'me, are some things that may be dangerous to be looked upon:

however, I think you may venture, though you should blush • for it, since blushing becomes you the best of any lady in Eng• land,' &c. By the rest of this book' are evidently meant the

c other contents of the volume of Miscellanies, which, apparently, were partly of a somewhat loose description. Both Mr. Roscoe and Mr. Bowles absurdly understand the words as referring to additions that had been made to the Rape of the Lock since it was first printed; and the former, to support this impossible interpretation, proposes that the date of the letter should be altered from May, 1712, to May, 1714. But even that new reading would not answer the purpose, unless we are to suppose that Miss Blount had not her copy of the improved edition of the poem sent to her till after it had been before the world for three months ; for that edition certainly appeared in the end of February, 1714. Still more incorrect is the account afterwards given of the translation of the Emperor Adrian's deathbed verses: upon this small matter Mr. Roscoe contrives to crowd nearly half-a-dozen blunders into the compass of about as many sentences. Again, it is impossible that an undated letter of Pope's to Lord Burlington, in which he recounts a ludicrous conversation with Lintot, the bookseller, who overtook him in Windsor Forest, and rode with him to Oxford, can have been written in August, 1714, as Mr. Roscoe supposes, both in his Life of Pope and in a special note on the letter; for one of the most remarkable passages in it relates to the recent publication of the first volume of the translation of Homer, which did not take place till June, 1715. Another of his misconceptions is comical. In November, 1734, Swift, having just read the Essay on Man, and some other recent productions of Pope's, writes to him thus:· I am glad that what you write is printed in large letters; other

wise, between the weakness of my eyes and the thickness of 'my hearing, I should lose the greatest pleasure that is left me. • Pray command my Lord Bolingbroke to follow that example, if I • live to read his Metaphysics. Whereupon Mr. Roscoe gravely remarks that · Pope, during the later part of his correspondence

with Swift, was accustomed to write his letters in imitation of print, that his friend might more easily read them !' And so Bolingbroke, too, was to copy over the whole of his metaphysical lucubrations in the saine peculiar kind of character, for the ease of the Dean's eyesight! We need hardly observe, that all that Swift asks is, that when the work is sent to the press, it shall be printed in a good-sized type. Pope, indeed, is said to have learned to write by copying printed books; but the information that he ever was in the habit of writing his letters to Swift, or

any one else, in imitation of print, is quite original. Once more: how can Mr. Roscoe adopt from Ayre, as he does in p. 304, the story of Pope's unlucky visitor, who, on discovering that his host was the author of the Essay on Man, after he had been abusing it for everything despicable both in philosophy and poetry, is asserted to have taken up his hat and never ventured to show his face again in Pope's presence,-adding, from himself, that the gentleman referred to is supposed to have been Mallet,-when there is abundance of evidence, part of which is to be found in a subsequent page of his own volume, that Pope and Mallet continued on the most friendly terms so long as the former lived? We cannot allow the mere biographer of a modern poet the privilege ascribed to the Father of Poetry of thus sometimes writing like a man half asleep.

Let us here notice, too, for correction in the next edition of the Life, such errors of simple misstatement or omission as the following. It was not in his childhood that Pope was called 'the little nightingale,' as Mr. Roscoe assumes, here following Johnson. The original authority is Lord Orrery, in his Letters on Swift,' whose words are, speaking of Pope:- His voice in 'common conversation was so naturally musical, that I remember 'honest Tom Southerne used always to call him the little nightingale.' The epithet little referred to the diminutiveness of his person throughout his life. Again: it is not the fact that, when Pope first took to versifying, his father not only suggested subjects for his pen, but corrected his verses.' The old gentleman's practice was, as Mrs. Pope told Spence, to make the boy correct the verses himself to send him back to new-turn them,' as she expressed it. Neither Mr. Roscoe nor any other biographer of Pope, by the bye, has attempted an interpretation, or taken any notice of the following passage in his letter to Lord Hervey, which undoubtedly alludes to some misconduct of his father's elder brother :- He (Pope's father) did not, indeed, think it a happiness to bury his elder brother, though he had one who wanted some of those good qualities which yours possessed.' Nothing whatever, we believe, is known of this elder of the two sons of Pope's grandfather, the Hampshire elergyman. Finally we may observe that Mr. Roscoe has forgotten to inform his readers where Pope died. We are told that, on the proclamation coming out ordering all Roman Catholics to withdraw from London and its neighbourhood, he removed, in the beginning of March, 1744, to the prescribed distance of ten miles from the capital; but no mention is made of his having ever returned to Twickenham, whither, however, he had certainly ventured back before the end of April, perhaps much sooner,

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and where he was when he died on the evening of the 30th of May. One wonders whether Mr. Roscoe himself did not discover such inadvertencies as these after his volumes were printed off, and whether he did not leave a corrected copy which might have been made use of for the new edition.

Most of the facts mentioned by Pope's preceding biographers have been incorporated in Mr. Roscoe's narrative; but it is surprising that he should have been altogether ignorant of the existence of Tyers's sketch, published in 1782, under the title of * An Historical Rhapsody on Mr. Pope.' Thomas, or Tom Tyers, as his friend Johnson used always to call him, now best remembered, perhaps, as one of the figures in Boswell

