poet, the same editor has taken occasion to throw out insinuations,1 which every unprejudiced mind must reject with scorn.

From the seclusion of Binfield, Pope sometimes repaired to London, chiefly, we may suppose, for the sake of enjoying the society of literary men; and was a frequenter of Will's Coffee-house (in Russell Street, Covent Garden), the haunt of the most fashionable wits and writers of the day. It was probably on one of these occasions, that he became acquainted with Mr. Henry Cromwell, a somewhat coxcomical personage, who seems to have divided his time between elegant literature and the pleasures of the town. Their acquaintance ripened into friendship: the series of their published letters, however, reaches only from 1708 to 1711. Some displeasure conceived by the eccentric Cromwell, at the freedom with which Pope rallied him on his turn for trifling and pedantic criticism, appears

1 Mr. Bowles saw something very improper in the following note from

"Mrs. Martha Blount to Pope.

66

Sunday Morning.

"Sir,

"My sister and I shall be at home all day. If any company come that you do not like, I'll go up into any room with you. I hope we shall see you.

"Yours, &c."

to have abruptly put an end to their intercourse;1 but from the correspondence which they had together many years afterwards, in consequence of the publication of Pope's letters, by means of Mrs. Thomas, it is manifest that no quarrel had taken place between them.

The exact period at which the Essay on Criticism was composed cannot be determined. According to Ruffhead, it was produced "before Pope had attained his twentieth year."2 The two following notices concerning it in Spence's Anecdotes, are at variance with each other. "My Essay on Criticism was written in 1709; and published in 1711; which is as little time as ever I let any thing of mine lay by me." " "I was with him [Walsh] at his seat in Worcestershire for a good part of the summer of 1705, and showed him my Essay on Criticism in 1706.”4 That he wrote it with rapidity, the matter having been all digested in prose, before he began to put it into verse, we learn from the same valuable volume: 5 and Malone, in a note on his edition of Spence, conjectures that Pope, in 1706, only showed to Walsh the Essay in its prose state.

Though Pope had not yet appeared before the

1 See a letter from Pope to Gay, Nov. 13th, 1712; and Warburton's note on it.

world as an author, his Pastorals, having been handed about in manuscript, had made him known to Lord Halifax, Lord Somers, George Granville, afterwards Lord Lansdowne, Garth, Congreve, Mainwaring, and other celebrated characters. By them he had been earnestly recommended to print the pieces in question: and Tonson, the bookseller, having seen one of them in the hands of Walsh and Congreve, had expressed his desire to become the publisher of poems which the best judges had so highly praised. Accordingly, the Pastorals were printed in 1709, at the end of the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellanies, which opened with the Pastorals of Ambrose Phillips. To the same volume Pope also contributed January and May, from Chaucer, and The Episode of Sarpedon from Homer. Writing to him, May 17, 1709, Wycherley says, "I must thank you for a book of your Miscellanies, which Tonson sent me, I suppose, by your order; and all I can tell you of it is, that nothing has lately been better received by the public than your part of it. You have only displeased the critics by pleasing them too well; having not left them a word to say for themselves against you and your performances; so that now your hand is in, you must persevere till my prophecies of you be fulfilled. In earnest, all the best judges of good sense or poetry are admirers of yours, and like your part of the book so well, that the

rest is liked the worse." The exquisitely melodious versification of Pope's Pastorals fascinated at once the public ear; nor need we wonder that, in those days when descriptive poetry was at its lowest ebb, they were supposed to exhibit pictures of nature.

In 1711, the Essay on Criticism was given anonymously to the world. It is said that the sale of this admirable poem was at first slow; that about a month after its appearance, Pope went into his publisher's shop, and having tied up twenty copies, addressed them to the best judges of poetry in town, among others to Lord Lansdowne and the Duke of Buckingham; and that in consequence of this manœuvre, the Essay soon acquired the popularity which it deserved.1

Its publication raised up to Pope a bitter enemy in John Dennis, whose plays and poems gained

1 This anecdote was told to Warton (Life of Pope, p. xviii.) by Lewis, the bookseller, who published the first edition of the poem; and D'Israeli (Quarrels of Authors, vol. i. p. 145), heard it from a descendant of Lewis.

"This information," observes Mr. Roscoe, "cannot, however, be received without some degree of hesitation. In a letter from Pope to his friend Mr. Craggs (July 19, 1711), speaking of a second edition, he says: 'This I think the book will not so soon arrive at, for Tonson's printer told me he drew off a thousand copies in his first impression:' from which it would appear that the Essay was originally printed for Tonson, and that the impression in the same year by Lewis was a subsequent publication."-Life of Pope, p. 64. The word "Tonson's," in the preceding quotation from Pope's

some contemporary applause, and the ferocity of whose criticisms is still proverbial. The following lines in the Essay were certainly intended to paint this formidable person:

"But Appius 1 reddens at each word you speak,
And stares, tremendous, with a threatening eye,
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry:"

2

4

and it is asserted that Dennis, finding the work on Lintot's counter, read a page or two with many frowns, till arriving at the couplet,

"Some have at first for wits, then poets pass'd,
Turn'd critics next, and prov'd plain fools at last,"

he dashed it down with great fury, and exclaimed, "He means me, by God!" Dennis now vowed vengeance on Pope; and forthwith attacked him in a pamphlet, entitled Reflections, Critical and Satirical, upon a late Rhapsody called an Essay upon Criticism, wherein, amid a quantity of extravagance and most outrageous abuse, were one or two just observations, of which, in a subsequent edition of the Essay, our poet availed himself.

letter, must have been a slip of his pen. The small quarto of the Essay on Criticism, printed for Lewis in 1711, was certainly the first edition. An octavo of the poem, printed also for Lewis in 1713, with the words "Second Edition" on the title page, is now before me.

1 Dennis wrote a tragedy called Appius and Virginia.

2 Mr. Roscoe refers to Ayre's Life of Pope for this story, seemingly not aware that it is told by our author himself in the Narrative of the Frenzy of J. D.