who compelled his victims to wash his feet upon the cliff, and while they were engaged in
the operation he kicked them over into the sea.
[83] "We have scarcely in our language eight more beautiful lines than these, down to human care,"
ver. 481.—Warton.
[84] Pope owed some happy expressions to the translation of Stephens:

The silent world does view
Her airy chariot pearled with drops of dew.

[85] He again borrowed from Stephens:

And nodding through the air brings down in haste
A sweet forgetfulness of labour passed.

[86] A very faulty expression; as also below, verse 501,—"rolls a deluge on."—Warton.

He copied Dryden's Virg. Æn. iv. 638:

As when the winds their airy quarrel try.

He was indebted to a second couplet in the same translation, Æn. ii. 565:

Thus, when the rival winds their quarrel try,
Contending for the kingdom of the sky.
[87] "Showers" is an inappropriate word to denote the deluge of rain which flooded the earth, and
"swept herds, and hinds, and houses to the main."
[88] The Inachus, and the Erasinus were rivers in the plain of Argos.
[89] The waters of the Lerna were infected by the venom from the serpent Hydra, which Hercules
slew.
[90] The storm, by blowing down trees or branches, made an opening in the dense foliage through
which the sun had never penetrated.
[91] In the first edition:

The prince with wonder did the waste behold,
While from torn rocks the massy fragments rolled.

[92] Dryden's Virg. Æn. ii. 413:

The shepherd climbs the cliff, and sees from far
The wasteful ravage of the wat'ry war.

[93] Dryden's Virg. Geor. i. 652:

Bore houses, herds, and lab'ring hinds away.

[94] Statius represents Polynices as terrified by the tempest. Pope appears to have thought that this
was derogatory to the character of the fugitive king, and he calls him, when gazing on the ravages
caused by the storm, "the intrepid Theban," which conveys the impression that he was undaunted by
the spectacle. In the same spirit Pope at ver. 527, has the line, "Thus still his courage with his toils
increased," where the original says that the stimulus which urged him on was fear. But while Pope
has obliterated the alarm which was generated by the tempest he has introduced in its place an alarm
which had no existence. In the midst of the havoc worked by the elements the recollection of his
brother "wings the feet" of the intrepid Theban "with fears," though he is beyond his brother's reach,
and has no suspicion at present that he designs to break the compact to reign alternately. The
influence which the remembrance of Eteocles exercised over the mind of the wanderer is expressly
distinguished by Statius from the fear, and means no more than that since Polynices was an exile
from Thebes, he was compelled to proceed onwards till he could find an asylum in another state.
[95] A mountain on which stood the citadel of Argos.
[96] The temple at Prosymna was dedicated to Juno.
[97] Pope took the expression from Dryden, Virg. Æn. vii. 79:

One only daughter heired the royal state.

And ver. 367:

Only one daughter heirs my crown and state.
[98] Strictly his sons-in-law.
[99] That is, he ordained that the oracles should be incapable of interpretation before it was fulfilled.
[100] Calydon, of which his father Œneus was king.
[101] The mode in which the two fugitives became known to the king and gained admission to the
palace, is not told by Pope, who has left upwards of seventy lines untranslated, and by the mutilation
rendered the incidents improbable. Polynices reaches the palace first and lies down, worn out, on the
pavement of the vestibule. Tydeus arrives at the same spot, and Polynices is unwilling that he should
share the shelter. A quarrel ensues, and from words they proceed to blows. The king is disturbed by
the uproar; he issues forth from the palace with attendants and torches to ascertain the cause;
explanations follow, and these result in Tydeus and Polynices becoming the guests of Adrastus.
"There is an odd account," Pope says to Cromwell, "of an unmannerly battle at fisty-cuffs between
the two Princes on a very slight occasion, and at a time when, one would think, the fatigue of their
journey, in so tempestuous a night, might have rendered them very unfit for such a scuffle. This I had
actually translated, but was very ill satisfied with it, even in my own words, to which an author
cannot but be partial enough of conscience."
[102] Before the victory of Hercules over the Nemean lion, he is said by Statius to have worn the
skin of a lion which he slew in the neighbourhood of Mount Temessus.
[103] "Horror" at the thought of the dreadful forebodings which had been suggested by the literal
language of the oracle; "glad" because of the manner in which the prediction was verified. Jortin, in a
note on another passage of the Thebais, says, "Statius could not help falling into his beloved fault of
joining contraries together. He is too apt to seek this opposition in his words. He never indeed misses
this favourite figure when he can bring it in."
[104] "Firm" for confirm was sanctioned by the frequent example of Dryden, from whose translation
of Virg. Æn. viii. 107, Pope has borrowed the entire couplet:

But oh! be present to thy people's aid,
And firm the gracious promise thou hast made.

