seems to have known their imbecility, and therefore suppressed them while he was yet contending to rise in reputation, but ventured them when he thought their deficiencies more likely to be imputed to Donne than to himself."-JOHNSON.

It will be observed that Warburton's account of the versification of these Satires contradicts Pope's statement on the subject in his Advertisement to the First Imitation of Horace.' Warburton distinctly says that they were versified "in pursuance of Pope's purpose," viz., as a reply to the clamour raised against his satiric writings. Pope says that they were published on that occasion, having been versified long before. If his statement is substantially true, he must have revised and altered them greatly before publication; for the text as it stands is full of allusions to incidents which had occurred since the accession of George II. "The excise and army" alluded to in v. of the Second Satire; "Sutton and Chartres" (v. 36); Peter Walter (vv. 65-80); the gambling at White's (v. 88); show that the current of thought in this Satire is the same as that in the Third Moral Essay, published in 1732. So too, in the following Satire, verses 140-145, still harping on the monied interest; as well as those alluding to the Spanish interference with British commerce (v. 165) to the reconstruction of the works at Dunkirk contrary to the Treaty of Utrecht (v. 165), and to Lord Hervey's influence at Court (vv. 178-9), must, if the Satires were versified as far back as Pope says, have replaced some earlier verses.

It is, however, far more probable that the poet, who had no scruples in such matters, did not tell the whole truth in his Advertisement, though he afterwards confided it to Warburton. We need not doubt his assertion that Lord Oxford and the Duke of Shrewsbury suggested to him to versify the Satires. Dryden had before declared that it would be worth while to do this; and Pope had shown his capacity for such work by his rehabilitation of Chaucer. On the other hand, if the idea had been immediately put into execution, the Satires would probably have appeared with the versions of Chaucer, published in the first volume of his collected works (1717). But the fact is, that in Queen Anne's reign, Pope had not turned his attention to moral satire, and would not have been likely to produce anything so nearly resembling his late satiric manner as these Imitations, the latter of which, at any rate, is far from deserving the contemptuous treatment it received from Johnson. When he was in the full swing of satiric composition he very likely remembered Lord Oxford's old suggestion, and, after acting upon it, thought that it would be effective to introduce the mention of his two noble friends, with a flourish

1 See page 287.

about their freedom from prejudice and suspicion. He probably wished, too, as in his Advertisement to the Epistle to Arbuthnot, to conceal the fact that the Second Satire was a direct retaliation on his enemies. For it is noticeable that it had been published separately and anonymously in 1733, under the title of The Impertinent, as appears from the following advertisement in the Daily Journal of November 5 of that year: "This day is published The Impertinent, or A Visit to the Court.' A Satire. By an Eminent Hand. Printed by Wilford." No mention either of Donne or Pope is made in this publication, which, being for the most part identical with the second of the two following Satires, was reprinted as Pope's by Hill in 1737, after the authorship had become known by the appearance of the Versifications of Donne in the quarto volume of 1735. Pope no doubt intended it chiefly as a stroke at Lord Hervey in return for the Verses to the Imitator of Horace. See especially ver. 184-211.

THE SATIRES OF DR. JOHN DONNE,

(DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S,1)

VERSIFIED.

SATIRE II.

YES, thank my stars! as early as I knew
This town, I had the sense to hate it too:
Yet here, as e'en in hell, there must be still
Ong giant-vice, so excellently ill,

That all beside, one pities, not abhors;

As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores.2
I grant that poetry's a crying sin;

3

It brought (no doubt) the Excise and Army in:
Catched like the plague, or love, the Lord knows how,
But that the cure is starving, all allow.
Yet like the papist's is the poet's state,'
Poor and disarmed, and hardly worth

1 John Donne, born 1573; was made Dean of St. Paul's in 1620, and died 1631. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic, and the first of the two Satires versified by Pope must therefore have been composed in his early youth, as it is evidently written with a predilection for the Romish Church, the authority of which he began to question about the age of eighteen.

2 There is nothing in the original to warrant this stroke at Lady Mary. See Imitations of Horace, Sat. ii., 1, 84.

your

hate!

10

3 The Excise and the Standing Army were both favourite themes of declamation with the Opposition, who pretended to see in them the instruments of despotism. Pope alludes to them again in Imitation of Horace, Sat. ii., 2, 133-4 and 153-4.

4 In the same way he represents papistry and poetry as equally heinous crimes in Imitation of Horace, Epistle ii., 2, 67:

Convict a papist he, and I a poct.

1

Here a lean bard, whose wit could never give
Himself a dinner, makes an actor live:
The thief condemned, in law already dead,
So prompts, and saves a rogue who cannot read.
Thus as the pipes of some carved organ move,
The gilded puppets dance and mount above.
Heaved by the breath the inspiring bellows blow :
The inspiring bellows lie and pant below.

One sings the fair; but songs no longer move:
No rat is rhymed to death, nor maid to love;
In love's, in nature's spite, the siege they hold,
And scorn the flesh, the devil, and all-but gold.

These write to lords, some mean reward to get,
As needy beggars sing at doors for meat.
Those write because all write, and so have still
Excuse for writing, and for writing ill.

Wretched indeed! but far more wretched yet

e;

Is he who makes his meal on others' wit:
'Tis changed, no doubt, from what it was before
His rank digestion makes it wit no more:
Sense, passed through him, no longer is the same;
For food digested takes another name.

I o'er all those confessors and martyrs,
pass
Who live like S*tt*n, or who die like Chartres,"

1 It is noticeable that Pope, in his endeavour to make the rude style of Donne pointed and polished, has increased the obscurity of the original. Donne's design is to blacken the character of the attorney by comparing his crimes with others which are allowed to be heinous, but which the poet says have in them something of humanity. Among these he makes a humorous allusion in passing to poetry, and he points out briefly and in a single paragraph how every kind of poetry entails a punishment of its The argument in the original

own.

13

20

25

30

35

therefore flows naturally on in Donne's colloquial style to its proper climax in v. 45. Pope, by breaking up the paragraph about poetry, and putting too much point into the description of the different classes of poets, greatly perplexes the meaning, -another proof that his powers of philosophical conception were inferior to his genius for execution.

2 "Like Sutton," the " Reverend Sutton' of the earlier editions of Moral Essays, iii. 105. See note to that passage.