tions by her wayward conduct, and being disappointed in the hopes she had formed, she retired voluntarily to a convent. Warton asserts that she was "forced" into a nunnery. This is expressly contrary to what Pope himself says in a letter to her : "If you are resolved in revenge to rob the world of so much example as you may afford it, I believe your design to be in vain ; for, in a monastery, your devotions cannot carry you so far towards the next world, as to make this lose sight of you." It is most probable that incipient lunacy was the cause of her perverted feelings, and untimely end. Johnson says, "poetry has been seldom worse employed than in dignifying the amorous fury of a raving girl." This seems severe, contemptuous, and unfeeling. Johnson, however, chiefly adverted, I imagine, to the false reasoning and absurd attempt in the lines "Is there no bright," &c., to make suicide the natural consequence of more elevated feelings. Johnson spoke as a severe moralist, and a rigid philosopher, against such contemptible reasoning as Pope employs upon this subject from the fifth to the twenty-second verse. Having been, as might naturally be expected from his superior understanding, disgusted with the reasoning part of the poem, the gentler touches of fancy and tenderness were lost, if I may say so, on him. He would turn with disdain from such images as

There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow ;

or perhaps exclaim, as upon another occasion, Incredulus odi. Not. withstanding, however, his severity, the animated passages of this poem, "But thou, false guardian," &c., and the lines of tenderness and poetic faucy interspersed, cannot be read without sympathy. The verses "Yet shall thy grave," &c., are possibly too commonplace, but they are surely beautiful. If any expression might he objected to, perhaps it would be "silver" for "white" wings of an angel.-BOWLES.

The Elegy, although produced at an early age, is not exceeded in pathos and true poetry by any production of its author. But whilst we admit the extraordinary powers displayed by the poet, we cannot but perceive that they are apparently employed to give a sanction to an act of criminality, and to inculcate principles which cannot be too cautiously guarded against. It must, however, be observed, that this piece is not to be judged of by the common rules of criticism. It is, in fact, a spontaneous burst of indignation against the authors of the calamity which it records. Throughout the whole poem, the author speaks as if he were under a delusion, and utters sentiments which would be wholly unpardonable at other times. It is only in this light that we can excuse the violence of many of the expressions, which border on the very verge of impiety. The first line of the

poem demonstrates that he is no longer under the control of reason. He sees the ghost of the person whom he so highly admired and loved. The " visionary sword" gleams before his eyes, and in the excess of his grief he perceives nothing but what is great and noble in the act that terminated her life. This impassioned strain is continued till his anger is turned against the author of her sufferings, when it is poured out in one of the most terrific passages which poetry, either ancient or modern, can exhibit, -a passage in which indignation and revenge seem to absorb every other feeling, and to involve not only the offender, but all who are connected with him, in indiscriminate destruction. Nor is this sufficient-their destruction must be the cause of exultation to others, and they are to become the objects of insult and abhorrence—

There passengers shall stand, and pointing say, &c.

Compassion at length succeeds to resentment, and pity to terror. The poet in some degree assumes his own character, and his feelings are expressed in language of the deepest affection and tenderness, which impresses itself indelibly on the memory of the reader. The concluding lines, whilst they display the ardour of real passion, demonstrate how greatly the author was attached to the art he professed; that, and his affection for the object of his grief, could only expire together;

The Muse forgot, and thou beloved no more.-Roscoe.