[105] In the first edition this verse was an Alexandrine, ending with "and wake the sleeping fires,"
which Pope took from Dryden, Virg. Æn. viii, 720:

And on his altars waked the sleeping fires.

[106] "Fry" was the reading of all the editions till that of 1736, when "fly" was substituted by an
evident error of the press, and has been retained ever since.
[107] "Tutress" in the first edition. Acestis had been the nurse, and was now the duenna of the two
daughters of Adrastus.
[108] The gorgon, Medusa, changed every one who saw her to stone. Perseus avoided the penalty by
only looking at her reflection in a mirror as he cut off her head while she slept. Being the grandson of
a king of Argos he was an Argive hero, whence his triumph was engraved upon the royal goblet. The
artist had selected the moment when Perseus is darting into the air with the head of the gorgon,
which, newly separated from the body, still retained the traces of expiring life.

[109] On account of the beauty of Ganymede, Jove sent an eagle to convey him from the earth to the
habitations of the gods. There he was appointed cup-bearer, which rendered the incident appropriate
to a drinking-vessel.
[110] He has omitted some forcible expressions of the original: Septem—atris—terentem—nigro—
centum per jugera,—all of them picturesque epithets.—Warton.
Statius says, that the huge serpent while alive encircled Delphi seven times with its dark coils, and
that when dead and barely unrolled, its body spread over a hundred acres.
[111] The water was not itself poisonous, but it turned to venom in the serpent.
[112] Stephens is more literal, and at the same time more poetical:

earth prepares thy room
Garnished with flow'ry beds, and thatched above
With oaken leaves close woven; whilst the grove
Lends bark to make thy garments.

[113] Much superior to the original.—Warton.
[114] Sandy's translation of Ovid's Met. bk. vi.

And calls the furies from the depth of hell.

[115] Pope copied Stephens:

devouring some
With rav'nous jaws before their parents' eyes,
And fats herself with public miseries.

[116] Inachus, according to one tradition, built the city of Argos. After his descendants had reigned
for some generations, the throne was seized by Danaus.
[117] Death cutting off the fatal thread with a scythe, is not a very sublime or congruous image. Pope
has blended modern ideas with classical: in the original it is "ense metit;"—"mows with his sword."
Pope has introduced a "scythe," to preserve more accurately the metaphor, but it has a bad effect.—
Bowles.
[118] Chorœbus.
[119] Statius states that Chorœbus withdrew, having obtained his end, and says nothing of his being
"unwilling," by which Pope seems to mean that he was unwilling to accept his life. This deviation
from the original destroys the generous heroism of Chorœbus, for if he was weary of his existence
there was no merit in his braving death. Statius, indeed, had previously said that Apollo granted
Chorœbus the "sad boon of life" out of admiration for his magnanimity; but this phrase only signifies
that life is sorrowful, and not that Chorœbus would have preferred to die.
[120] Some of the most finished lines he has ever written, down to verse 854.—Warton.
[121] Apollo was specially worshipped by the Lycians.
[122] The celebrated fountain sacred to Apollo on Parnassus.

[123] Apollo was surnamed the Cynthian, from Mount Cynthus in the island of Delos, which was the
place of his birth, and the most revered of all the localities set apart for his worship. The island,
which had previously floated over the ocean, was, according to one version of the legend, rendered
stationary by Jupiter when Apollo was born; according to another version, it was subsequently fixed
by Apollo himself.
[124] The walls of Troy were the work of Apollo and Neptune.
[125] In the first edition it was

Thou dost the seeds of future wars foreknow.

[126] The Phrygian was Marsyas, who contended on the flute against Apollo with his lyre. When the
umpires decided in favour of the god, he flayed Marsyas for his presumption.
[127] Tityus assaulted the mother of Apollo, and her son shot the offender.
[128] Niobe, because she had seven sons and seven daughters, thought herself superior to Latona,
who had only one son, and one daughter,—Apollo and Diana. These divinities, in revenge, destroyed
the fourteen children of Niobe.
[129] In the first edition:

He views his food, would taste, yet dares not try,
But dreads the mould'ring rock that trembles from on high.

