Johnson, in his Life of Pope, conjectured "that he gleaned from authors, obscure as

to a friend with whom he had been at the university, and who resided on the borders of Windsor Forest, near Easthamstead Park, formerly the seat of Sir W. Trumbull, and at a short distance from Binfield, where Pope passed so many of his early years, and wrote some of his most admired productions. He was particularly attracted to a spot said to have been the favourite resort of the poet, on which are several trees with the words "Here Pope sang," almost obliterated by time. The sentence has been cut afresh by direction of a lady in the neighbourhood.

Rambling among these "consecrated walks," the feelings which Mr. Wakefield frequently expressed would naturally remind his companions of his reflections on bidding adieu to Cambridge (Mem. i. 145). Such feelings on a similar visit. are most agreeably described by Melmoth. Fitzosborne, letter liii.

Since the above was written, we have received from a gentleman, long resident in the town of Oakingham, a few anecdotes of Pope, which will probably have some interest with the admirers of the poet,

During Mr. Pope's residence at Binfield, he frequently came to Oakingham, about two miles distance, and passed many hours in a back parlour, at the Rose Inn, called the Mitre. In the wall of this room is a small recess, called Pope's Repository, in which he committed to paper many of those ideas that occasionally occurred in the formation of his poems. In this room was written the famous song called Molly Mogg, published in Gay's poems, being the joint production of Pope, Gay, and Swift, in their moments of hilarity. The Rose Inn was kept by two sisters, the youngest was by

well as eminent, what he thought brilliant or useful, and preserved it all in a regular collection." Mr. Wakefield's design was "to illustrate Pope, as an elegant English classic,

far the finest woman, and to celebrate her beauty the above song was composed.

"The late Mrs. Chaplin, mistress of the Rose Inn, commissioned me to write on the door of the above recess, the undermentioned lines. I confess I neglected doing it, till illness came on her, which wholly set aside the execution.

'Let no rude touch presume to injure this Repository, which formerly contained the dulcet notes of ALEXANDER POPE, Esq. May it ever be preserved inviolate to the latest posterity, in respectful remembrance of his sublime genius.'

"Near the habitation of Mr. Pope is a small wood, where he often retired, and on a favourite spot at the foot of a beech tree, composed many of his excellent performances. Windsor Forest, it is supposed, was principally written there. The late Countess Dowager Gower caused to be affixed on a conspicuous part of the tree, out of the reach of rude hands, a fair tablet, with these words, Here Pope sang, and kept it in constant preservation during her life. I believe the tablet is still remaining.

"Mr. B, a respectable barber at Oakingham, whom I knew very well, frequently declared, that he dreaded going to Mr. Pope's house to shave him, as he scarcely ever could perform it under an hour, and very often it would take him an hour and a half, and sometimes two hours, as during the operation he was continually ordered to stop, while Mr. Pope penned down his occasional thoughts."

• Johnson's Works, xi. 195.

by opening the sources of his imitation, by noticing his beauties of sentiment and expression, and occasionally his improprieties in both," without entering upon the consideration of "the general plan and conduct of his poems, where so much is left for the sportive conjectures of imagination, and where the rules themselves, by which such criticisms are adjusted, are often the mere whimsical position of arbitrary critics, without any founda tion in truth and nature."

१

In pursuance of this design, in 1794 he. published, in 8vo. the first volume of the Works of Pope. All the notes of his author he appears to have preserved, with an occa

P Obs. Pref. xvi.

"If the predominant effect of a poem, without gross incongruities and palpable want of artifice in its construction, be impressive, and enchain the soul with a continuity of strength and elegance, all enquiry into the particular adjustment of the parts, and its general constitution, may seem but a visionary and preposterous operation. Had Homer made a very different distribution of events in his poems, the complaisant dexterity of criticism would soon have proved it the very best that human ingenuity could devise." Obs. Pref. xvii.

• Ibid.

Containing the Pastorals, Windsor Forest, Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock, Eloisa to Abelard, &c.

sional reference to the remarks of Warburton, adding a variety of his own observations.

In an advertisement prefixed, he proposed to proceed expeditiously in his design, should he not be deterred by "Dr. Warton's intention of executing the same work, of which he was unapprised before the completion of this volume and the printing of the greater part." To that gentleman, who in 1797 published an edition of the Works of Pope, he, with great liberality, concedes "a superior knowledge of English literature, more experience, more leisure, and more accidental advantages of every kind, which "rendered him a formidable competitor in this province.'

However, Mr. Wakefield still indulged the expectation of completing his original plan; yet at length finding no sufficient encouragement to proceed with his intended publication of the entire Works of his author, he determined," at the end of the following year, to

Works of Pope, vol. i. Advertisement, p. 2.

"For some time past I had cherished an agreeable expectation, that the remainder of Pope's works would be consigned to my care, after the new edition of his Homer, with continued notes on both Iliad and Odyssey, should be delivered to the public through my hands. But in consequence of a previous agreement unknown to me, privately contracted

bring together in another octavo volume the further collections he had made, in the order of those works, and under the title of “Observations on Pope,"

In the preface to that volume, he gives the following account of the rules by which he had been guided in the conduct of this undertaking.

"Those imitations, which others had before discovered, I have not been forward to repeat, from a disinclination to an unreasonable extension of the work: what may have been incidentally repeated, I have not appropriated with intentional usurpation. Even in those instances where the symptoms of imitation are dubious, or improbable, to contemplate the efforts of genius on the same sentiment, is of itself a most pleasing occupation to a reader of sensibility."

by Mr. Cadell with Dr. Warton, and the rapidity of the Doctor in a pre-occupation of the press, this office has devolved upon him. That my rambles, however, in this province, thus intercepted, might not perish to myself, I have collected, but with studied brevity, my miscellaneous remarks into this work now presented to the reader; where what occur to the extent of my former volume, are merely supplemental to it, that no person might have occasion to complain, nor myself unreasonably suffer by a solitary and unsupported work."

Obs. Pref. v. & vi,

* Ibid. p. vii.