Pope: His Descent & Family Connections, Facts and Conjectures

The following Tract is an enlargement of the principal portion of an account which I propose to give of Pope, in Poets and Verse Writers, from Chaucer to Pope: new Facts in their History—should the public curiosity respecting them call for the publ ... Read more

The following Tract is an enlargement of the principal portion of an account which I propose to give of Pope, in Poets and Verse Writers, from Chaucer to Pope: new Facts in their History—should the public curiosity respecting them call for the publication of what I have collected and written. Excerpt...........Two persons of noble birth, who thought themselves insulted in the “Imitation of the First of the Second Book of the Satires of Horace,” retorted upon the Poet with a severity not wholly undeserved. Unlike Pope, who had dismissed them both in a line or two, they composed their attacks very elaborately, seeking out everything that could offend him,—defects for which he must be held responsible, and those for which no man can justly be so held. One of these latter points was, want of birth. The lines, Whilst none thy crabbed numbers can endure, Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure, are attributed to the Lady Mary Wortley Montague; but Johnson assigns them to Lord Hervey,[1] who attacked Pope in another poem, in which he makes it a charge that he was a hatter’s son, and insults him on the score of the meanness of his family. Less