This poem first appeared in the quarto of 1717, where it bore the title of "Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady." In the edition of 1736, 66 Elegy was substituted for "Verses." The earliest historical account of the heroine was given by William Ayre, Esq., in a miserable compilation called Memoirs of Pope, which is full of extravagant fictions and blunders.' This wretched book-maker has merely turned the incidents of the poem into prose, and amplified them in the process. His narrative would be unworthy of notice if it had not been adopted by Ruffhead, who borrowed, without acknowledgment, the statements, and, in the main, the very language of Ayre. The authority of Ruffhead's work is entirely due to the fact, that it was in art drawn up from manuscripts supplied by Warburton, and was subsequently revised by him.. The copy corrected by the bishop contains no note on the pages which record the fate of

1 The Memoirs by Ayre appeared in 1745, without the name of the publisher. In a pamphlet which was printed the same year, under the title of Remarks on Squire Ayre's Memoirs, it is stated that the work was put together, and published by Curll, who being notorious for the manufacture of vapid, lying biographies, suppressed a name which would have been fatal to the sale of his trash.

the unfortunate lady. It does not follow that he knew the particu lars to be true because he has not declared them to be false. He was probably ignorant on the subject, and unable either to confirm or confute the story. Dr. Johnson was in the same position. "The lady's name and adventures," he says, in his Life of Pope, "I have sought with fruitless inquiry. I can, therefore, tell no more than I have learned from Mr. Ruffhead, who writes with the confidence of one who could trust his information." The trust was fallacious. Ruffhead, an uncritical transcriber, a blind man led by the blind, was deceived by a transparent impostor who, in default of facts, embellished the hints in Pope's verse. His style of invention is emblazoned in the last sentence of his narrative when he says, that "the priesthood would have buried the lady in the highway, but it seems their power there did not extend so far." The law of England till the reign of George IV. ordained that a suicide, unless irresponsible from insanity, should be interred in the highway, and a stake driven through the body. Pope, in his poem, only spoke of "unpaid rites," whence Ayre, alias Curll, concluded that the law of the place did not sanction road-burial. Familiar, however, with the English notion he transfers it to the priests of a locality where the usage, by his own confession, did not exist.

Nearly half a century after the death of the poet, Hawkins and Warton, who evidently derived their statements from a common source, produced a legend, which instead of being drawn from the elegy is directly opposed to it. Pope says that the unfortunate lady destroyed herself with a sword, Warton that she put an end to her life with a rope; Pope says that she had beauty, Warton that she was deformed: Pope says that she had titles, Warton that she was simply one Wainsbury; Pope says that she had fame, and Warton has quoted a name so obscure that nobody has been able to discover her lineage, her connections, her residence, or that she was ever known to a single human being of the time. The Warton form of the romance has been jotted down by the Duchess of Portland in her note book, from which it appears that the narrators did not agree among themselves; for Warton declares that the lady was beloved by Pope; the duchess that Pope was beloved by the lady, and that he did not return her affection. In his Essay on the Genius of Pope, Warton states that her first suitor was the Duke of Buckingham, that on his deserting her she retired into a convent in France, and that her retreat into a nunnery prompted the poet, "who had conceived a violent passion for her," to express his feelings in the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard. The Duke of Buckingham, on March 16, 1705, married his third wife, who survived him. The tone and details of the Elegy

2 Warton's Essay, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 329.

forbid the notion that it could have been written on a cast-off mistress of the duke, and the incidents must, therefore, have occurred before March 16, 1705, when Pope was barely sixteen years and ten months old. The fable thus requires us to suppose that the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard was the production of a lad of seventeen, that it was composed several years before the translation of the letters existed from which he has borrowed a considerable part of the phraseology as well as the ideas, and that his virulent denunciation of the "false guardian," was for not allowing a ward "with beauty, titles, wealth, and fame," to wed the son of a linen-draper,—a mere boy without money, reputation, or prospects, and who was deformed and stunted in an extreme degree.

