ansferred the moonlight reverie from 1713 to
1716, he may have been influenced by the consideration that in the
former year his correspondence with Blount had not commenced. The letter
to Caryll of November 23, and the letter to Digby of September 10, both
open with the same compliment on their return from the Continent, and
the date may have been altered from 1725 to 1724 to make it harmonise
with Digby's travels abroad. In remedying one inconsistency, Pope fell
into another. A new use was found for the letter in the quarto of 1737.
Arbuthnot died in February, 1735, at the very time when there is reason
to suppose that the poet printed the P. T. collection. The final letter
in the volume is from the Doctor, and it was apparently added at the
last moment. It was then too late to be thinking of a re-distribution of
the materials, and the idea was not executed, or perhaps conceived till
1737, when the address, which had been changed from Caryll to Digby, was
once more changed from Digby to Arbuthnot. In the interval Pope appears
to have detected the anachronism. He retained the day of the month, but
struck out the year. He preserved the announcement, "death has seized
one of our family," but dropped the words "my poor old nurse." Her death
nevertheless could alone have been meant; for in the letters to Caryll,
as in the letter to Digby, several contemporaneous particulars are
mentioned, which being repeated in the letter to Arbuthnot, limit its
date to the period of the poor old nurse's decease. In both cases Pope's
time had been spent in attending upon the dying patient, in both cases
he and his mother had been ill together, in both cases these incidents
had hindered his writing, in both cases he had been questioned
respecting the effect produced upon his mind by the attacks upon his
translation of the "Odyssey," and in both cases he had been less
troubled by the criticisms upon his writings than by the imputations
upon his morals, in consequence of some reports which had been spread of
his intrigues with Martha Blount. It follows that the letter to
Arbuthnot, though dated September 10, must have been written subsequent
to the death of the nurse on November 5. But there is unanswerable
evidence that at that time, and for weeks and months afterwards, he had
constant personal intercourse with the poet. He was at his elbow, and
not on the Continent,[165] and the event could not have been
communicated to him as news upon his r