al
history, and no man could have been more competent to bring to the
surface the under-current of forgotten circumstances.

I have kept to the plan sketched out by Mr. Croker. "A commentary," says
Johnson, "must arise from the fortuitous discoveries of many men in
devious walks of literature," and few poets have had more commentators
than Pope. I have borrowed whatever I met with in previous writers that
throw light upon his meaning, faults, and beauties, have cast aside what
was plainly inapplicable and erroneous, and have done what I could to
fill up deficiencies. My own notes will be recognised by the absence of
any signature; all other notes throughout the work have the names of
their authors attached, even when a note is by the same author as the
text. The extracts from Warton are sometimes taken from his Essay, and
both in his case and that of Bowles I have occasionally joined together
scattered fragments which were connected in their subject. The rest of
the arrangements will be understood at a glance.

The letters of Pope demand a more particular discussion. Estimated by
their intrinsic merits they would call for little notice. "He laboured
them," says Horace Walpole, "as much as the Essay on Man, and as they
were written to everybody they do not look as if they had been written
to anybody."[11] Their dry and frigid generalities could not be more
happily exposed. The chief importance of the correspondence is in its
relation to the morality of Pope, and the fame of men whose reputation
is involved in the question of his uprightness. His real nature has
always been hotly debated. "His detractors," says De Quincey, "fancy
that in his character a basis of ignoble qualities was here and there
slightly relieved by a few shining spots; we, on the contrary, believe
that in Pope lay a disposition radically noble and generous, clouded and
overshadowed by superficial foibles; or, to adopt the distinction of
Shakespeare, they see nothing but 'dust a little gilt,' and we 'gold a
little dusted.'"[12] Pope boasted loudly of his virtue, and his
champions judge him by his own representations. His accusers hold that
his professions were hypocritical, as when Lord Macaulay speaks of his
"spite and envy, thinly disguised by sentiments as benevolent and noble
as those which Sir Peter Teazle admired in Mr. Joseph Surface."[13] The
charges brought against him are thickly scattered over his life, and
either the guilty appearances are