Such a perver into his notes irrelevant sarcasms of his own. sion of his trust of course raises the further presumption that he may have tampered with the text itself, which we know differs in several important respects from all the editions published in Pope's lifetime. The account Warburton gives of the circumstances, under which the first Moral Essay was recast, is not intrinsically probable; and it will be generally allowed that the alteration in the form of the Third Essay, from an Epistle to a Dialogue, shows bad judgment. Neither of these changes was effected in any of the editions published under the superintendence of the poet himself; yet Warburton after 1740 was in constant communication with the latter, and according to his own account objected to the original form of what is now the First Moral Essay when at the author's desire he first examined this Epistle.' Warburton however acquired great influence over Pope by the service which he rendered him in defending the Essay on Man; and in the absence of the suppressed edition which Pope prepared just before his death in conjunction with Warburton, and which would have removed all doubts upon the subject, we must conclude that, as far as the text is concerned, the first editor did not so far venture to depart from the terms of the will, which made his property in the poems conditional on their being published without alterations, as to make changes in the form of the Moral Essays on his own responsibility. The same consideration must also forbid us to entertain the very natural suspicion that, after Pope's death, and without authority from him, he altered the references to 'Reverend Sutton' [Moral Essays, iii. v. 106 and note; Epilogue to Satires, i. v. 16 and note] made in two of the poems as originally published,'in order to spare a man to whom he himself was under considerable obligations.' Quite enough evidence, however, remains of the untrust 1 Since the above was written I have found, by reference to the unpublished correspondence between Pope and Warburton in the British Museum, that Pope consented to remove Sutton's name. worthiness of Warburton's work to make us deplore the fact that his edition should have been taken as the starting-point for all succeeding investigations. Warton-who gives as his reason for undertaking his own edition, 'the universal complaint that Dr. Warburton had disfigured and disgraced his edition with many forced and far-sought interpolations, totally unsupported by the passages they were brought to elucidate,'-did much less than might have been expected from his opportunities towards clearing up the difficulties of the text. He reproduced many of Warburton's most useless notes, and if he did not imitate the turgid comments of the first editor, he equalled or even surpassed him in the irrelevancy of his observations. His reading was wide and miscellaneous, and he was more anxious to display this, than to illustrate the meaning of his text. The mixture of indolence and ostentation which 'disfigures' his edition may be inferred from the following instance. In his Imitation of the Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Pope says: When servile chaplains cry that birth and place Upon which Warton remarks: -v. 220. “I have in vain searched for the name to which this blank belongs. Of all sorts of writing, personal satire is not only the most unintelligible but the most short-lived. How many of the characters to whom La Bruyère alludes are unknown! Theodor is Santeuil; Menclaus, Count de Brancas. It was long before it was understood that M. de la Rochefoucault, in his 71st maxim, meant to point out the Chevalier de Rohan: in his 342nd maxim the D. d'Espernon; and in his 393rd, M. Le Tellier and in maxim 200, he has a conversation of Boileau and Racine, who never talked on any subject but poetry and criticism. unintelligible." Three parts of Hudibras are become Thus, very characteristically, Warton endeavours to cover his ignorance of what the readers of Pope wished to know, by displaying his knowledge of what they did not care to know at all. And yet all the time the key to the problem lay under his very eyes. Warburton, who knew what name was intended, though he did not care to explain the allusion, had already informed the world that the 'servile chaplain' was Dr. Kennett; and with such a hint Warton ought to have been as well able as Gilbert Wakefield (who published his notes on Pope soon after Warton's edition had appeared) to fill up the blanks. Other and equally ill-founded complaints of Warton as to the unintelligible character of personal satire in general, and of Pope's in particular, may be found in his notes to Dunciad, iv. 511, and to Imitation of Horace, Epistle i., Book i. v. 88. His somewhat gossiping turn of character is shown in his manner of imparting the special information at his disposal, which he simply retails as he received it, without attempting to sift the nature of the evidence, even where it most gravely affects the character of the poet. He was the first to give authority, in a loosely worded note, to the story that Pope received £1000 