University of Virginia Library

Verses Address'd to the Imitator of Horace: A Skirmish between Pope and Some Persons of Rank and Fortune
by
Isobel Grundy

Pope's imitations of Horace take as grist to their mill the attacks of those writers rash enough to oppose him. Mr. J. V. Guerinot, cataloguing their attempts, considers only one 'a worthy adversary' to Pope, which caught something of his 'own satiric brilliance'.[1] That one, the Verses Address'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, 1733, has been briefly discussed not only by Guerinot but also by Professor Robert Halsband in his lives of its confederate authors, Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Much, however, remains to be told, particularly about the poem's publishing history. This article will give a short account of Lady Mary's previous attacks on Pope, of her denial of any connection with the Verses and Hervey's silence about them; it will then recount the ascertainable facts about their publication, in two different texts, compare later printed versions of these texts and Hervey's unpublished revisions, analyse the evidence we have about authorship from contemporary and later opinion and from examination of the Verses themselves, and show the part which they later played in shaping some of Pope's own most brilliant attacking lines.

Pope published his First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, on 15 Feb. 1733. He devoted some attention (lines 81-84) to his former friend Lady Mary, who had already crossed pens with him:

Lord Hervey, who was politically opposed to Pope's friends, but had offered no show of hostility in print,[2] received only a glance of disparagement (lines 5-6): There was, however, a common element in the two attacks, in that each aimed at the victim's activities as a writer. Lady Mary tried nonliterary means to ensure Pope's future silence, first through Lord Peterborough and then through Sir Robert Walpole.[3] Her first attempt met with humiliating failure; while the second was still under discussion she must have turned back to the idea of verse retaliation.

Despite its rashness and its liability to the charge from Pope of 'fulfilling the veracity of my prophecy',[4] this idea was not new to Lady Mary. After Pope's thrust in the Dunciad, 1728 (ii. 127-128):

she had begun work on a mock-epic counterblast. Its action takes place before Queen Anne's death: Dullness, aided by Prophanation, Obscœnity and in an early version Cloacina, has settled (anachronistically) in a certain grotto beneath a muddy road: she plots to reverse the national educative process being carried out by Addison; each goddess supports her own candidate for leadership of their forces, and the young Pope is chosen as commander in preference to Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot.[5] Lady Mary had re-worked the material of Pope's masterpiece and copied his tone with some skill. She had also enlisted her cousin Henry Fielding, at that time a very young writer looking for patronage, as ally. He too, loyally rather than personally indignant, had attacked the Dunciad in Dunciad-like fragments, related to hers, the draft of which he left with her. The subject-matter of this epic story makes it hard to see how either Fielding's or Lady Mary's part could ever have been finished, let alone printed. Any satisfaction which she derived from this counter-attack must have remained private.[6]

After Pope's new offensive of 1733, Fielding composed his sympathetic 'Epistle to Mr Lyttleton, occasioned by two Lines in Mr Pope's Paraphrase on the first Satire of the 2d Book of Horace', either at Lady Mary's prompting or on his own initiative. Again he left the manuscript with her; again it remained unpublished. Meanwhile, however, as contemporary opinions about the Verses to the Imitator suggest, Lady Mary struck up the same sort of alliance with Lord Hervey that she had previously had with Fielding. No record of this remains among her letters: the following account comes from other sources than herself. She denied any part in the Verses, saying two years later that they had been written '(without my knowledge) by a Gentleman of great merit, whom I very much esteem, who [Pope] will never guess, and who, if he did know, he durst not attack'. This denial, sent to Arbuthnot the day after the publication of Pope's Epistle to him, can be ignored as a desperate defensive stroke in her mortal combat with Pope. If it is incredible, so are Pope's denials to Peterborough and to Hervey: that he 'never applied that name [Sappho] to her in any verse of mine, public or private; and, I firmly believe, not in any letter or conversation.'[7] Neither of the two enemies could be trusted to speak truth of the other.

Lady Mary cannot be proved a liar. As her biographer writes, 'no documentary evidence survives to prove [her] authorship of the Verses'.[8] No copy in her hand is now known, either in the Harrowby Manuscripts Trust with the bulk of her papers, or elsewhere. Her great-grandson and editor, Lord Wharncliffe, claimed that the poem was 'contained in the collection of poems verified by Lady Mary's own hand as written by her'; and this was repeated by a later editor and a biographer.[9] Yet the surviving album verified by Lady Mary in this way, Harrowby MS 256, shows no sign of anything having been removed from it. Either a copy of the Verses was once lodged, though not bound, in the album, and has since vanished; or a whole volume of Lady Mary's manuscripts, also verified by her hand, has similarly disappeared; or Lord Wharncliffe was entirely mistaken.

