f it. That was in the year ----, when the author was
---- years of age. But the last hundred lines, including the celebration
of the Peace, were added in the year ----, soon after the ratification
of the treaty of Utrecht." Pope supplied the omitted dates in the octavo
of 1736, where he ascribes the former part of Windsor Forest to 1704,
and the latter part to 1710. The testimony of Pope carries little
weight, and there is no subsidiary evidence to confirm the improbable
statement that the larger portion of the poem was produced as early as
1704. The date he assigned to the remainder, in a note at ver. 1 of the
edition of 1736, and again in a note on ver. 289, must have been a slip
of the pen, or an error of the press. Warburton altered 1710 to 1713 in
the first note, and left the mistake uncorrected in the second. The
amended date was a fresh blunder, for it appears from the letters of
Pope to Caryll on Nov. 29, and Dec. 5, 1712, that the new conclusion was
then complete. Pope's memory deceived him when he stated that the end of
the poem was written "soon after the ratification of the treaty of
Utrecht." The treaty, as Mr. Croker remarks, was not signed till March
30, 1713, nor ratified till April 28, and Windsor Forest was published
before March 9. The Peace had for some months been an accepted fact, and
Pope did not wait for its formal ratification.

"Lord Lansdowne," said Pope to Spence, "insisted on my publishing my
Windsor Forest, and the motto (_non injussa cano_) shows it."[5] Pope
not only published, but composed Windsor Forest at the instigation of
Lord Lansdowne, if the opening lines of the poem are to be believed.
Trumbull, however, asserts that it was he who suggested the topic to
Pope. "I should have commended his poem on Windsor Forest much more,"
wrote Sir William to Mr. Bridges, May 12, 1713, "if he had not served me
a slippery trick; for you must know I had long since put him upon this
subject, gave several hints, and at last, when he brought it, and read
it, and made some little alterations, &c., not one word of putting in my
name till I found it in print." The apparent discrepancy may be
explained by the supposition that Trumbull proposed the earlier poem on
the Forest, and Lord Lansdowne the subsequent celebration of the Peace.
The poet tacked the new matter on to the old, and may have represented
that he sang at the command of Granville, because the ultimate form
which the work assumed was due to hi