Apollo intrigued with Coronis, the daughter of Phlegyas. Her enraged father retaliated by firing the
temple of Apollo, and was consigned for his rebellion to perpetual torture in the infernal regions. His
terror lest the impending rock should crush him is a circumstance interpolated by Pope from Virgil's
description of the punishment of Pirithous and Ixion, and the expression "mould'ring rock" is taken
from Dryden's translation of the passage, Æn. vi. 816:

High o'er their heads a mould'ring rock is placed
That promises a fall, and shakes at ev'ry blast.

The revolting nature of the food itself is the reason assigned by Statius why Phlegyas forebore to
partake of it, and preferred to endure the pangs of hunger.
[130] After Apollo, in the later mythology, had been identified with the sun, all the names
personifying the sun, of which Titan was one, became applicable to Apollo.
[131] Diodorus maintained that the Osiris of the Egyptians was their god of the sun, and Statius has
adopted this erroneous view. According to the statement of Herodotus, Osiris answered to the
Grecian Bacchus, and there is little doubt that the old historian was right.
[132] Mithras was the Persian god of the sun. He was worshipped in caves, or, as Pope has it, in
"hollow rocks," because the spherical form of the cave symbolised the universe, of which Mithras
was the maker. The "blaze of light which adorns his head" in Pope's version, makes no part of the
description in the original. The final line is explained by several ancient works of art, in which a
man, wearing a Phrygian cap, is depicted cutting the throat of a bull he has flung to the ground. The
man is said by an old scholiast on Statius to typify the sun, the bull the moon, and the intention, he
states, is to represent the superiority of the sun over the moon. Statius speaks of the bull as indignant

at being compelled to follow Mithras,—an idea which suits ill with the tranquil aspect of the moon
as it floats through the heavens.

TRANSLATIONS
FROM

OVID.
Great is the change in passing from Statius to Ovid; from force to facility of
style; from thoughts and images which are too much studied and unnatural
to such as are obvious, careless, and familiar. Ovid seems to have had the
merit of inventing this beautiful species of writing epistles under feigned
names. It is a high improvement on the Greek elegy, to which its dramatic
form renders it much superior. The judgment of the writer must chiefly
appear by opening the complaint of the person introduced, just at such a
period of time, as will give occasion for the most tender sentiments, and the
most sudden, and violent turns of passion to be displayed. Ovid may
perhaps be blamed for a sameness of subjects in these epistles of his
heroines; and his epistles are likewise too long, which circumstance has
forced him into a repetition and languor in the sentiments. On the whole the
epistle before us is translated by Pope with faithfulness and with elegance,
and much excels any Dryden translated in the volume he published, several
of which were done by some "of the mob of gentlemen that wrote with
ease,"—that is, Sir C. Scrope, Caryll, Pooly, Wright, Tate, Buckingham,
Cooper, and other careless rhymers. Lord Somers translated Dido to Æneas,
and Ariadne to Theseus. Though I regret the hours our poet spent in
translating Ovid and Statius, yet it has given us an opportunity of admiring
his good sense and judgment, in not suffering his taste and style, in his
succeeding works, to be infected with the faults of these two writers.—
Warton.
Warton says, "The judgment of the writer must chiefly appear by opening
the complaint of the person introduced at such a period of time as will give
occasion for the most tender sentiments." How beautifully is this displayed
in Pope's Epistle to Abelard, a poem that has another most interesting
circumstance, which Ovid appears, as well as our Drayton, to have
neglected,—I mean the introduction of appropriate and descriptive imagery,
which relieves and recreates the fancy by the pictures, and by the
landscapes which accompany the characters. Ovid, in this Epistle, seems
not insensible to the effect of the introduction of such scenes; and the
Leucadian rock, the antra nemusque, the aquatic lotus, the sacred pellucid

fountain, and particularly the genius of the place, the Naiad, addressing the
despairing Sappho (which circumstance Pope has beautifully imitated and
improved in Eloisa), are in the genuine spirit of poetical taste. Dr. Warton
observes that this translation is superior to any of Dryden's. If, indeed, we
compare Pope's translations with those of any other writer, their superiority
must be strikingly apparent. There is a finish in them, a correctness, a
natural flow, and a tone of originality, added to a wonderful propriety and
beauty of expression and language. If he ever fails, it is where he
generalises too much. This is particularly objectionable, where in the
original there is any marked, distinct, and beautiful picture. So, ver. 253,
Pope only says,