Hervey also says nothing of the poem in his surviving letters (which do not, however, include those he wrote to Lady Mary); but

he is linked with it by documentary evidence, which will be discussed in detail later. He made two sets of corrections, differing slightly from each other: to a scribal copy now in the British Museum and to a printed copy now at Ickworth, Suffolk. He also wrote a manuscript preface 'To the Reader', assuming rather than claiming authorship, now bound inside the Ickworth copy which he called 'corrected by the Author'; it is the closest we have to an assertion of literary ownership. He refrained from asserting the same thing elsewhere. He mentioned The First Satire of the Second Book without annoyance two days after its publication. Early in 1734, à propos his Epistle From a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity, he told Arbuthnot he was sorry 'to enter into a Paper-War' with Pope, apparently not expecting Arbuthnot to reply that he had entered already.[10] In letters he gloried in his severity on Pope, but only the severity of An Epistle, which he disclaimed in the press and discussed at length with his correspondents.[11] Where Lady Mary protests too much, Hervey protests less than might be expected.

The Verses' manner of publication does not cast much light on the question of authorship. Pope thought that Hervey had arranged it ('if I call it yours, my Lord, it is only because, whoever got it, you brought it forth'), and that he had recommended the poem to the perusal of the King and Queen.[12] But the bringing forth of the attack is even more obscure than its begetting. Hervey's preface and alterations indicate a concern with publication, not of any of the existing editions, but of a projected version which was never realised. The versions which were printed may have been authorized by him, by Lady Mary, by both, or by neither. They appeared through the publishers or pamphlet-distributors Anne Dodd and James Roberts respectively. The former edition was advertised as 'This Day' published in The London Evening-Post, 8 March 1733, with the additional selling-points of 'Being the same Size with the Dialogue [Pope's satire]' and 'By a Lady of Quality'. Its title ran:

The Roberts edition, rarer now than the Dodd one, was also advertised as 'This Day' published on 8 March 1733, in The Whitehall Evening-Post. Its price too was 6d. It made no mention of any author. Its title ran:

The failure to identify the satire being answered was corrected by Hervey in his copy now at Ickworth. The edition was re-advertised, still as 'This Day' published, in The Daily Post-Boy of 9 March, which is also the date given the poem in The Grub-Street Journal.

After this second advertisement hostilities broke out between Dodd, or rather her employer, and Roberts, or his. The Dodd side prosecuted the struggle with greater energy. On 10 March, and again on the 13th and 15th, The London Evening-Post reiterated that her version was 'This Day' published, pointed out that it was not only the same size as but 'very proper to be bound up with' Pope's poem (the same applied, of course, to the Roberts edition, another folio), and added

On the 13th the Whitehall Evening-Post responded by reprinting its former advertisement for the Roberts edition, with the additional comment, 'N.B. This being the Genuine and Correct Edition, is in Three Sheets.' On 20 March, the day on which a revised edition was published through Dodd, and on 22 March, her London Evening-Post advertisement was altered to read 'stitch'd' for 'bound', and expanded to take in a quotation from Juvenal ('Si Natura negat, facit Indignatio Versus. Juv.') and to conclude: On 27 and 29 March this elaborated advertisement even appeared with its grammar corrected. On 31 March it was dropped from the London Evening-Post but re-appeared in the St. James's Evening Post. For three weeks the Dodd sales campaign had been running strongly.

As the Dodd campaign reached its peak there appeared a new but related advertisement, as 'This Day' published, for 'An Elegy to a young Lady: In the Manner of Ovid. By ---- [James Hammond] With an Answer, by a Lady, Author of the Verses to the Imitator of Horace. Printed for J. Roberts . . . .'[16] With the publication through Roberts of these two poems, somebody using his imprint had admitted Lady Mary's authorship and the Dodd form of the title of the Verses to the Imitator. The Dodd edition's claim to superiority began to appear convincing.

During this paper skirmish between the employers of the two pamphlet houses, the Dodd version underwent some changes. Its first edition exists in two different states: that already noted, and another in which the first line has a different ornamental 'I'. Resetting has occurred in sheet A and in the outer forme of B (page 8 only), but without verbal change.[17] More substantial changes are found in an edition published through Dodd on 20 March.[18] The collation is unchanged. 'Si Natura negat, facit Indignatio versus. Juvenal.' has been added to the title page (in contrast with the revisions made by Hervey and discussed below: he wrote a title page which invoked Horace instead of Juvenal). An extra couplet appears at lines 38-39 and verbal changes at lines 28, 73-74 and 80. The ornamental 'I' is the same as in the second state of the first edition; the text appears to have been reset only as far as necessary to accommodate the extra couplet. There are one or two changes in punctuation—little enough to form a basis for the fighting words of the expanded advertisement.[19]

The Dodd edition must have sold out again before 16 Jan. 1735, when there issued through her shop 'The Fifth Edition Corrected',

handsomely advertised in the London Evening-Post (16, 18, 21 and 23 Jan.) as 'by a Lady', as 'Proper to bind with' Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot and 'other Pieces in Folio', and sold by Dodd, J. Fisher and 'most Pamphlet Shops in Town'. Lord Oxford commented on his copy: If Oxford thought that Dodd or her employer was unloading old stock, he was wrong: in the 'Fifth Edition' the tailpiece ornament as well as the title-page one was changed, the same initial 'I' employed as in the original text of 8 March 1733 (not used since the first state), and both sheets were entirely re-set. The collation was unchanged. A variant was introduced in line 77, and line 20 was italicized to go with a footnote, which with another on p. 6 referred to Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot.[21] There is no evidence here of authorial revision.

