which he sent to him, immediately on its appearance, with this note: "You have Mr. Tickell's book to divert one hour. It is already condemned here; and the malice and juggle at Button's is the conversation of those who have spare moments from politics." Pope says of himself that he was heated by what he had heard, and wrote to Addison, that if he were to speak severely of him in return for his behaviour, it should be something in the following manner. He then subjoined the first sketch of the twenty-two lines, concluding with

"Who would not weep if Atticus were he?"

Addison, Pope says, used him very civilly ever after. We have no information whether the quarrel of the great writers extended to the publishers of the rival translations. There is an anecdote in the supplement to Spence, from which it appears that they long continued rivals. The authority for this anecdote is Dr. Young himself. "Tonson and Lintott were both candidates for printing some work of Dr. Young's. He answered both their letters in the same morning, and in his hurry misdirected them. When Lintott opened that which came to him he found it begin:

That Bernard Lintott is so great a scoundrel, that,' &c. It must have been very amusing to have seen him in his rage; he was a great sputtering fellow."

Pope returned to his old bookseller, Tonson, when he published his edition of Shakespeare. It was not a success. Of the six quarto volumes, only about six hundred copies were sold; and the remainder of an impression of seven hundred and fifty were disposed

of at a reduced price. Pope received a small remuneration for his editorial labours, 2177. 128. His Preface was a masterly composition, pregnant with good sense, and elegant in style; but the character of the age, in which the higher art of the poet was imperfectly appreciated, is reflected in Pope's conception of Shakspere's genius. Theobald, three years after, produced his edition, having previously published a pamphlet, entitled 'Shakspeare Restored; or a Specimen of the many Errors, as well committed as unamended, by Mr. Pope in his late edition.' This attack, and Theobald's greater success, gave him that place upon the throne of Dulness which was afterwards occupied by Cibber. Lintott was the publisher of the subscription edition of 'The Odyssey,' in 1725. Pope, in announcing his proposals for this translation, avowed that he had been assisted by friends. He had undertaken the translation, but did not claim to be the sole translator. Mr. Pope, the undertaker, became a byeword amongst his numerous unfriends. Pope gained nearly three thousand pounds by this operation; but Lintott was disappointed; and pretending to have discovered something fraudulent in the agreement, threatened a suit in Chancery. Pope quarrelled, of course, with him, and finally elevated him to his ignoble position in The Dunciad.' That Curll came in for the greater honours of that poem is to be attributed to his share in the mystery of the publication of Pope's Letters, about which nearly as much has been written as about "Junius." It is beside the purpose of this little volume to enter upon this debatable ground. I

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am content to refer to the lucid account of the affair by Mr. Carruthers; to the elaborate discussions of the elder D'Israeli; and to the desire of Mr. Roscoe to vindicate Pope from the imputation of Johnson:— Being desirous to print his own Letters, and not knowing how to do, without imputation of vanity, what in this country has been done very rarely, he contrived an appearance of compulsion; that when he could complain that his Letters were surreptitiously published he might decently and defensively publish them himself." Pope had an awkward controversialist in Curll. His impudence was at once spear and shield. One specimen may suffice of his mode of attack and defence: "I have engraven a new plate of Mr. Pope's head from Mr. Jervas's painting; and likewise intend to hang him up in effigy for a sign to all spectators of his falsehood and my own veracity, which I will always maintain under the Scots' motto, Nemo me impune lacessit.”

In the publication of the first edition of "The Dunciad,' in 1729, there was employed that mystification which Pope and Swift delighted in as the herald of their attacks upon their adversaries. It professed to be printed originally in Dublin in 1728; but this was really a reprint of a London edition. This was the prelude to an enlarged quarto edition, which was soon pirated. Pope went to the Court of Chancery to obtain an injunction. He was not successful, as the printer could not prove any property. The public curiosity was stimulated by these law proceedings, as was their manifest intent. Pope then assigned his copyright to Lords Burlington, Oxford, and Bathurst,

and they re-assigned it to Lawton Gilliver, who had become Pope's bookseller, "with the sole right and liberty of printing the same." There is a graphic account of the excitement produced by the publication of The Dunciad.' It was held to have been written by Savage, but is with much probability attributed to Pope himself.

"On the day the book was first vended a crowd of authors besieged the shop; entreaties, advices, threats of law and battery, nay, cries of treason, were all employed to hinder the coming out of 'The Dunciad.' On the other side, the booksellers and hawkers made as great an effort to procure it. What could a few poor authors do against so great a majority as the public! There was no stopping a torrent with a finger, so out it came. Many ludicrous circumstances attended it. The Dunces (for by this name they were called) held weekly clubs to consult of hostilities against the author. One wrote a letter to a great Minister, that Mr. Pope was the greatest enemy the Government had; and another bought his image in clay, to execute him in effigy; with which sad sort of satisfaction the gentlemen were a little comforted. Some false editions of the book having an owl in their frontispiece; the true one, to distinguish it, fixed in its stead an ass laden with authors. Then another surreptitious one being printed with the same ass, the new edition in octavo returned for distinction to the owl again. Hence arose a great contest of booksellers against booksellers, and advertisements against advertisements; some recommending the edition of the owl, and others the edition of the ass,

by which names they came to be distinguished, to the great honour also of the gentlemen of 'The Dunciad.""

I might here close this chapter, and leave the shadows of the old booksellers of The Dunciad' as not quite fit to call up in decent company. "The high heroic games" in which Lintott and Curll are the chief antagonists are not redolent of attar of roses. The six lines which describe the person and action of the "huge Lintott" may be extracted with safety:

"As when a dab-chick waddles through the copse
On feet and wings, and flies, and wades, and hops;
So lab'ring on, with shoulders, hands, and head,
Wide as a windmill all his figure spread,

With arms expanded, Bernard rows his state,
And left-legg'd Jacob seems to emulate.”

Another bookseller is introduced in even a more filthy contest with Curll, Thomas Osborne. Pope deposed Chapman, after the original edition of The Dunciad,' and introduced Osborne, who, according to Johnson, was so dull that he could not feel the poet's gross satire. He properly belongs to a few years later, when the ragged scholar who walked from Lichfield into London, with his friend David Garrick, had to earn his scanty wages under this arrogant old bookseller, and has told how he had dealt with him: "Sir, he was impertinent to me, and I beat him." Happily there were many in this busy age of letters who were worthy dealers in wares literary. One of these was the great-nephew of the first Jacob Tonson. His eulogium by Steevens, in his advertisement to his edition of Shakspeare, in 1773, offers an example