446 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[2'"i S. No 101., Dkc. 5. '57. 



gery, and which your correspondent Mr. Douglas 

 traces to the Annual Register for 1763, may be 

 worth a parting note. The letter in question was 

 copied by The Scots' Magazine for July, 1764; 

 and in the following number appeared a letter 

 from a correspondent pointing out the fraud, of 

 which I send you a copy : — 



" Dumfrieshire. 



"SiK, — As I have observed you readily acknowledge 

 your obligations for being set right in "those mistakes 

 into which the authors of periodical works must some- 

 times be led, I think proper to inform you that the letter 

 Inserted in your July magazine from Lord Bolingbroke to 

 Pope, is evidently one of those literary forgeries for which 

 this age is so infamous. In the letter. Lord Bolingbroke 

 complains of the crowd of ambitious coronets and fawning 

 sycophants with which he was surrounded at Court, and 

 proposes to spend a day more agreeably with Pope in his 

 garden at Twickenham. He speaks of having seen Ad- 

 dison that morning. . . . But unluckily for this letter- 

 writer, Mr. Pope did not live at Twickenham until the 

 j-ear 1715 ; whereas Lord Bolingbroke left England imme- 

 diately after King George's accession, 1714 [Bolingbroke 

 left England in March, 1715], and did not return again 

 from exile till the year 1723, which was several years 

 after Mr. Addison's death. To crown the whole, his 

 Lordship is made to conclude his letter with a quotation 

 from a poem of Pope's, which was written when Sir Ro- 

 bert Walpole and Cardinal Pleury were in the zenith of 

 their power and glorj', which was long after Addison's 

 death, and many, many years after Lord Bolingbroke had 

 got rid of the crowd of coronets and fawning sycophants 

 with which the letter paints him as surrounded. H. L." 



The writer is mistaken as to the period at which 

 Pope lived at Twickenham. Pope had not left 

 Binfield in 1715, when Bolingbroke left England, 

 and we now know that he did not remove to 

 Twickenham until some years after. This, how- 

 ever, only strengthens the argument. The evi- 

 dences of forgery here noted are exactly the same 

 as those pointed out by the Athenceum. 



W. Mot Thomas. 



Pope's Jucenile Poems. — As the opinion seems 

 to be gaining ground that the bibliography of 

 Pope's writings must precede a satisfactory bio- 

 graphy of the poet, perhaps the following notice 

 of a volume not recorded in Mr. Carruthers' use- 

 ful List of Pope's works, may be acceptable to that 

 gentleman, and also to others interested on the 

 subject. It is a small 8vo., entitled The Works of 

 Alexander Pope, Esq., Vol. III., consisting of 

 Fables, Translations, and Imitations: London, 

 printed for H. Lintot, 1736. This was obviously 

 intended to follow the Vol. II. of Pope's Works, 

 published in the preceding year by L. Gilliver, as 

 described by Mr. Carruthers, and respecting which 

 I shall have a word to say presently. 



The contents of this third volume are : The 

 Temple of Fame ; Sappho to Phaon ; Autumnus to 

 Pomona ; The Fable of Dryope ; The First Book 

 of Statins his Thebais ; January and May ; The 

 Wife of Bath, her Prologue; and January and May. 

 Prefixed is the following Advertisement, which. 



as it contains some history of these several pieces, 

 and has not been reprinted by Warburton, seems 

 worth recording in "IT. & Q." 



" The following Translations were selected from many 

 others done by the Author in his Youth ; for the most 

 part indeed but a sort of Exercise, while he was improv- 

 ing himself in the Languages, and carried bv his early 

 Bent to Poetry to perforni them rather in Verse than 

 Prose. Mr. Dryden's Fables came out about that time, 

 which occasioned the Translations from Chaucer. They 

 were first separately printed in Miscellanies bv J. Tonson 

 and B. Lintot, and afterwards collected in 'the Quarto 

 Edition of 1717. The Imitations of English Authors, 

 which are added at the end, were done as early, some of 

 them at fourteen and fifteen years old ; but having also 

 got into Miscellanies, we have put them here together to 

 complete this Juvenile Volume." 



This, then, was the first occasion on which the 

 Imitations, as we now have them, were printed. 

 One or two only had appeared in the 1717 Quarto 

 and Folio. 



A word or two now as to the Second Volume of 

 Popes Works, published by Gilliver in 1735. Mr. 

 Carruthers speaks of it as having been " in folio 

 and quarto, the same as the 1st vol. of Poetical 

 Works published by Lintot." I have, however, 

 a copy of it in small octavo. Indeed, I have 

 three copies, each varying in the title. The first, 

 which had belonged to Matthias, has his autograph, 

 and a pencil note (I believe in his handwrTting), 

 " privately printed." Its only title-page, if it may 

 be so termed, is a page on which is Kent's oval 

 engraving, the subject of which is a shield, on 

 which is the head of Pope, surrounded by the 

 words " VNi A : qvvs virtuti atq eivs amicis," 

 with two Cupids embracing over the top of the 

 shield. 



This I suppose, from the MS. note, may have 

 been one of a few copies struck ofF especially for 

 Pope and his friends : and it is in every other 

 respect identical with an edition which has the 

 following title : The Works of Alexander Pope, 

 Vol. II., containing his Epistles and Satires : Lon- 

 don, printed for L. Gilliver, 1735, except that this 

 latter has the Advertisement " The Author to the 

 Reader," dated Jan. 1, 1734, followed by a bas- 

 tard title to the Essay on Man. But, strangely 

 enough, I have recently piiiked up another copy 

 corresponding precisely with the last, except that 

 the title-page contains, in place of the words 

 ''containing his Epistles and Satires," and the 

 woodcut ornament which follows them, a copy of 

 Kent's engraving already described, — the title- 

 page being preceded by a half-title, The Works 

 of Alexander Pope, Esq., Vol. II. The last Edi- 

 tion corrected, with explanatory Notes and Addi- 

 tions never before printed; and on the back of 

 this, consequently facing the title-page, is the fol- 

 lowing notice : 



" Speedily will be published The Dukciad, in the same 

 size and letter with this volume, which makes a third Volume 

 of Mr. Pope's Works." 



