"The common reader I am sensible will be always more solicitous about the names of these three ladies, the unlucky play, and every other trifling circumstance that attended this piece of gallantry, than for the explanation of our author's sense or the illustration of his poetry, even when he is more moral or sublime. But had it been Mr. Pope's purpose to indulge so impertinent a curiosity, he had sought elsewhere for a commentator on his writings."

These extravagant pretensions sufficed to relieve Warburton from the duty of explaining obscure personal allusions in the text, but could not extricate him from the difficulty of commenting on Satires reflecting directly on the Court. To make his task less ungrateful, he did not hesitate-as the following evidence will prove almost to certainty-to pervert and misinterpret the sense of the poems which had been entrusted to his care. In the Epilogue to the Satires, Pope, with bitter irony, represents the Queen forgiving the Prince of Wales on her death-bed, it being notorious that she had then refused him her pardon :

Hang the sad verse on Carolina's urn,

And hail her passage to the realms of rest,

All parts performed, and all her children blest.-Dialogue i. 82.

These lines (though not published in the poem in its separate folio form) occur in the volume of collected poems printed in 1738, and in all subsequent editions, without any note, but in Warburton's edition of 1751, the following note is appended:

"Carolina, Queen Consort to George II. She died in 1737. Her death gave occasion, as is observed above, to many indiscreet and mean performances unworthy of her memory, whose last moments manifested the utmost courage and resolution."-POPE.

It would of course have been quite in Pope's manner to guard himself by veiling the satire of the text under the commendations of a foot-note, but if that had been his intention, the note would have appeared in the early editions of his Satires. Time, however, would have rendered such a precaution unnecessary, and we may be certain that the poet would

not have been anxious in 1743-4 (when he prepared, with the aid of Warburton, the edition which after his death was suppressed) to mislead the reader as to his real meaning. We are driven therefore to conclude that the note was manufactured by Warburton, for the purpose of obscuring the sense, and of introducing his own acknowledged note, which runs thus:

"How highly our poet thought of that truly great personage may be seen by one of his letters to Mr. Allen, written at that time; in which, amongst others equally respectful, are the following words: 'The Queen showed by the confession of all about her, the utmost firmness and temper to her last moments, and through the course of great torments. What character historians will allow her, I do not know; but all her domestic servants, and those nearest her, give her the best testimony, that of sincere tears.'"-WARBURTON.

Whatever Pope may have written to Allen in private, Warburton must have known perfectly well that the Epilogue to the Satires was designed to promote the cause of the Opposition, who in 1738 were rallying round the Prince of Wales. His note, with others equally tending to mitigate Pope's Satires on the Court, was inserted in his own interest, and doubtless served its purpose, for in 1753 he obtained a prebend at Gloucester, in 1755 one at Durham; while in 1755 he was made King's Chaplain, and in 1757 Dean of Bristol.

But this is not the worst. To gratify his own private resentments Warburton did not scruple to misrepresent Pope's intentions with regard to persons who were still alive. It is well known that the Allens were on bad terms with Martha Blount, and Warburton, who had married the niece of the former, so far entered into the quarrel as to endeavour to deprive Pope's favourite of one of the most precious compliments which the poet had paid her. The Epistle on the Characters of Women was addressed To a Lady,' who was generally understood to be Martha Blount; and indeed Pope himself, with an evident reference to her, says in a letter to Swift (16th February, 1733):

"Your lady-friend is semper eadem, and I have written an Epistle to her on that qualification, in a female character, which is thought by my chief critic, in your absence, to be my chef-d'œuvre; but it cannot be printed perfectly, in an age so sore of satire and so willing to misapply characters."

Warburton, taking advantage of his position as editor, sought to deprive Martha Blount of the honour which the poet had intended for her, and in a note on the very first line of the poem calls attention to the conclusion:

"Let me not omit to observe the great beauty of the conclusion it is an encomium on an imaginary lady to whom the Epistle is addressed.”

:

The character of the address referred to testifies in itself to the absurdity of this statement, which is also in direct contradiction to Pope's own declaration to Swift. Warburton's animus is plainly shown in his note on the apostrophe to the imaginary lady (Moral Essays, ii. 259) :

"The picture of an estimable woman, with the best kind of contrarieties, created out of the poet's imagination: who therefore feigned those circumstances of a husband, a daughter, and love for a sister, to prevent her being mistaken for any of his acquaintance. And having thus made his Woman, he did as the ancient poets were wont when they had made their Muse, invoke and address his poem to her."

Warburton went still further. Under cover of Pope's prestige as a satirist, he made attacks on persons with whom the poet had no quarrel, but who had given some offence to himself. Thus, in his edition of 1751, in a note on the line in the New Dunciad,

Who study Shakespeare at the Inns of Court,

he implies that Edwards, the author of Canons of Criticism,' is intended. No mention is made of Edwards in the edition of 1743, the last published during Pope's lifetime; indeed, he was at that date unheard of. But in 1747 Warburton brought out his edition of Shakespeare, and this work Edwards,

in his 'Canons of Criticism,' published a few months afterwards, handled pretty severely. Warburton was much nettled, and avenged himself by the reference to Edwards in the abovementioned note. His animosity against his critic even caused him to delay the publication of his edition of Pope, as we find from a letter of Horace Walpole to Montagu, dated 15th June, 1751:

"Warburton publishes his edition of Pope next week. *** I am told the edition has waited, because he had cancelled above one hundred sheets (on which he had written notes) since the publication of Edwards' Canons of Criticism.'

The rumour as to the number of sheets cancelled is of course a great exaggeration, but the papers left by Warburton show that cancels were actually made for the purpose mentioned by Walpole.

Besides Edwards, Warburton had designed punishments for other of his personal enemies in the notes to the Dunciad. In a letter written to Hurd, 10th February, 1750, together with which he sends him a copy of that edition of the 'Dunciad' which was printed to supply the market while the general edition of the works was preparing, he says:

"In this there is a new Dunce or two that came in my way; but I shall have a general reckoning with them, which I hope you will not think unsuitable to my character, and then adieu to the Dunces for ever."

One of these new Dunces' was Dr. John Burton, of Eton, who seems to have given offence to Warburton by a saucy joke' about Allen, with whom he had been staying. Bishop Hurd informs us that "Burton was, at the intercession of Dr. Hayter, Bishop of Norwich, left out in the general edition of all Mr. Pope's works in 1751."

1

It will thus be seen that Warburton not only slurred over the explanation of difficult passages in Pope's text, but that to promote his interest, or to gratify his spite, he did not scruple to misrepresent the plain intention of his author, and to introduce

1 Letters from a Late Eminent Prelate to One of his Friends, p. 43.

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.