The commanders had remained indistinguishable during the competition between the mercenaries Dodd and Roberts, who were accustomed to serving as screens for the operations of others. Both were 'publishers', to be defined as those who distribute books or pamphlets without other responsibility, not owning the copyright, employing the printer, or even knowing the writer. Their imprint and their names in advertisements provide no evidence of authorship, and indeed were intended to conceal it.[22] Anne Dodd (d. c. 1750) was a friend and associate of the notorious Curll; she sold many of the post-Dunciad attacks on Pope, as well as the First Satire of the Second Book itself, and also the Opposition journal The Craftsman.[23] James Roberts (d. 1754) carried pamphlets mainly for the other side, that of the government. He was in fact Hervey's usual outlet for his anonymous writings in support of Walpole.[24] Lady Mary had had experience of both these

pamphlet-sellers: Roberts's name had appeared on the title-page of her Court Poems, pirated by Curll in 1716, and (together with that of Anne Dodd) on her Genuine Copy of a Letter Written From Constantinople by an English Lady, 1719, published through the indiscretion or even greed of her friend the Abbé Conti. On these occasions she did not, like Hervey, use the printing trade, but was used by it. These transactions would not have endeared either Roberts or Dodd to her; but she did employ Roberts on two occasions, one before and one after the publication of the Verses: as an agent in 1727 when advertising for her runaway son, and as distributor in 1737-38 for her anonymous journal in support of Walpole, The Nonsense of Common-Sense.[25]

The fact that both the putative authors had links with Roberts diminishes the temptation to link one text of the Verses with each. It also makes more surprising the apparent superiority of the Dodd version—an indisputable superiority in vigour of marketing, reprinting, and revising the text, even though no firm judgement can be made about its original accuracy. The Dodd ascription 'By a Lady' might seem to connect this text with Lady Mary; but this publicity would probably, judging from her usual comments on the horror of appearing in print, have been unwelcome to her. It is possible that the Verses got printed only through the unreliability of someone who saw them in manuscript (as in the case of Lady Mary's involuntary publications of 1716 and 1719).

The two original printed texts, apparently published on the same day,[26] are in fact very much alike. Apart from the title there are only four minor variants (line 7, 'view' in Dodd, 'views' in Roberts; line 55, 'He' in Dodd, 'He'd' in Roberts; line 89, 'do' in Dodd, 'then' in Roberts; line 96, 'priz'd' in Dodd, 'prais'd' in Roberts). In each case it is arguable which reading is better, except perhaps the last, where Dodd appears to carry it. From the beginning there were slender grounds for the Dodd advertisements to call the Roberts text 'spurious'.[27]

Both versions omit lines 38-39, an unremarkable couplet which was added in the second Dodd edition, 20 March:

It resembles one in an unpublished poem by Hervey: The only surviving manuscript of the Verses to lack lines 38-39 is one in the collection begun in childhood at the instigation of her father by the Duchess of Portland, daughter of an old friend of Lady Mary, and headed 'by Ly Ma-y W—ly Describ'd by the Name Sappho';[29] it could therefore be related to her own holograph (which if so was closer to the Roberts than the Dodd text). Hervey's scribal copy contained the couplet; he inserted it in his printed copy. It probably derived from him and was left out of the first printed texts by oversight.

Three other changes made in the Dodd edition of 20 March perhaps stem from Lady Mary since they were not made by Hervey in his copies. In line 28 the substitution of 'to' for 'of' converts 'Abuse' from noun to verb, making it a better rhyme for 'news' and 'Stews'. In lines 73-74 'Porcupines . . . Backs shoot' becomes 'Porcupine . . . Back shoots', which removes the absurdity of plural porcupines shooting forth a single quill. In line 80 'little' becomes 'puny', a more accurate quotation from Pope, whose Epistle to Burlington is here being turned against himself. These have the air of authorial or at least careful revisions; they seem not to be corrections of printer's slips, for the awkwardnesses which they remove are common to all contemporary manuscripts of the Verses, including Hervey's. The text of 20 March, like those of the 8th, has possible links with each collaborator.[30]