from the Duchess of Marlborough to suppress the character of Atossa; a charge which, if established, constitutes, as he says, 'the greatest blemish in our Poet's moral character,' but the truth of which he makes not the slightest effort to examine. The general tendency of Warton's edition is to correct the extravagant idea of Pope's genius which had been raised by the panegyrics of Warburton. Bowles, who had been Warton's pupil at Winchester, and who constituted himself his master's successor in disparaging the genius of Pope, was the first of the poet's editors to make any attempt at explaining the obscurities of the text. His edition, published in 1806, preserved the principal notes of Warburton and Warton, and included an Essay in which both the moral and the poetical character of Pope were subjected to a somewhat unfavourable examination. Out of this Essay grew the great Pope controversy between Bowles on the one hand, and Byron, Campbell, Disraeli, and Roscoe on the other, which first showed by what mysteries the poet's life and works were surrounded. Bowles, however, did not himself contribute greatly towards the elucidation of difficulties. He accepted without question the bona fides of Warburton; was as much in the dark as Warton respecting the personal allusions which had puzzled the latter; and was occasionally led into mistakes by his eagerness to make out a case against the poet's moral character. Thus he rests part of his hypothesis, concerning the liaison between Pope and Martha Blount, upon the supposed relationship of the latter to Pope's correspondent Edward Blount, who was connected only in the most remote antiquity with the family of Mapledurham. Nevertheless, though he was often wrong, and though his general view of the poet is too much coloured with animosity, Bowles may fairly lay claim to having exposed certain features in Pope's real character, which had been altogether disguised in the pompous panegyrics of Warburton. Roscoe published his edition in 1824, avowedly in correction of the iconoclasm of Bowles. The view of the poet which he presents may be said to be more remote from the truth than that of any of the preceding editors. Pope, in Roscoe's judgment, could not possibly fail in respect of gratitude or manliness; and accordingly he labours to prove, in the teeth of the evidence, that Bufo was not meant for Halifax, or Sappho for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Nor is he much more careful of facts, even where they tell in favour of his hero. He is indignant, on abstract moral grounds, with Bowles, for suggesting that Martha Blount became less strict in her conduct after the death of her brother; but he never discovers that Edward Blount was not her brother at all. In fact it may be said that where Roscoe adds to the commentary which he compiled from the editions of Warburton, Warton, and Bowles, the tendency of his notes is generally to obscure and mislead. Thus it has happened that, in spite of all the talent which has been employed in illustrating the genius of Pope, he has suffered more from his commentators than any other great satirical poet, and that, for a true understanding of the spirit and details of his satires, it is necessary to get clear of the edition of Warburton, and of all the subsequent controversy which it provoked. As we have long passed the period when direct testimony could throw light on the moral character of the poet, we must rely for our conclusions in this respect on documentary and circumstantial evidence. With regard to the obscurities of personal allusion in the text, much must now be regarded as beyond the reach of explanation, and much must remain mere conjecture. But even on this ground there are many points which deserve attention and investigation. To begin with, we may learn something from the poet's method in his various attacks on individual reputations. Sometimes, where no danger is apprehended, he gives a name in full, as in the case of persons of notorious ill-fame, 'Ward, and Waters, Chartres, or the Devil;' or of well-known characters who were dead, such as Wharton, who however was originally introduced into the First Moral Essay, under the name of 'Clodio.' Sometimes we have a blank ; sometimes asterisks, generally according to the number of syllables in the name intended: sometimes initials simply, or initials and final letters; occasionally fictitious names resembling the names of the persons satirized, as Delia for Deloraine, Bubo for Bubb Dodington, Worldly for Wortley Montagu. Five names at least are employed to denote Lord Hervey-Lord Fanny, Sporus, Paris, Adonis, and Narcissus; and some of these he changes for each other in different versions of the same passage, partly no doubt for the purpose of piquing curiosity, and partly to elude detection. Light is also thrown upon the poet's underground proceedings by a comparison between his text, as it stood in the various editions published during his life, and that which, since Warburton's work, has been accepted as the authorised version. Pope made considerable alterations from time to time both in VOL. III.-POETRY. с |