Mr. Bowles remarked in the course of the skirmish of pamphlets he provoked, that the editorship of Pope's works had been to no one a bed of roses. For the larger part of the discomforts his commentators may have endured, Pope himself was responsible. His mysteries, his double-dealings, his falsifications, and his quarrels have rendered half the acts of his life a fertile theme for debate. None of the angry controversialists who mingled fifty years ago in the fray had prepared properly for the contest, and the insolence and assumption, the virulence and the dogmatism, were commonly greatest with the persons whose acquaintance with the subject was the least. The intemperate, and usually ignorant warfare, left nearly all the vexed questions in confusion, and it is only in recent years that a new generation of dispassionate students have begun to replace the blunders of sciolism by facts. In the many battles yet to be fought over Pope there will be this advantage which will be certain to produce solid results, that the critic will be in possession of the materials for judgment, and will not have to write without knowledge of his cause.
[Footnote 1: Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, Vol. iii. p. 368.]
[Footnote 2: Marchmont Papers, Vol. ii. p. 335.]
[Footnote 3: Nichols, Lit. Anec. Vol. ii. p. 165.]
[Footnote 4: Johnson, Lives of the Poets, Vol. iii. p. 72.]
[Footnote 5: Prior's Life of Malone, p. 385.]
[Footnote 7: Hurd said of Warburton's Pope, that "it was the best edition that was ever given of any classic."]
[Footnote 8: Imit. Bk. i. Epist. vi. ver. 87.]
[Footnote 9: This last sentence was added by Warburton in the later editions of his Pope.]
[Footnote 10: Nichols, Lit. Anec. Vol. IV. p. 429-437.]
[Footnote 11: Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Cunningham, Vol. vi. p. 422.]
[Footnote 12: De Quincey, Works, ed. 1863. Vol. xv. p. 137. He usually maintained the opposite view, and sided altogether with the "they who could see nothing in Pope but 'dust a little gilt.'" "There is nothing," he says, "Pope would not have sacrificed, not the most solemn of his opinions, nor the most pathetic memorial from his personal experiences, in return for a sufficient consideration, which consideration meant always with him poetic effect. Simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of a sincere thought, or a sincere emotion. Nothing that ever he uttered, were it even a prayer to God, but he had a fancy for reading it backwards. And he was evermore false, not as loving or preferring falsehood, but as one who could not in his heart perceive much real difference between what people affected to call falsehood, and what they affected to call truth."]