The four surviving contemporary manuscripts bear no obvious relation to print. The Duchess of Portland's copy agrees with the Roberts against the Dodd text everywhere except line 96, lacks the extra couplet, and embodies four minor variants which are neither clearly improvements nor clearly corruptions. James West (d. 1772), resident at the Inner Temple when the poem was published, kept a copy titled as by Lady Mary (Bod. MS Eng. misc. c. 399, ff. 76-77),

which generally agrees with the first Dodd text, but includes the extra couplet; it omits lines 36-37 and 89-90, and includes seven variants which may well be mere slips. Another copy (BM Add. MS 31152, ff. 25-26) mentions no author's name; it has the extra couplet but otherwise agrees with the first Dodd text, and with Dodd at lines 55 and 96 but with Roberts at lines 7 and 89. It has eight other variants (or slips). These copies show that, brief as was the period between the composition of the Verses and their printing, they circulated before publication or independently of it, in forms which combined features of both published texts (but none of the 20th March Dodd revisions, except sometimes the extra couplet).

Hervey's untitled scribal transcript of the Verses (BM Add. MS 35335, a volume of material collected by Horace Walpole, ff. 53-54), in which he made one set of his alterations, agrees with the Roberts edition except at lines 38-39 and line 96. If it derived from his holograph, then that would have been a little nearer to Roberts than to Dodd. It did not, however, reflect his final wishes. He deleted lines 9-10, where the Roberts text demands whether Pope can no better understand

This he replaced with the more explicit He also crossed out lines 40-43: These followed a reference to Pope's supposed attack on James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, in his Epistle to Burlington; the printed texts carried an explanatory footnote which Hervey's scribal manuscript duplicates. His deletion perhaps reflected unwillingness to stress Chandos's kindness to Pope. He also deleted the echo of the Epistle to Burlington at lines 79-82 of the Verses: Yet he did not wish to avoid all specific reference to the Epistle, for the added to the Verses, line 90, a note, 'See Taste and Riches'.

These revisions may have been made either before or after publication. They probably but not necessarily preceded Hervey's other set of revisions, made either immediately upon publication, or later. One possible occasion is January 1734, in which month he wrote of making additions and corrections to his Epistle From a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity (published Nov. 1733, also attacking Pope), although he was 'tired of hearing, seeing & talking of these odious verses'.[31] The corrections referred to are probably those surviving in a copy of his Epistle which is now bound up with his revised printed copy of the Verses at Ickworth. He could have revised both together as part of the same anti-Pope campaign.

Working with a copy of the Roberts edition which he then called 'corrected by the Author', Hervey gave no hint that he had approved its text; indeed, two of his changes bring it closer to Dodd. His alterations do not correspond exactly with those he made to the scribal copy. He deleted the same lines 9-10, but here he wrote in only the first four lines of his six-line insertion, and proposed moving the succeeding paragraph to follow line 24. Here too he deleted lines 40-43, but in this case only 81-82, not 79-82. Here too he inserted the note at line 90. He brought the Roberts text into conformity with that of Dodd at lines 55 and 96, but did not alter lines 7 and 89 (the change at line 55 was one which he could have made in his manuscript copy, but did not). He also made some entirely different revisions: line 8, 'mean' for 'dull'; line 58, 'that Sentence' for 'the Sentence'; line 102, 'When left forlorn' for 'That leaves Thee thus'; line 105, 'Whilst then' for 'Then whilst'; and lines 99-100,

for Many of his revisions, both to manuscript and printed copy, must be the result of second thoughts (or of disagreement with a co-author), not, like those made in the Dodd second edition, corrections of clumsiness.

Hervey's holograph 'To the Reader', probably but not necessarily composed at the same date as his revisions to the printed copy, survives on a separate sheet of paper now bound into that copy before the title page. It runs thus, with his own footnotes:[32]

This protective irony is designed to lend confusion rather than clarification; it is not inconsistent with a possible desire to conceal a partner. Despite Hervey's explicit reference to the Epistle to Burlington, his remark about Pope's disingenuous response to identification of his characters may glance at Sappho as well as Timon. His account of the publication of the Verses—'So hasty and incorrect a Copy' circulating in 'the World' and followed by a version 'much more imperfect since printed'—is probably a comparison of manuscript copies with one or both of the printed versions, rather than of any printed text with another. In any case Hervey, as he worked on the Verses after their publication, clearly had an eye on the press. In the text he indicated heavy typographical emphasis; on the back of his preface he drafted a title page which he later struck through:

On the printed title page he added the same quotation from Horace, inserted 'first' before 'SATIRE', and below the printer's ornament 'the second Edition corrected | by the Author, with a Preface.'

