2'»'i S. No 99., Nov. 21. '67.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



405 



LONDON, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 81. 1857. 



^oXti, 



A Patent Fact. — From Me. Boltqn Cornet's 

 letter {ante, p. 381.) it might be inferred that I 

 (2"'' S. iii. 462.) had done him and his " friend, 

 Mr. Peter Cunningham," some injustice. Ma. 

 CoBNEY, however, admits that he is not ac- 

 quainted with all the circumstances — that he 

 has not read the Illustrated News on which I 

 commented. Allow me, therefore, to state the 

 facts. 



A correspondent of Mr. Hotten's, Mr. Edward 

 Edwards as it now appears, announced, in the 

 " Adversaria " attached to Mr. Ilotten's Catalogue, 

 that in an old London Directory of 1677 appeared 

 the name of " Alexand. Pope, Broad Street." 

 The fact was in itself barren, as Mr. Hotten's 

 correspondent admitted, except so far as *t sug- 

 gested the probability that this A. P. might have 

 been the poet's father. The Athenceum imme- 

 diately offered proof that Mr. Edwards's conjecture 

 was something more than a probability ; confirmed 

 it, indeed, by showing that, while resident in 

 Broad Street, Pope's father lost his first wife Mag- 

 dalen, the mother of Magdalen Rackett, who, as 

 the parish register certifies, was there buried in 

 1679; — another first proof — proof that Mrs. 

 Rackett was Mr. Pope's daughter by a first wife, 

 and not, as assumed by the biographers, Mrs. Pope's 

 daughter by a first husband. 



A writer in the Illustrated News asserted that 

 Mr. Edwards's discovery was no discovery at all ; 

 that the fact had " been a patent fad for many 

 years;" and that Me. Coeney possessed the 

 volume " containing the fact." Of course Mr. 

 Corney's possession of the volume was no proof 

 that the fact was known even to Mr. Corney, 

 still less that it had been " patent for many years." 

 The volume — and we now know that there are 

 at least three copies in existence — must have 

 been in the possession of some one for a hundred 

 and eighty years. Yet the fact that an " Alexand. 

 Pope " ever resided in " Broad Street " was not 

 known even to the last and best of Pope's bio- 

 graphers, Mr. Carruthers ; neither was it known 

 to Mr. Corney that this A. P. was the poet's 

 father, as appears from his own letter. Mr. Cor- 

 ney, indeed, says he was " quite satisfied that the 

 merchant of Broad Street was the father of the 

 poet." But this was no proof ; indeed, such cer- 

 tainties are merely temperamental ; and the "quite 

 satisfied" of Mr. Cornby and the "probable" of 

 Mr. Edwards are of precisely the same value. 

 But Mr. Cornby tells us farther that the simple 

 record suggested many " queries." Very likely ; 

 and the first would be, naturally and necessarily, 



whether the A. P. of the Director i/ was the poet's 

 father ; and until that was decided, the record 

 could bear no other query worth a moment's con- 

 sideration. However, this is quite certain from 

 Mr. Cornet's own letter : whatever the number 

 of queries suggested, Mr. Corney did not solve 

 one of them ; and therefore, so far as Mr. Corney 

 is concerned, the record remained as barren as it 

 had been for the one hundred and eighty preceding 

 years. But Mr. Corney would lead us to infer 

 that the Directory may have been more fruitful 

 under Mr. Cunningham's tillage ; that he, Mr. 

 Cunningham, may have known more than he told 

 the public ; and that the no- notice In his Handbook 

 of the elder Pope amongst the former residents in. 

 Broad Street, to which I referred, and the no- 

 notice of the burial of Magdalen Pope, are not 

 proofs to the contrary. This assumed knowledge 

 and silence is of course to be explained by the 

 fact, that Mr. Cunningham was engaged as "as- 

 sistant " to Mr. Croker in preparing a new edition 

 of Pope's Works. Now, I doubt whether Mr. Cun- 

 ningham was so engaged when the Handbook was 

 published. Be that as it may, I cannot believe 

 that Mr. Cunningham, or any other man, would 

 conceal his own knowledge that the knowledge of 

 another might appear with the greater lustre ; and 

 certainly cannot believe, on a mere conjectural 

 speculation, that he suppressed these fiicts in 1854, 

 when he actually edited, annotated, and published 

 Johnson's Life of Pope, But assume all or any of 

 these improbabilities, — all this self-devotion and 

 self-sacrifice, — what end, I ask Mr. Corney, could 

 be answered by suppressing, in 1854, facts which, 

 in 1857, were declared to have been " patent many 

 years" — that is, known for many years to at least 

 all intelligent persons. 



It was the habitual depreciation in that Journal 

 of all discovei-ies in relation to Pope made by 

 others, and the trumpetings about the discoveries 

 of Mr. Croker and Mr. Cunningham, which in- 

 duced me to bring this " patent " fact to the test. 

 In these Pope inquii-ies the shrewdest and the 

 most diligent are but guessing and groping their 

 way, and we should welcome the smallest contri- 

 bution of fact, even a name from an old Directory, 

 knowing and seeing proof in the instance before 

 us how pregnant it may be. I was weary of 

 hearing of such patent facts. It was not very 

 long before that The Athenceum adduced proofs 

 that the biographers weje all wrong about Pope's 

 removal from Binfield to Twickenham, and of 

 the death and burial of the elder Pope at Twicken- 

 ham, — established, for the first time, that the Popes 

 removed from Binfield to Chiswick, lived there, 

 and that the father died, and was there buried iu 

 October, 1717. This, we were told in the same 

 journal, was a patent fact, or at least a fact 

 known to all who bad exanjined the Homer MSS. 

 in the British Museum, although it did happen 