Cupid for thee shall spread the swelling sail;

whereas in Ovid, Cupid appears before us in the very act of guiding the
vessel, seated as the pilot, and with his tender hand (tenerâ manu)
contracting, or letting flow the sail. I need not point out another beauty in
the original,—the repetition of the word Ipse.—Bowles.
Richardson has appended this note to the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon in his
copy of the quarto of 1717: "Corrected by the first copy, written out
elegantly (as all his MSS.) to show friends, with their remarks in the
margin; the present reading for the most part the effect of them." The
remarks in the margin are mere exclamations, such as "pulchre," "bene,"
"optime," "recte," "bella paraphrasis," "longe præstas Scrope meo judicio,"
"minus placet," &c. They are doubtless from the pen of Cromwell, since it
appeals from Pope's letter to him on June 10, 1709, that he had jotted down
the same phrases on the margin of the translation of Statius. Bowles having
quoted the observation of Warton, "that he had seen compositions of youths
of sixteen years old far beyond the Pastorals in point of genius and
imagination," adds, "I fear not to assert that he never could have seen any
compositions of boys of that age so perfect in versification, so copious, yet
so nice in expression, so correct, so spirited, and so finished," as the
translation of the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon. The remark was made by
Bowles in the belief that the version was the production of the poet's
fourteenth year. Pope himself records on his manuscript that it was "written
first 1707." He was then nineteen, and when the Epistle was published in
1712, in Tonson's Ovid, he was twenty-four.

"Ovid," says Dryden, "often writ too pointedly for his subject, and made his
persons speak more eloquently than the violence of their passions would
admit." Passion is sometimes highly eloquent; feeling strongly it expresses
itself forcibly, and Dryden meant that the characters in Ovid, by their
numerous strokes of studied brilliancy, seemed to be carried away less by
their emotions than by the ambition to shine. These glittering artifices were
formerly called wit, and Dryden complains that Ovid "is frequently witty
out of season," but they are not wit in our present sense of the word.
Occasionally they are the far-fetched or affected prettinesses which are
properly called conceits; and more commonly they consist in terse
antithesis, and a sparkle of words produced by the balanced repetition of a
phrase. They are often as appropriate as they are showy, and if they are
among the blemishes they are conspicuous among the beauties of Ovid. His
writings are marked by opposite qualities. He is sometimes too artificial in
his expression of the passions, and sometimes he is natural, glowing, and
pathetic. He abounds in pointed sentences, and is not less distinguished for
the easy, spontaneous flow of his language. He is at once prolix and
concise, indulging in a single vein of thought till the monotony becomes
tedious, and yet enunciating his ideas with sententious brevity. The
condensation of the Latin in many places cannot be preserved in the diffuser
idioms of our English tongue, but, if we overlook a few weak couplets,
Pope has translated the Epistle of Sappho to Phaon with rare felicity, and
notwithstanding the inevitable loss of some happy turns of expression, he
has managed to retain both the passion and the poetry. Effusions of
sentiment were better adapted to his genius than the heroic narrative of the
Thebais; and his limpid measure, which neither resembled the numerous
and robuster verse of Statius, nor was suited to an epic theme, accorded
with the sweetness and uniformity of Ovid's verse, and with the outpourings
of grief and tenderness which are the staple of these epistolary strains.
There is no ground for the regret of Warton that Pope should have spent a
little time in translating portions of Ovid and Statius. It would be as
reasonable to lament that he stooped to the preliminary discipline which
made him a poet. He has related that he did not take to translation till he
found himself unequal to original composition, and, like all who excel in
any department, he learnt, by copying his predecessors, to rival them.