To sum up the testimony of the editions and manuscripts: Hervey treated the Verses as his own property to preface and revise; he gave little sign of knowledge of the Dodd text of 8 March and none of that of 20 March; he disapproved of the Roberts text, though he owned it because it was convenient for him to obtain from his usual agent; he sounded fairly convincingly the familiar note of an author who has been surreptitiously published; and he projected at some unknown date a new edition which came to nothing. Lady Mary on the contrary publicly denied the Verses and left no evidence connecting them with her. Between 8 and 20 March 1733 somebody read the Dodd text carefully enough to notice one omission and three blemishes, and got them altered; nobody bothered to alter these same blemishes, or the more glaringly wrong title page, in the Roberts edition. The Dodd edition probably sold better from the beginning, if the second state represents an intermediate re-printing before the second edition, either because of its advertising or its ascription 'By a Lady' or for some other unknown reason.

After publishing history, the next possible source for evidence of authorship is contemporary and later critical opinion. The Verses seem to have been identified as Lady Mary's from the first, and Hervey's contribution recognized only later. Two of the four early transcripts ascribed them to her. On 8 March, the day of publication, Pope wrote to Fortescue of 'that Lady's having taken her own Satisfaction in an avowed Libell'; this sounds more sincere than his later suggestion that he considered the Dodd title-page ascription, 'By a Lady', to be her deliberate confession of authorship.[33] Two days later Theobald told Warburton that Pope had been 'most handsomely depicted in a severe Poem by Lady Mary W. Mountague'.[34] On [18] March Pope again wrote of the 'Libel' as hers alone; he did not link Hervey's name with hers until 2[0] April. Irish opinion also believed the Verses were 'certainly hers'.[35]

Her authorship was again assumed three weeks after publication by whoever was responsible for printing the Answer to Hammond's Elegy as 'By a lady, Author of the Verses to the Imitator of Horace.' (Dodsley's Collection, however, reprinting the Answer as Hervey's, thereby implied his authorship of the Verses too.)[36] Hervey himself kept a copy of the Elegy and Answer (now bound with his copy of the Verses at Ickworth), but he made no mark in it as he did in the other pamphlets collected in this volume as his.

Hostile squadrons gathering against the Verses had no doubt whom to attack. A Proper Reply to a Lady, 'By a Gentleman' (3 April), began with the question of authorship:

This 'Gentleman' not only detected feminine ignorance of razors in lines 25-26, but amply hinted at Lady Mary's identity, mentioning her poetry and the scandal over her deranged sister. Another combatant, the 'Gentlewoman' who printed at her own expense her Advice to Sappho (received by Lord Oxford on 12 April),[37] made it clear that her quarry was Lady Mary. On the other side, the anonymous author of 'In Defence of Lady Mary Wortley' described how 'Ingenious Wortley draws her conq'ring Pen.'[38]

By 2[0] April Pope had heard more of the complicated story of 'Lady M—'s or Lord H—'s performance. . . . it was labour'd, corrected, præcommended and post-disapprov'd, so far as to be dis-own'd by themselves, after each had highly cry'd it up for the others'.[39] On the first of May Swift wrote of the authors as 'they', not knowing whether 'the production you mention came from the Lady or the Lord'. In any case he was not impressed:

Thereafter, opinions continued uncertain or ambiguous—none more so than Pope's own in his Letter to a Noble Lord, 30 Nov. 1733. Here he began with a clear statement of Lady Mary's responsibility: 'I wonder yet more, how a lady, of great wit, beauty, and fame for her poetry . . . could be prevailed upon to take a part in that proceeding.' Further on he implied that her denial of authorship, brought to him by Lord Peterborough, had caused him to change his mind about her part in the Verses; but this he almost immediately contradicted, in a passage famous for suggestiveness rather than for precision: Pope never again admitted to believing Lady Mary's disclaimer. He continued to couple her with Hervey as authors of unworthy libels against him, either as 'some Persons of Rank and Fortune' or by name.[42] By this time Hervey had struck again in his Epistle From a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity; Pope did not make it clear whether he was blaming Hervey for that alone, or for a share with Lady Mary in the Verses.

More than a year after the Verses were published, a third name was added to those of the suspected authors. Lord Oxford wrote on his copy of the first Dodd edition, 'The Authors of this poem are Lady Mary Wortley, Lord Harvey and Mr Windham under Tutor to the Duke of Cumberland and married to my Lady Deloraine'.[43] Since William Windham married Lady Delorain only in April 1734, Oxford's identification was written more than a year after the Verses were published—very likely at the same time that he annotated his copy of the 'Fifth Edition', January 1735. Despite this time-lag Windham is a plausible third collaborator. His courtship of Lady Delorain (the 'Delia' Pope linked with 'Sappho') provided ample grounds for reprisals by him. He might be the esteemed gentleman whom Lady Mary considered Pope would not guess or dare to attack—a description by that time entirely unfitted to Hervey, who had just been trounced

as Sporus. A Letter to a Noble Lord mentions 'your friend W----m'. Professor Maynard Mack has argued that Windham's marriage and his part in the Verses are glanced at in the Epistle to Arbuthnot: Lord Oxford may have been simply following this same reasoning, or he may have had positive information. His wife was a close friend of Lady Mary, and their daughter the Duchess of Portland (whose transcript of the Verses, ascribed to Lady Mary, has already been mentioned) an equally close friend of Lady Mary's daughter. The paragraph in the Verses beginning was taken by W. J. Courthope to be a tribute to Lady Mary,[45] but is more appropriate to Lady Delorain, who was eleven years younger. These lines, if no others in the Verses, may well be Windham's contribution. If he took a larger part, it seems odd that it attracted such slight and tardy notice.