In 1806, Bowles promulgated a tradition which contradicts the representations both of Ayre and Warton. The hero of Warton is Pope himself; the hero of Bowles is the Duke of Berry. The heroine of Warton in one version, for he is not consistent, was forced into a convent; and the heroine of Bowles withdrew there of her own accord. The unfortunate lady of Ayre and Ruffhead is driven abroad by her uncle, that she may be weaned from an English attachment; the unfortunate lady of Bowles falls in love with a foreigner on the continent; the lady of Ayre and Ruffhead is thwarted in her matrimonial schemes because she has fixed her heart upon a person beneath her; and the lady of Bowles is reduced to despair because she aspires to the hand of a person above her. Bowles maintains that the latter view must be received or the Elegy is unintelligible. Johnson has shown that the Elegy is contradictory, and if the verses which represent the lady's fate to have been the consequence of her ambition favours the theory that she was enamoured of some superior in rank, the passage which represents the uncle as steeling his heart against his niece out of pride equally favours the rival hypothesis that she was devoted to an inferior.

At variance in nearly every particular, the conflicting histories of the unfortunate lady have the common quality, that they are unsupported by a single circumstance which could warrant the smallest measure of belief. Bowles heard his version, for which he declined to vouch, from an unnamed gentleman, who heard it from Condorcet, who heard it from Voltaire, who heard it nobody knows where. Ayre and the rest cite no witnesses whatever, for the obvious reason that they had none of any value to cite. The only accounts which give the lady's name report it differently, and not one of the investigators of her story,—not even Warton after his "many and wide enquiries," can tell us where she was born or died, or where she lived, or to whom she was related or known. The veriest phantom that ever flitted in darkness before the eye of credulous superstition could not be more illusive and impalpable.

The biographers and editors who went about enquiring after the unfortunate lady had no suspicion that she might be altogether a poetical invention, nor could they have shown that here was the solution of the mystery unless they had been in possession of the Caryll correspondence. Pope, in a posthumous note, which was published by Warburton, directs us to the letters to several la lies at p. 206 of the quarto edition, for the indications that the unfortunate lady of the Elegy was also the heroine of the Duke of Buckingham's Verses to a Lady designing to retire into a Monastery. There are no letters to ladies at p. 206 of the quarto, but some are inserted from p. 86 to p. 95, and 206 is a palpable misprint for 86, where, in conformity with the title of the duke's poem, we have a letter to a lady who was meditating a retreat to a convent. The preceding letter is addressed to Mr. Caryll, and, in the table of contents, is said to be "Concerning an unfortunate lady." The letter which relates to the monastic project is said, in the table of contents, to be "To the same lady," and thence it appears that the lady who thought of withdrawing to a nunnery was the same unfortunate lady who was the subject of the letter to Caryll. From the Caryll correspondence we discover that she was the wife of John Weston, Esq., of Sutton, in the county of Surrey; but, instead of dying by her own hand in a foreign country, she died a natural death in her native land on the 18th of October, 1724, several years after the poet had commemorated the suicide of the unfortunate lady. It follows that he has falsely represented the unfortunate lady of his letters to have been the same individual with the unfortunate lady of the Elegy, and since he was driven to conjure up a fictitious victim we may be sure that there was no real victim in the case. This explains Pope's omission to answer Caryll's inquiry who the unfortunate lady was; this explains why the tragical death of a woman 66 with beauty, titles, wealth, and fame," was unknown to her contemporaries; this explains why the histories of her differ from each other, and why in every one of them she remains a shadowy being whose very existence cannot be traced; this explains why, as Johnson observes, it is not easy to make out from the poem the character of either the heroine or her guardian: and this accounts for the contradictions which have crept into the Elegy. Pope adopted the

1

1 Pope's Correspondence, ed. Elwin, vol. i., pp. 144, 158-160, 162.

'Pray in your next," writes Caryll to Pope, July 16, 1717, "tell me who was the unfortunate lady you address a copy of verses to. I think you once gave me her history, but it is now quite out of my head." Pope, in his reply, does not allude to the subject, and Caryll says to him on Aug. 18, "You answer not my question who the unfortunate lady was that you inscribe a copy of verses to in your book. I long to be re-told her story, for I believe you already told me formerly; but I shall refer that, and a thousand other things more, to chat over at our next meeting, which I hope draws near." This letter was answered by Pope on Aug. 22, but there is still not a word on the unfortunate lady.