ttle thing, and entreated Pope not to run
the risk of marring what was so excellent in trying to mend it. Pope
afterwards declared that this insidious counsel first opened his eyes to
the baseness of him who gave it.

Now there can be no doubt that Pope's plan was most ingenious, and that
he afterwards executed it with great skill and success. But does it
necessarily follow that Addison's advice was bad? And if Addison's
advice was bad, does it necessarily follow that it was given from bad
motives? If a friend were to ask us whether we would advise him to risk
his all in a lottery of which the chances were ten to one against him,
we should do our best to dissuade him from running such a risk. Even if
he were so lucky as to get the thirty thousand pound prize, we should
not admit that we had counselled him ill; and we should certainly think
it the height of injustice in him to accuse us of having been actuated
by malice. We think Addison's advice good advice. It rested on a sound
principle, the result of long and wide experience. The general rule
undoubtedly is that, when a successful work of imagination had been
produced, it should not be recast. We cannot at this moment, call to
mind a single instance in which this rule has been transgressed with
happy effect, except the instance of the Rape of the Lock. Tasso recast
his Jerusalem. Akenside recast his Pleasures of the Imagination, and his
Epistle to Curio. Pope himself, emboldened no doubt by the success with
which he had expanded and remodelled the Rape of the Lock, made the same
experiment on the Dunciad. All these attempts failed. Who was to foresee
that Pope would, once in his life, be able to do what he could not
himself do twice, and what nobody else has ever done?

Addison's advice was good. But had it been bad, why should we pronounce
it dishonest? Scott tells us that one of his best friends predicted the
failure of Waverley. Herder adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a
subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the
History of Charles the fifth. Nay, Pope himself was one of those who
prophesied that Cato would never succeed on the stage, and advised
Addison to print it without risking a representation. But Scott, Goethe,
Robertson, Addison, had the good sense and generosity to give their
advisers credit for the best intentions. Pope's heart was not of the
same kind with theirs.

In 1715 while he was engaged in translating the Iliad,