It is not easy to decide the date at which these verses were written. The first mention of them is found in a letter from Bishop Atterbury to the poet, dated 26th Feby. 1721-2, in which the writer asks for "a complete copy of the verses on Mr. Addison." "No such piece of your writing," he says, "has ever been sought after so much. It has pleased every man without exception to whom it has been read. Since you now therefore know where your real strength lies, I hope you will not suffer that talent to lie unemployed." From these expressions we should judge that the lines had been recently composed, and the bent of Pope's genius for personal satire thus discovered. The poet, however, gives a different account of the composition.

"About this time (1715)," writes Warburton, whose narrative is in substantial agreement with the story told by Spence on Pope's own authority, "Mr. Addison's son-in-law, the Earl of Warwick, told Mr. Pope that it was vain to think of being well with his father, who was naturally a jealous man; that Mr. Pope's talents in poetry had hurt him; and to such a degree that he had underhand encouraged Gildon to write a thing about Wycherley, in which he had scurrilously abused Mr. Pope and his family; and for this service he had given Gildon ten guineas after the pamphlet was printed. The very next day, Mr. Pope in great heat wrote Mr. Addison a letter, wherein he told him he was no stranger to his behaviour, which, however, he should not imitate; but that what he thought faulty in him he would tell him fairly to his face, and what deserved praise he would not deny him to the world: and, as a proof of this disposition towards him, he had sent him the enclosed: which was the character first published separately, and afterwards inserted in this place of the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. This plain dealing had no ill effect. Mr. Addison treated Mr. Pope with civility, and, as Mr. Pope believed with justice, from this time to his death, which happened about three years after."

If this were all the evidence on the question we possessed, and if Pope had nothing to gain or lose by his representations, we might accept his history of the satire on Addison without hesitation, though the openness of his dealing with the person whom he attacked would, in that case, stand in striking contrast to his shifty conduct on other, and more or less similar, occasions. But it must be remembered that his story is intended to be a refutation of what he called "the great falsehood which some of the libels reported, that this character was written after the gentleman's death;" it therefore requires to be corroborated. Now the direct confirmatory evidence that the lines on Atticus were written during Addison's lifetime comes from two quarters, Lady M. W. Montagu and Lord Oxford. The former, who was certainly not likely to have testified voluntarily in Pope's favour, is quoted by

Spence (Anecdotes, p. 337) as having said, apparently in reply to a question which the latter had asked her, "Yes, that Satire was written in Addison's lifetime." Lord Oxford, in the Bodleian folio, has the following MS. note to ver. 209 of the Epistle to Arbuthnot; "The assertion of some anonymous authors that Mr. Pope writ this character after the gentleman's death was utterly untrue: it having been sent him several years before, and then shown to Mr. Secretary Craggs and the present Earl of Burlington, who approved our author's conduct on an occasion which he had too much regard for that gentleman's memory willingly to make public. By what accident it came into print he never could learn, but all he can now do is to omit the name." Lady Mary's statement, baldly reported by Spence, and unsupported by any explanation, cannot count for much; and it is to be observed that she says nothing about the verses having been sent to Addison. Lord Oxford's note seems to be merely an amplification of a note which Pope himself inserted in an Appendix to the quarto volume of 1735, without giving any reference to the Earl of Burlington.' With regard to what is said about the substitution of the name "Atticus" for that of Addison, we know that Pope preserved the initial and final letters of Addison's name in the "Fragment of a Satire," which he published in the Miscellanies in 1727, after the verses had been separately printed. The single point in Pope's story, which both Lady Mary and Lord Oxford confirm, is that the verses were written during Addison's lifetime.