SAPPHO TO PHAON.[1]
Say, lovely youth,[2] that dost my heart command,
Can Phaon's eyes forget his Sappho's hand?
Must then her name the wretched writer prove,
To thy remembrance lost, as to thy love?
Ask not the cause that I new numbers choose,5
The lute neglected, and the lyric muse;[3]
Love taught my tears in sadder notes to flow.
And tuned my heart to elegies of woe.
I burn, I burn, as when through ripened corn
By driving winds the spreading flames are borne![4]10
Phaon to Ætna's scorching fields retires,
While I consume with more than Ætna's fires![5]
No more my soul a charm in music finds;
Music has charms alone for peaceful minds.[6]
Soft scenes of solitude no more can please,15
Love enters there, and I'm my own disease.
No more the Lesbian dames my passion move,
Once the dear objects of my guilty love;
All other loves are lost in only thine,
Ah youth ungrateful to a flame like mine!20
Whom would not all those blooming charms surprise,
Those heav'nly looks, and dear deluding eyes?
The harp and bow would you like Phœbus bear,
A brighter Phœbus Phaon might appear;
Would you with ivy wreathe your flowing hair,25
Not Bacchus' self with Phaon could compare:
Yet Phœbus loved, and Bacchus felt the flame,
One Daphne warmed, and one the Cretan dame;[7]
Nymphs that in verse no more could rival me,
Than ev'n those gods contend in charms with thee.[8]30
The muses teach me all their softest lays,

And the wide world resounds with Sappho's praise.
Though great Alcæus more sublimely sings,
And strikes with bolder rage the sounding strings,
No less renown attends the moving lyre,35
Which Venus tunes, and all her loves inspire;
To me what nature has in charms denied,
Is well by wit's more lasting flames supplied.
Though short my stature, yet my name extends
To heav'n itself, and earth's remotest ends.40
Brown as I am, an Ethiopian dame[9]
Inspired young Perseus with a gen'rous flame;
Turtles and doves of diff'ring hues unite,
And glossy jet is paired with shining white.
If to no charms thou wilt thy heart resign,45
But such as merit, such as equal thine,
By none, alas! by none thou can'st be moved,
Phaon alone by Phaon must be loved!
Yet once thy Sappho could thy cares employ,
Once in her arms you centered all your joy:50
No time the dear remembrance can remove,
For oh! how vast a memory has love?[10]
My music, then, you could for ever hear,
And all my words were music to your ear.
You stopped with kisses my enchanting tongue,55
And found my kisses sweeter than my song.[11]
In all I pleased, but most in what was best;
And the last joy was dearer than the rest.[12]
Then with each word, each glance, each motion fired,
You still enjoyed, and yet you still desired,60
Till all dissolving in the trance we lay,
And in tumultuous raptures died away.
The fair Sicilians now thy soul inflame;
Why was I born, ye gods, a Lesbian dame?
But ah! beware, Sicilian nymphs! nor boast65
That wand'ring heart which I so lately lost;
Nor be with all those tempting words abused,
Those tempting words were all to Sappho used.

And you that rule Sicilia's happy plains,
Have pity, Venus,[13] on your poet's pains!70
Shall fortune still in one sad tenor run,
And still increase the woes so soon begun?
Inured to sorrow from my tender years,
My parent's ashes drank my early tears;
My brother next, neglecting wealth and fame,75
Ignobly burned in a destructive flame:[14]
An infant daughter late my griefs increased,
And all a mother's cares distract my breast.[15]
Alas! what more could fate itself impose,
But thee, the last and greatest of my woes?80
No more my robes in waving purple flow,
Nor on my hand the sparkling diamonds glow;
No more my locks in ringlets curled diffuse
The costly sweetness of Arabian dews,
Nor braids of gold the varied tresses bind,85
That fly disordered with the wanton wind:
For whom should Sappho use such arts as these?
He's gone, whom only she desired to please!
Cupid's light darts my tender bosom move,
Still is there cause for Sappho still to love:90
So from my birth the sisters fixed my doom,
And gave to Venus all my life to come;
Or, while my muse in melting notes complains,
My yielding heart keeps measure to my strains.
By charms like thine which all my soul have won,95
Who might not—ah! who would not be undone?
For those Aurora Cephalus[16] might scorn,
And with fresh blushes paint the conscious morn.
For those might Cynthia lengthen Phaon's sleep,
And bid Endymion[17] nightly tend his sheep.100
Venus for those had rapt thee to the skies,
But Mars on thee might look with Venus' eyes.
O scarce a youth, yet scarce a tender boy!
O useful time for lovers to employ!