in which he had
drawn a comparison between his own Pastorals and those of his rival, and
awarded himself the palm. He therefore sent the criticism anonymously,
and Steele, as we are told by Warburton, not discovering that the praise
of Philips and the censure of Pope were both ironical, showed the
manuscript to the latter, and assured him that he would "never publish
any paper where one of the club was complimented at the expense of
another." His ingenuous ally affected magnanimity, and prevailed upon
Steele to print the essay. The irony which could not be detected by the
wits at Button's might well escape less cultivated minds. Ayre, in his
Memoirs of Pope, in 1745, and Dilworth, in 1760, both believed that the
criticism was to be interpreted literally, that Steele was the author of
it, and that it was dictated by friendship for Philips. Small as was the
ability of these biographers, they may be supposed to have shared the
common opinion. This continued to be the accepted doctrine in the next
generation; and the celebrated circle in which Hannah More lived were
unanimous in holding that the essay was not satirical. "The whole
criticism," she wrote August 4, 1783, "appears to me a burlesque, but I
have some reason to think I am in the wrong, as I have all the world
against me. That a writer of so pure a taste could be in earnest when he
talks of the elegance of Diggon Davy, and exalts all that trash of
Philips's, whose simplicity is silliness, I cannot bring myself to
believe." She found it still more difficult to believe that the author
could be serious in asserting that Hobbinol and Lobbin are names
agreeable to the delicacy of an English ear.[25] Hannah More judged of
Philips by the wretched extracts in the Guardian. Her accomplished
friends could hardly have admired them; and it must have been for a
different reason that the purpose of the essay was misunderstood. Warton
says that the misapprehension arose from "the skill with which the irony
was conducted." It would be more natural to infer that the execution was
defective when the vast majority of literary men mistook the design. The
satire, in fact, is imperfectly sustained, and passages, which the
author intended for irony, appeared to the reader to be plain common
sense. "Mr. Pope," he says of himself, "hath fallen into the same error
with Virgil. His names are borrowed from Theocritus and Virgil, which
are improper to the scenes of his Pastorals. He introduces D