Later attributions of the Verses followed one or other contemporary view. In 1768 Isaac Reed, editing Lady Mary's Poetical Works, reprinted them (pp. 46-54) from the Monthly Review, 1767, without suggesting that she was not sole author. James Dallaway, first editor to be allowed by her family to use her papers, mentioned that the poem was 'said to have been the joint performance' of her and Hervey.[46] J. W. Croker, who edited Hervey's Memoirs, decided on the basis of the manuscript evidence that Hervey wrote it—but decided against his own critical judgement, for he found it

and especially over An Epistle From a Nobleman.[47] W. J. Courthope found in the poem various characteristics of Hervey (triplets, enjambement, lack of cæsura), but also 'greater vigour than is usually found in Lord Hervey's style, which, when he uses metre, is, as a rule, mean and dull.'[48] A modern critic finds An Epistle 'inferior to the Verses, lacking the crack and sparkle which frequently distinguish' them.[49] Halkett and Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature ascribes the Verses to Lady Mary (rev. ed., 1926-43). Hervey's most recent editor gives as 'the accepted view' that she wrote them, possibly with Hervey's help.[50] His biographer, wittily elaborating Pope's paradoxes, finds in the poem 'a crude vitality and masculine robustness more characteristic of Lady Mary . . . than it is of Hervey, most of whose verse is monotonously fluent and nerveless', and concludes it to be hers.[51]

It still remains to analyse the poem more closely and to compare it in some detail with others by each writer. This analysis will confirm the view of Lady Mary's dominance, but with some qualifications. The opening of the Verses is strongly Herveyesque: antitheses as thick as bees o'er vernal blossoms, and six lines of subordinate clauses (in most of Lady Mary's poems the first main verb occurs in the first or second line). On the other hand the extended climactic image occupying the last paragraph has many parallels among her verse, while Hervey usually prefers to end with a detached, pointed couplet. If genuine collaboration went into the Verses, then the influence of each contributor enabled the other to surpass his or her usual level. They have none of the prolixity which was Hervey's besetting sin, and little of the careless syntax and construction which was Lady Mary's. She seldom uses 'thou' and 'thee' with so few lapses into 'you'. The balance of lines and couplets (especially in the series of antitheses at lines 93-100) is more exactly judged than is usual in any but short passages of her writing. Hervey was certainly no fonder of triplets than she was; but while his generally enclose their sense within the three lines in the approved manner, she treated this device in more cavalier fashion, often making the third line introduce a new idea or lead hurriedly on towards the following couplet, as it does in all the triplets of the Verses except the first.

In content the poem reflects sometimes one author, sometimes the other. The sneer at Pope's classicism in the first paragraph expresses an attitude which Hervey (like Fielding) consistently took towards him: that of one who has enjoyed the classical education proper to

a gentleman. In his revisions to the Verses and also in later attacks, Hervey accuses Pope of inability to appreciate the ancients; in An Epistle From a Nobleman he laments the increasing rustiness of his own classical learning, with a polite air of deprecating a grace which in fact his correspondent knows him to possess. This poem, like the Verses (line 4), compares Pope to his disadvantage with the 'ancient Sense' which Hervey felt himself better equipped to savour.

The Verses's admission (line 96) that many people had formerly prized Pope's work possibly reflects the fact that Lady Mary, who never liked his satires, had once deeply admired his pre-Dunciad poems. By 1728 she had lost her admiration sufficiently to call them 'smooth unmeaning Rhime'; perhaps a contrast with that smoothness is implied in the Verses, line 19: 'none thy crabbed Numbers can endure'. Hervey made no distinctions as to chronology when attacking Pope's work.

The reference (Verses, line 61) to physical weakness as 'The Female Scold's Protection in Offence' would read oddly coming from Lady Mary. So would the gibe at Pope as one who may legitimately be beaten since he 'cannot fight' (line 62), which may imply a contrast with Hervey's surprisingly bold conduct in his duel with Pulteney in 1731. The threat of inflicting punishment is in itself harder to assign; there are innumerable parallels in other people's pamphlet attacks on Pope, and some elsewhere in Hervey's and Lady Mary's writings. Hervey had mentioned late in December 1731, and again in January 1733, the likelihood of physical chastisement for Pope: on the first occasion he seems to have been quoting a phrase of Lady Mary's, as reported by Horace Walpole; on the second he used, like the Verses, line 65, the word 'cudgel'.[52] This passage goes on to depict Pope escaping actual punishment ('Limbs unbroken, Skin without a Stain, | Unwhipt, unblanketed, unkick'd, unslain'), as does the concluding line of Lady Mary's 'P[ope] to Bolingbroke', written after An Essay on Man: 'You scape the Block, and I the Whipping-Post'.[53] The effect in both poems is that of a barely-suppressed rather than a direct threat.