, attracted considerable attention, in his own day, by various publications. His · Political Conferences between several Great Men in the Last and Present Century,' and his Conversations Political and Familiar,' may be considered as having been the precursors of the · Imaginary Conversations' of Landor. But his biographical tracts on Pope, Addison, and Johnson, are now more interesting. That on Pope extends to about a hundred and fifty pages. Tyers was a youth of eighteen when Pope died, but missed seeing Virgil. He once had, he tells us, an opportunity of viewing Pope's grotto and garden, and should have seen the poet himself if he had been at home,' the friend by whom he was accompanied having been a person who could have introduced him. His · Historical Rhapsody,' as he calls it, is considerably more rhapsodical than historical, but he has preserved a few particulars not elsewhere mentioned. One, which is given in a postscript to his second edition, is, that Pope, when at school, took great delight in cock-fighting, and laid out all his money in buying fighting-cocks, till his mother's solicitous efforts succeeded in weaning him from that passion. One can readily enough believe this of the future satirist. Pope has been likened sometimes to a bee, sometimes to a wasp; but the cock, pugnacious, irritable, and arrogant, at once presenting something of the ludicrous in the contrast between his size and his strut, and yet commanding our respect by his courage and dignity, would typify him upon the whole better than either. Tyers also refers to some memorabilia preserved by Mrs. Pilkington in her autobiographical memoirs, and by Tom Davies in his Life of Garrick,' which have escaped Mr. Roscoe. The best account, we may add, of Pope's going to see Garrick when the great actor first came out at the theatre in Goodman's-fields, in 1741, is in that half-mad book, the Memoirs of Percival Stockdale. Stockdale had the story from Garrick's own lips. He had the honour, it seems, to act thrice, in different characters, in the presence of Pope. The

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first was Richard, the character in which he first astonished the public. When I was told,' said he, that Pope was in the house, I instantaneously felt a palpitation at my heart.... It gave me ' a particular pleasure that Richard was my character, when Pope was to see and hear me. As I opened my part, I saw our little 'poetical hero, dressed in black, seated in a side box, near the stage, and viewing me with a serious and earnest attention. 'His look shot and thrilled like lightning through my frame; ' and I had some hesitation in proceeding, from anxiety and from joy. As Richard gradually blazed forth, the house was in a roar of applause; and the conspiring hand of Pope shadowed 'me with laurels.' He afterwards learned that Pope had said of him: 'That young man never had his equal as an actor, and he will never have a rival.' One particular in this description by Garrick is in curious accordance with Pope's own picture of himself under the character of Dick Distich, the little poet, in his paper, giving an account of the Club of Little Men, in the Guardian. They had elected Dick their President, he says, not only as he is the shortest of us all, but because he has enter'tained so just a sense of his stature as to go generally in black, 'that he may appear yet less.' Pope's biographers, as far as we remember, have forgotten, or have not deigned to record, this peculiarity. The delineation of Dick Distich goes on:-' Nay, to that perfection is he arrived, that he stoops as he walks. The figure of the man is odd enough; he is a lively little creature, ' with long arms and legs; a spider is no ill emblem of him; he has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.'

Pope has been sufficiently honoured at least in the number of his biographers. Of the earliest of Mr. Roscoe's predecessors, William Ayre, Esq., as he calls himself, nothing appears to be known. It has been conjectured that he may possibly be the same person who is mentioned under the name of Ayrs, as one of Pope's friends, in Gay's poem entitled 'Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece,' written on the completion of the translation of the Iliad in 1720. But in a tract-published immediately after Ayre's work appeared -Remarks on Squire Ayre's Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Pope,' &c., by a writer who subscribes himself J. H.—it is asserted that Ayre is a mere pseudonyme, and that the real writer of the Memoirs was Curll, the bookseller. This tract was published by Curll's rival, Cooper; but it is curious that, some years afterwards, in 1754, Ayre's work was reproduced under a new title, 'The Life of Alexander Pope, Esq.' by this very Cooper, as an original work. The new publication, however, with the exception of the title-page, consisted merely of the unsold copies of the first and only real edition, which came out in 1745, bearing

to be printed for the author, who, in a patent prefixed to the work, giving him the copyright for fourteen years, is styled, Our trusty and well-beloved William Ayre, Esq. There can be little doubt that Ayre was a real personage. His book, which consists of two volumes of between three and four hundred pages each, is one of considerable show and pretension. It is embellished with heads of Pope, and a dozen other persons mentioned in his writings, and is dedicated to Lords Bolingbroke, Burlington, Marchmont, and Bathurst. In his Preface, the author speaks of himself as having always been a professed admirer of Pope's poetry, criticism, and satire ; but he says nothing of having had any personal acqnaintance with the deceased poet. •I have made * use," he says, 'of all possible means, my friends, as well as my'self, having spared no pains to procure what helps were attain

able. Some few I had in my own hands, which were never made public; and the world stands obliged to those of all stations, who have been so kind to hand to me for this use what they

thought would contribute to give light into his life.' Afterwards he declares, that, with certain exceptions, he has not received the least hint from persons of honour and credit (to whom he returns most grateful thanks), of which he has not made some use. In one place he mentions that he is authorized to quote the name of the Earl of Burlington in attestation of a particular statement. The work, however, which appears from the patent to have been finished by the middle of December, 1744, has evidently been got up in great haste. The greater portion of it, indeed, consists of quotations from Pope's poems and printed correspondence, among which are interspersed a few translations from Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Pastor Fido, which the author informs us are his own, those from the Aminta being taken from a complete version of that poem, which he had published a few years before; and even of the remainder, more is occupied with Pope's distinguished literary friends, of most of whom short biographical notices are given, than with himself. Ayre's style is barbarous in the extreme; and its appearance is rendered still more illiterate by bad punctuation. Yet several of the received anecdotes about Pope have no other authority to rest upon than his: and his book continued to be the standard account of Pope's life for a quarter of a century after his decease. It is the chief authoriiy referred to by the writers of the ‘Biographia Britannica, in their article upon Pope, published in 1760. * At last in 1769 appeared what may be called the official biography, not written, however, as originally promised, by Warburton, who was now become Bishop of Gloucester, and too great or too indolent for such labours, but compiled by Owen Ruffhead, from documents

NO, XI.

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