writings have been collected, and copiously annotated, by four successive editors; of the voluminous labours of all of whom, except one, there have been two or more authorized impressions, not to speak of several irregular reprints. This is sufficient evidence of his popularity, and of something more. These critical editions have been called for to be placed in libraries among our greatest writers, or the greatest writers of every age of literature. Shakspeare is the only other English classic who has given so much employment to the commentators. We have only one annotated edition (twice printed) of the entire works of Dryden; one (also printed twice) of those of Spenser; and not as yet so much as one of those of Milton, any more than of those of Chaucer. If we except Shakspeare, the only other English writer whose works have been edited as often as those of Pope, is Swift; but even of Swift, Scott's (twice printed) is the only edition that has any pretensions to be called a critical one. for our other great prose writers, such, for instance, as Bacon— although the works of most of them have been several times collected, we can scarcely be said to possess a critical edition of any one of them.

As

Perhaps, when the booksellers found themselves called upon for another library edition of Pope, the best thing upon the whole that they could do was to reproduce that prepared by the late Mr. Roscoe, and published in 1824. Besides being, by its omission of some questionable or objectionable matter, better suited for the use of ordinary readers, if not of the more curious student, than either that of Warton or that of Bowles, it was free from the disadvantage, under which both these preceding editions laboured, of being constructed upon and pervaded by the principles of a school of criticism, which, whatever might be its merits, could not but be regarded as heretical by the generality of the readers of Pope; and out of which, indeed, it was somewhat unaccountable how an editor of his poetry, not to say two, should ever have arisen-unless we are to suppose that they took to the task, as Butler makes the old Puritans to have worshipped their Maker for spite,' and as thinking the writings they republished and commented upon very good for being mended and carped at, if for nothing else. Mr. Roscoe, if without any pretensions to be accounted either a profound or a brilliant critic, was at least not disqualified for the office of editing Pope by any such anti-Popish principles or prejudices. On the contrary, his charity for his author, both as a poet and as a man, has all the amiable weakness that could be desired either in an editor or a biographer. As his edition, too, was of subsequent date to the

publication of Spence's Anecdotes,' his Life of Pope, and his Notes might be considered as embodying nearly all the information respecting the poet and his writings that is yet before the world. We recollect nothing of any importance that has come out since 1824, except a fact or two given in Lady Louisa Stuart's brilliant Biographical Anecdotes,' prefixed to Lord Wharncliffe's edition of the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Still the new edition ought, we think, to have been something more than a mere reprint, with only the former ten volumes compressed into eight. So purely mechanical a piece of reproduction is the present publication, that the reader can nowhere gather from it even the knowledge of when the former edition appeared. Even the fact that Mr. Roscoe no longer lives is nowhere indicated. The former edition, for anything that appears, might have preceded the present by only a few months; and the Preface, addressed to the world more than twenty years ago by a writer who is now, and has been for some years, dead, might be understood as having been penned within the present year. It may be that, luckily, the statements in it, read in that understanding, will still be all true, or at least not absolutely false; that, for instance, when it is said that Spence's Manuscripts' now belong to Mr. Singer,' the fact is still so, as much as it was in 1824; but so negligent or inartificial a manner of republication is not for that the less pessimi exempli. The date of the Preface, which is of the nature of a letter or epistle from the author to his readers, ought at least to have been given. But there are also other reasons why the book should not have been left thus to edit, or re-edit, itself. Apart altogether from matters of taste or opinion, Mr. Roscoe, though he has executed his task generally with care and diligence, has committed several oversights, which may have been excusable enough in a first edition, but which ought not to be allowed to stand without correction in succeeding impressions of the book.

The several veratæ quæstiones of Pope's history will be found to be discussed for the most part by his latest biographer in a sufficiently painstaking manner, and with an attention to the relevant facts which will be allowed to be correct and comprehensive even by those who may not always agree with his conclusions. But even in the more elaborate portions of his performance, which are occupied with these controverted matters, he sometimes misses what a little more research would have discovered. Thus, from having consulted only the first edition of Curll's surreptitious publication of the Letters,' he has given an incomplete copy of what is called The Initial Correspondence;