There remains the indirect evidence of the letter to Craggs of 15th July, 1715. In this letter Pope writes to Craggs to complain of the "little senate of Cato," and to insinuate that Tickell had commenced his translation of Homer for the purpose of gratifying the ambition of “one man, a great Turk in poetry, who can never bear a brother on the throne." These expressions seem very intelligible when they are compared with Pope's protestations of friendship in his published letters to Addison, which, as we know now, were never written to Addison, but were constructed out of the returned letters of Caryll, and readdressed, obviously for the purpose of giving the public a favourable impression of Pope's conduct in the dispute about the rival translations of the Iliad. The letter to Craggs may therefore be either genuine or concocted. Let us first assume it to have been genuine. In that case it seems to confirm Pope's story in two points in the first place it shows signs of the "great heat" in which the poet says he wrote the verses after what Lord Warwick told him; in the second place, containing as it does the same phrases

1 He had, however, stated in the Testimonies of Authors prefixed to the Dunciad, that he was authorised to give the Earl's name, as one of those who had seen the verses before Addison's death. He also asserts in the same place that the verses were sent privately to Addison; but the passage is so worded as not necessarily to make Lord Burlington a witness to the truth of this statement.

and metaphors as the verses, it would appear to have been written about the same time, thus indirectly corroborating Pope's statement, prefixed to the Dunciad, that the character was written in Addison's lifetime, and, as he hinted, in consequence of Addison's supposed connection with Tickell's Translation. But the date of the letter to Craggs proves that Pope's story, as reported by Warburton, is untrue in its most essential particulars. The poet evidently wishes to insist on the authenticity of the information which he received, by showing that it came from Addison's own stepson. Now Addison was not married to the Countess of Warwick till the 2nd August, 1716; and at that date Pope could not have had any cause to complain of Addison's jealousy, for in the Freeholder of May 7, 1716, the latter had praised his Translation in warm terms. Even if we suppose the information to have been given by Lord Warwick before his mother's marriage, Wycherley did not die till Dec., 1715, so that Gildon could not have received his ten guineas before that date. Yet in July of

that year, when Pope wrote to Craggs, he evidently possessed some proofs of Addison's jealousy, which had thrown him into "great heat; " so that the verses, written at least six months later, and carefully built up on the language of this letter, can hardly have been the product, as he asks us to believe, of sudden impulse.

Supposing, however, that the published letter to Craggs was never really written to that statesman? The latter had been dead fifteen years when the surreptitious volume of Pope's correspondence was published, and it is difficult to see how the poet can have recovered the letter. Again, Craggs was one of Addison's most intimate friends, which makes it highly improbable that Pope would have denounced the latter to him so unreservedly. On the other hand, if the letter was written purposely for publication in the volume of correspondence, the poet's motive is clear. He ran no

risk of detection, as Craggs was dead; while his nice calculation anticipated that the public, struck with the resemblance between the language of the Character of Atticus and that of the letter, would believe them both to have been written about the same time, and would find in the fact a confirmation of the story of the quarrel which he had himself circulated.

It is indeed not very difficult to conjecture with some confidence. the process by which Pope's fable was constructed. The verses on Addison were in all probability written, as Pope says, during the lifetime of the former. In 1711 the poet had been attacked by Dennis for his Essay on Criticism. Of the pamphlet on Wycherley by Gildon, in which Pope says that he and his family were scurrilously abused, I can find no trace, though, if it ever existed, it is curious that the poet should not have preserved it in the collection of libels on himself, which he caused to be bound, and which are

now in my keeping. But in the New Rehearsal, published in 1714, Gildon had attacked Pope under the name of "Sawney Dapper," and had accused him of having written himself the panegyrical verses which were prefixed with Wycherley's name to his Pastorals. In 1715 Pope suspected Addison of having prompted Tickell to undertake the rival translation of the Iliad. Feeling sore at what he conceived to be a conspiracy against his reputation, he joined Addison's name with those of Gildon and Dennis, in the first draft of the Satire, as it appears in Appendix VI. of this volume. But we may be sure that he never sent the verses to Addison. Had he done so, and had the lines produced in Addison's mind the effect which Pope insinuates, they would doubtless have been preserved by the former among his papers. But no trace of them was found there, any more than of the letters which Pope published in his correspondence as having been addressed to Addison.