The Verses contain no unique accusations, only those repeated elsewhere by Hervey, Lady Mary, Fielding, and others. Yet some distinctions may be drawn. Pope wrote of the Verses:

Insofar as this is accurate, it suggests a contrast with Lady Mary's other verse attacks on him, which fix on a large number of specific if unjust moral charges: superstition, obscenity, profaning religion, unfairness to Addison, Tickell, Lintot, Walpole, and Mme Dacier; toad-eating, cheating subscribers, causing bad blood between husband and wife, boasting of fictitious amatory exploits, and having the clap.[55] From the beginning, and increasingly with time, she points at Pope's personality rather than his writing, abusing his 'Father, Mother, Body, Soul' as well as 'Muse'[56] with more inclusiveness and particularity than Hervey. Oddly, in view of the latter's career, her attacks outside the Verses are more politically angled than his; they present Pope linked with Bolingbroke and others, a poison working in the body of the state, while Hervey presents him as an obscure private lampooner.

Hervey also moves away from the literary towards the personal in his attacks, but never becomes so specific in his personalities as Lady Mary. His Epistle From a Nobleman, devoting only part of its space to attacking Pope, singles out poor translation and plagiarism. His prose Letter to Mr. C-b-r, 1742, reproves Cibber for attacking 'nothing but his Morals, which no body defends', and goes on to criticise his poetry. The Difference between Verbal and Practical Virtue, published a few days later, says that Pope should be castigated for 'that worse Deformity, his Mind', mentioning specifically literary faults as well as vindictiveness, lying, and ingratitude. Of the major ideas of the Verses, that of Pope as inhuman is more characteristic of Lady Mary; that of his verse as unintentionally innocuous is more like Hervey.

In their plan the Verses differ from Lady Mary's other poetic attacks. Those are all cast in dramatic form, involving more than one character (Dullness, her 'subservient Pow'rs', and the Scriblerians; Swift and a prostitute; Pope and Bolingbroke),[57] whereas Hervey always chooses to argue directly in his own person, like an orator speaking for the prosecution. The Verses come closer to his method, though the fact that they are addressed to Pope, like an epistle, gives them greater immediacy of attack than an address to a third party, and they are not without dramatic characterization.

Hervey undoubtedly made use of the Verses' second paragraph,

nine years later in The Difference Between Verbal and Practical Virtue: But the image of Pope's body as sign and type of his mind weakens the fearsome image of his body as a signpainter's travesty of a man. Later and inferior re-workings are not evidence either for or against authorship; but it is of some interest that Hervey's The Difference re-works many ideas from the Verses and weakens almost all of them. For instance, it reduces to a run-of-the-mill accusation of impotence the force of 'the gross Lust of Hate' (Verses, line 30) and 'No more for loving made, then to be lov'd' (Verses, line 49), and in making a statement of the suitability of Pope's mind to his body misses half the point of Verses, lines 50-51: These details add up to a real and important difference between the pictures which the two poems present. The Difference takes the form of a general essay on the failure of poets to practise what they preach: Pope, though likened to a monster, to Domitian, to 'some yelping Mungril', remains recognisably an actual writer, who has faults which Horace, Seneca and others had, only worse. Despite the shrill tone which is de rigueur among Pope's antagonists, it remains a rational argument, as does that part of An Epistle From a Nobleman which deals with Pope. (Hervey points out in An Epistle that Pope has mangled 'what Homer thought', which is a derogatory opinion; Lady Mary in 'P[ope] to Bolingbroke' makes him refer casually to himself as 'The Homer, and the Horace of the Age', which is a dramatization.[58]) Though the Verses do not, like other works by Lady Mary, present Pope as a developed fictional character, they go further than Hervey's in transforming the raw material which he represents.

