Satires and Epistles

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881 edition. Excerpt: ...and epigram than the character of Wharton, or the Duchess of Marlborough, and therefore more reality. Pope felt every stab, and gratified his temper by the pain he inflicted. The lines were not published till Addison had been dead eight years. They appeared first as a fragment in the Miscellanies of 1727! but they were finished as early as 1716, when, according to Spence( they had been sent by Pope to Addison himself. Pope had meditated each point for years, as the germs of some of them appear in a prose letter to Craggs in 1715. In the first copy, in 1727, the name was given--Addison. The substitution of Atticus in 1735 may perhaps be an indication that Pope was not without some sense of the outrage he was committing. The supposed provocation was a project for a rival--Whig--translation of Homer, the suggestion of which Pope attributed to Addison. For an account of the misunderstanding, see Carruthers, Life, p. 117; Macaulay, Essays, vo1. 2; Life and Writings of Addison. 1. 198. Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne. Taken by Pope from Denham, On Fletcher's Works: 'Nor needs thy juster title the foul gilt Of eastern kings, who to secure their reign, Must have their brothers, sons, and kindred slain;' but originally Lord Bacon's. He applied it to Aristotle's treatment of preceding philosophers. De Augment. 3. 4: 'Aristoteles, more Ottomannorum, regnare se haud tuto posse putabat, nisi fratres suos omnes contrucidasset.' 1. 201. assent with civil leer. Macaulay, Essays, 2. 33: 'Addison had "one habit which both Swift and Stella applauded, and which we hardly know how to blame. If his first attempts to set a presuming dunce right were ill-received, he changed his tone, "assented with civil leer," and lured I the...