It is not wonderful that nothing should have been heard of the Satire till 1722. Addison's position and popularity would have suggested to a man so cautious as Pope the danger of showing them even in the circle of his own acquaintance. He may, however, have taken an intimate friend like Lord Burlington into his confidence, and he perhaps read the lines to Lady M. W. Montagu, knowing, in 1716, that she was about to leave England for Constantinople. In 1722 the reasons for reticence no longer existed. He sent the verses to Atterbury, who showed them to others; they were read with eagerness, and in 1723 were printed with an answer by Markland. The report naturally spread that they had been written since Addison's death; and Pope, though he had written the Satire only in retaliation for injuries which he believed to have been done him, now found himself charged with having wantonly attacked a great man who was no longer able to defend himself. All his self-love, all his old resentment against Addison, being thus aroused, his first thought henceforth was how to exalt his own character, even at the expense of his rival's. We see how early the story of the quarrel which he afterwards circulated began to take shape in his mind. The Longleat MS. of the verses (see note to ver. 156) cannot have been written later than 1724; and already Gildon's meaner quill" of the original lines is transformed into "venal quill," with evident reference to the "ten guineas" of Warburton's narrative (see note to ver. 156). This is the first stage of the fiction, which reaches its climax in the recomposition of the letters originally sent to Caryll, and in the tale of the character written off in "great heat" after Lord Warwick's disclosures, and forwarded openly to Addison.

The satire having been printed by Curll in the same volume with the Letters to Cromwell, Pope had an opportunity of charging the bookseller with having published it surreptitiously; and at the same time, as there was no longer any reason for

keeping it from the world, he inserted it in his Miscellany of 1727 under the title of Fragment of a Satire. It was, however, now preceded by the lines in disparagement of critics and commentators, which were aimed especially at Bentley and Theobald, the former of whom had offended Pope by his depreciation of the Translation of the Iliad, and the latter by his remarks on the poet's edition of Shakespeare. It is possible that the character of Bufo was written at some period previous to the appearance of the Verses to the Imitator of Horace; it belongs to the same class as the portraits of "Umbra," "Macer," and "Atticus," and may, like the two former, have been originally one of several satirical portraits painted in accordance with Atterbury's recommendation. The only other portion of the Epistle which we know to have been written long before its publication was the pathetic concluding paragraph. This was sent by Pope in a letter to Aaron Hill, dated 3rd September, 1731. It may, therefore, be said that the "snatches" written " as the several occasions offered," are comprised in vv. 151-214, 231-248, and 406-419; that is to say, out of a composition of 419 lines, only 96 were certainly written before 1733; and these might be removed without radically interfering with the construction of the poem.

How very far from the truth was Pope's statement that he only put "the last hand to this Epistle" after the publication of the Verses to the Imitator of Horace, may be inferred from the fact that the remaining 323 lines were evidently written as an answer to those Verses. The internal evidence of the composition itself is conclusive on this point. It is much less a "bill of complaint" than an apology in the shape of an autobiography into which the preexisting fragments are dexterously woven. The first portion—i.e., all the lines preceding v. 157—is obviously a connected work, and the occasion of its composition is ascertained by the interrupted sentence "Still Sappho-," (v. 101) in allusion to Lady W. M. Montagu, who had been grossly satirised as Sappho in the first Imitation of Horace, and was supposed by Pope to be one of the authors of the retaliatory Verses. The allusion to the elopement of Lady Walpole (see note to v. 25) shows that the opening of the poem was written as late as 1734. As to the latter part, which takes up the autobiographical thread that had of course been dropped in the portions of the Epistle relating to the small critics, to Atticus, and to Bufo, it is evident from the reference to the epitaph on Gay, that it could not have been composed before March 31, 1733, at which date Pope was corresponding with Swift about the final form which the memorial lines on their friend were to assume on the monument. The remainder of the Epistle comprises the assertion of the moral motives of the poet's satire, the character of Sporus, and the account of Pope's family; two of these three passages being an answer to the line, "Hard as thy heart and as thy birth obscure," in the Verses to the Imitator of