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Alexander Pope
[Epitaph on Mrs. Grace Butler.] "Stript to the naked soul, escap'd from clay." (11.76). This is part of "An Account of Doctor Robert Bolton" (pp. 74-76, 162-165), a friend of Mrs. Butler and an acquaintance of Pope. Bolton wrote a "Character" of Mrs. Butler upon her death. Curiously enough, there is no index entry for either Dr. Bolton or Mrs. Butler in the index volume to the Twickenham Pope, nor is the poem mentioned in the doubtful or wrongly attributed pieces. Yet there is a footnote in the EM stating that the poem was printed in Owen Ruffhead's life of Pope, in Aaron Hill's Prompter, No. 8, "and in the works of Aaron Hill, vol. iv. p. 153 who by mistake attributes the character of Mrs. Butler to Mr. Pope" (pp. 75-76). The poem is included in William Warburton's Letters from a Late Eminent Prelate to One of his Friends [1808], p. 268, with two textual differences, both preferable to the EM text, "taste" for "task" in l. 11 and "loves" for "love" (an obvious error) in l. 14. Ruffhead's text also has "task" and "loves,' but the text in Hill's Works has "taste," surely the preferable reading, and "glooms of death" in l. 10, instead of "gloom of death" of the EM and Ruffhead. The title in Hill's Works is "A Letter from a Departed Spirit to the Author (Mr. Pope) of a Lady's Character, lately publish'd, in a Thursday's Journal," i.e. "the Grub-Street Journal of November 28, 1734" (EM, 11.74n.).
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