The first paragraph of the Verses, perhaps Hervey's, is entirely logical if one accepts its premises. Thereafter, non-rational suggestion takes over. The images of the poem cluster round several central ideas: that of Pope as non-human, which the sign-post image introduces; that of his works as instruments of hurt, a whole catalogue of which succeed each other between lines 21 and 37, and 73 and 88; that of unavailing effort in 'Weeds, as they are, they seem produc'd by Toil', 'doubly bent to force a Dart', the lines on beauty, 'rancorous Will', 'stings and dies' and 'try at least t'assassinate' (all of which assert the opposite of Pope's own claim to Horatian ease); and that of oneman warfare against the rest of mankind. This idea dominates the poem, steadily growing in importance and incidentally producing some fine lines ('The Object of thy Spleen is Human Kind', line 33; 'To Thee 'tis Provocation to exist', line 35). As an enemy to mankind (and first of all to women), Pope is linked with Milton's Satan in his later, ignoble stages. Whether snake, porcupine or wasp, he is something the surrounding human beings look at with wonder and contempt.[59] At last he becomes the outcast homicide Cain. One can see how indispensable to the design is the most offensive aspect of the poem, the use it makes (from the second paragraph to the last couplet) of Pope's deformity.[60]

Whether or not it is true, as J. V. Guerinot thinks, that 'the experience of years of friendship, possibly of love . . . made it possible for Lady Mary to wound deepest of all',[61] it is true that the Verses inflict some wounds which are almost caressing. There is insulting pity in 'thy poor Corps' (line 91), in 'wretched little Carcass' and 'angry little Monster' (lines 70 and 76), and in lines 81-82 (surely Lady Mary's, since Hervey struck them out in both his copies):

This glimpse of embattled mock-pathos is vivid enough to oppose to self-portraits of the heroic satirist; yet despite hints of pathos or even amusement, the Pope created in the Verses is a creature whom in the end it is appropriate to banish with Old-Testament rigour.

The Verses make comparatively little effort to take up points from the First Satire of the Second Book. One might expect Hervey to look for debating points, or Lady Mary to be provoked by its celebration of Pope's friends, 'Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place', since they were her habitual targets in polemical verse. But all is subordinated to the substitution of the imaginary pest for the real man or for the modest crusader depicted in the Satire. Where the Verses do allude to specific lines it is always on this point of self-portraiture. Their 'if thou drawst thy Pen to aid the Law' (line 64) refers to the Satire's passage, lines 105ff.:

The second of these two lines also suggested the image of Pope's deformity as the brand 'Mark'd on thy Back, like Cain, by God's own Hand'. Line 84, 'To make those tremble who escape the Law', paraphrases Pope's claim in his line 118. Immediately afterwards, lines 85-86, refer to Pope's seeing the victim of his satire in his lines 79-80: This distorts Pope's claim by over-stating it and ignoring its irony and humour.

Pope surpassed his attackers in turning their weapons back upon themselves. Five years later he took 'But Horace, Sir, was delicate, was nice'[62] from the Verses, line 16: 'Horace can laugh, is delicate, is clear'. He may also have recalled 'none thy crabbed Numbers can endure' (line 19) when he wrote in the Epistle to Arbuthnot that 'Congreve lov'd, and Swift endur'd my Lays' (line 138). But of all his re-workings of the lines of others against him, laying them low with words from their own mouths, the most striking is the Sporus portrait (Arbuthnot, lines 305-333), which can be seen as virtually a composite portrait of the two collaborators.

In the Sporus passage the Verses seem to live a ghastly resurrected life. One of their accusations is re-animated in 'florid Impotence', one of their techniques alluded to in 'vile Antithesis'. Pope used their comparison of himself (line 55) with 'the Snake of Eve' for 'at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad'. 'This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings' has its source in 'as we're told of Wasps, it stings and dies' (Verses, line 88). He was already fond of insect-imagery, but his identification of Sporus-Hervey with butterfly and bug acquires an extra force from the Verses' use of this very image. Indeed, for readers—let alone the writers—of the Verses, an additional layer of meaning informs this passage. No wonder if on the publication of Pope's epistle someone 'supposed that some copies would be called for'. The poem had acquired notoriety as an assault on Pope of which 'Your Lordship indeed said you had it from a lady, and the lady said it was your Lordship's'. Although 'both sexes had a share in it', the lady, more sorely provoked and more poetically inventive, probably had the greater. Yet the lord was taking public acknowledgement and blame. The Sporus portrait, already rich with complex allusions to Hervey's sexual reputation, his influence on Queen Caroline, the behind-the-scenes nature of his court and pamphlet politics, acquires a new level of significance through the unacknowledged place in it of Lady Mary. Like Walpole she speaks through Hervey's mouth, like the Queen she is corrupted by him:

The sexual innuendoes of A Letter to a Noble Lord can be seen as a preliminary draft for this portrait, clumsy in comparison with the finished product.

The authors of the Verses had put up a fierce fight, but the champion was not to be worsted. He gave Hervey what is probably the most memorable of all his satirical lashings; he allowed Lady Mary (like her own later imagined version of himself) to escape the public whipping-post. In private she was not exempt. Pope deflected the

weighty blow of the Verses' closing lines by skilful paraphrase: It appears that he was not blind to the element of insulting pity in the poem, for he took up that weapon and with that too proved himself the victor: The annals of poetic warfare can hardly show a finer example of wounding, as the Verses have it (line 26), 'with a Touch, that's scarcely felt or seen.'

Notes