or, Anecdotes of the Life and Family of Mr. Pope,' inserted by Curll at the beginning of his second volume. The second edition contains a long additional advertisement by Curll, dated July 26, 1735, remarkable as for the first time advancing a direct charge against Pope, of being at the bottom of the contrivance by which the Letters' had been given to the world. Mr. Pope,' Curll here says, having put me under a necessity of using him as he deserves, I hereby declare, that the first volume of his 'Letters,' 'which I published on the 12th of May last, was sent me, ready 'printed, by himself; and for six hundred of which I contracted 'with his agent, R. Smythe, who came to me in the habit of a 'clergyman.' Not, indeed, that this assertion of Curll's is of the least value as evidence of anything except of his own unscrupulosity and impudence. We concur with Mr. Roscoe in scouting the supposition of Pope having had anything to do with the mysterious proceedings through which the Letters got into Curil's hands, as the wildest of improbabilities. At the same time, it is possible that Curll may have given a true account of the affair, so far as he was himself concerned in it: not only, as Johnson observes, no falsehood was ever detected in his account, but the numerous notes from R. Smythe and P. T., given in the 'Initial Correspondence,' have all the air of being genuine. The most natural hypothesis would seem to be that Curll really procured the Letters in the way that he said he did, and that the person from whom he bought them was the party, or the agent of the party, by whom they were stolen, or fraudulently transcribed from the collection deposited in Lord Oxford's library. Another curious random assertion of Curll's, by the bye, in this advertisement, which has escaped Mr. Roscoe, is, that Pope had been concerned in the newspaper called The Grub-street Journal from its origin. This, it appears, from a note subjoined to the advertisement, had been declared to be false by Pope, or on his authority; but Curll treats his denial as worth nothing; 'for,' says he, one of the Grub-street proprietors assured me, that both himself, and Huggonson, the Quaker, who prints the said jour'nal, could testify the contrary; nay farther, I know, from indis'putable evidence, that Mr. Pope wrote a letter to a certain 'gentleman, in the most pressing instances of friendship, not to 'divulge the secret of his being concerned in that paper with his 'writing partner, Dr. Arbuthnot.' This also, however, is to be received as merely another specimen of Curll's recklessness and effrontery. We quite go along, likewise, with Mr. Roscoe in the sensible view that he takes of the intimacy between Pope and Martha Blount, and his rejection of the imputations or surmises of Mr. Bowles on that subject. He might, however, have

strengthened his refutation of one of the most remarkable of Mr. Bowles's speculations, that founded on the short note numbered the 27th in the correspondence with Miss Blount and her sister, if he had more carefully examined the original, which, as he observes, yet exists in the British Museum. It forms one of the scraps of paper on which the first rough draft of the translation of Homer is written; a circumstance which alone might assure us that it was not regarded by Pope as having any peculiar significancy of the kind supposed by Mr. Bowles, seeing that, being used for such a purpose, it would have to fall under the eye of whoever might be employed to copy the translation for the printer. But it has happened also that a particular word in the letter has been mis-read by Mr. Bowles, in whose edition the letter was first published; and the error has been repeated after him by Mr. Roscoe. What Miss Blount writes is distinctly my room,' not any room,' as in the printed letter. This correction will be found to make the sentence run much more naturally, and to clear away from the expression whatever might be thought singular or suspicious.

Others of Mr. Roscoe's slips are such as would scarcely have been made by a very sharp man. It is ridiculous to suppose that a letter of Sir Charles Wogan's to Swift, in which he says:

I had the honour of bringing Mr. Pope from our retreat in the 'forest of Windsor, to dress à la mode, and introduce at Will's 'coffee-house,' can refer to the incident of Pope having had himself taken to Will's to see Dryden. When Dryden died, Pope had not quite completed his twelfth year, and he appears to have been then a boy at school in London. Nor do we know how long it was before Dryden's death that his youthful admirer managed to catch a sight of him. Pope's own account, in a letter to Wycherley, is: I was not so happy as to know him. Virgilium tantum vidi.' He probably got some grown-up friend to take him into the coffee-house; but the coming up from Binfield, dressed à la mode, to be formally introduced at Will's, was unquestionably an event of a later date. Mr. Roscoe's account of so important a passage in Pope's literary history as the publication of the Rape of the Lock, in its two successive forms, is altogether erroneous. He supposes that it appeared in its first form, or without the machinery of the sylphs and gnomes, in 1711. It is clear from Pope's correspondence that the poem was not published till towards the end of May, 1712. He sends a copy of the volume of Lintot's Miscellanies, in which it appeared, to Martha Blount, on the 25th of that month, accompanied by a letter, in which he says:- You have no hopes of entertainment but from the rest of this book, wherein, they tell

'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 England,' &c. By the rest of this book' are evidently meant the 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 same 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