t. Prosaic commentators are always asking, Who is meant by a
poet, as though a poem were a legal document. It may be interesting, for
various purposes, to know who was in the writer's mind, or what fact
suggested the general picture. But we have no right to look outside the
poem itself, or to infer anything not within the four corners of the
statement. It matters not for such purposes whether there was, or was
not, any real person corresponding to Sir Balaam, to whom his wife said,
when he was enriched by Cornish wreckers, "live like yourself,"

When lo! two puddings smoked upon the board,

in place of the previous one on Sabbath days. Nor does it even matter
whether Atticus meant Addison, or Sappho Lady Mary. The satire is
equally good, whether its objects are mere names or realities.

But the moral question is quite distinct. In that case we must ask
whether Pope used words calculated or intended to fix an imputation upon
particular people. Whether he did it in prose or verse, the offence was
the same. In many cases he gives real names, and in many others gives
unmistakable indications, which must have fixed his satire to particular
people. If he had written Addison for Atticus (as he did at first), or
Lady Mary for Sappho, or Halifax for Bufo, the insinuation could not
have been clearer. His attempt to evade his responsibility was a mere
equivocation--a device which he seems to have preferred to direct lying.
The character of Bufo might be equally suitable to others; but no
reasonable man could doubt that every one would fix it upon Halifax. In
some cases--possibly in that of Chandos--he may have thought that his
language was too general to apply, and occasionally it seems that he
sometimes tried to evade consequences by adding some inconsistent
characteristic to his portraits.

I say this, because I am here forced to notice the worst of all the
imputations upon Pope's character. The epistle on the characters of
women now includes the famous lines on Atossa, which did not appear till
after Pope's death.[27] They were (in 1746) at once applied to the
famous Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough; and a story immediately became
current that the duchess had paid Pope 1000_l._ to suppress them, but
that he preserved them, with a view to their ultimate publication. This
story was repeated by Warton and by Walpole; it has been accepted by Mr.
Carruthers, who suggests, by way of palliation, that Pope was desirous
at the time