Dr. Johnson, however, and Joseph Warton, for reasons not stated,
have placed his birth on the 22d. To this statement, as opposed to
that which comes from the personal friends of Pope, little
attention is due. Ruffhead and Spence, upon such questions, must
always be of higher authority than Johnson and Warton, and _a
fortiori_ than Bowles. But it ought not to be concealed, though
hitherto unnoticed by any person, that some doubt after all remains
whether any of the biographers is right. An anonymous writer,
contemporary with Pope, and evidently familiar with his personal
history, declares that he was born on the 8th of June; and he
connects it with an event that, having a public and a partisan
interest, (the birth of that Prince of Wales, who was known
twenty-seven years afterwards as the Pretender,) would serve to
check his own recollections, and give them a collateral voucher. It
is true he wrote for an ill-natured purpose; but no purpose
whatever could have been promoted by falsifying this particular
date. What is still more noticeable, however, Pope himself puts a
most emphatic negative upon all these statements. In a pathetic
letter to a friend, when his attention could not have been
wandering, for he is expressly insisting upon a sentiment which
will find an echo in many a human heart, viz., that a birthday,
though from habit usually celebrated as a festal day, too often is
secretly a memorial of disappointment, and an anniversary of
sorrowful meaning, he speaks of the very day on which he is then
writing as his own birthday; and indeed what else could give any
propriety to the passage? Now the date of this letter is January 1,
1733. Surely Pope knew his own birthday better than those who have
adopted a random rumor without investigation.
But, whilst we are upon this subject, we must caution the readers
of Pope against too much reliance upon the chronological accuracy
of his editors. _All_ are scandalously careless; and generally
they are faithless. Many allusions are left unnoticed, which a very
little research would have illustrated; many facts are omitted,
even yet recoverable, which are essential to the just appreciation
of Pope's satirical blows; and dates are constantly misstated. Mr.
Roscoe is the most careful of Pope's editors; but even he is often
wrong. For instance, he has taken the trouble to write a note upon
Pope's humorous report to Lord Burlington of his Oxford journey on
horseback with Lintot; and this note involves a sheer
impossibility. The letter is undated, except as to the month; and
Mr. Roscoe directs the reader to supply 1714 as the true date,
which is a gross anachronism. For a ludicrous anecdote is there put
into Lintot's mouth, representing some angry critic, who had been
turning over Pope's Homer, with frequent _pshaws_, as having
been propitiated, by Mr. Lintot's dinner, into a gentler feeling
towards Pope, and, finally, by the mere effect of good cheer,
without an effort on the publisher's part, as coming to a
confession, that what he ate and what he had been reading were
equally excellent. But in the year 1714, _no part_ of Pope's
Homer was printed; June, 1715, was the month in which even the
subscribers first received the four earliest books of the Iliad;
and the public generally not until July. This we notice by way of
specimen; in itself, or as an error of mere negligence, it would be
of little importance; but it is a case to which Mr. Roscoe has
expressly applied his own conjectural skill, and solicited the
attention of his reader. We may judge, therefore, of his accuracy
in other cases which he did not think worthy of examination.
There is another instance, presenting itself in every page, of
ignorance concurring with laziness, on the part of all Pope's
editors, and with the effect not so properly of misleading as of
perplexing the general reader. Until Lord Macclesfield's bill for
altering the style in the very middle of the eighteenth century,
six years, therefore, after the death of Pope, there was a custom,
arising from the collision between the civil and ecclesiastical
year, of dating the whole period that lies between December 31st
and March 25th, (both days _exclusively,_) as belonging
indifferently to the past or the current year. This peculiarity had
nothing to do with the old and new style, but was, we believe,
redressed by the same act of Parliament. Now in Pope's time it was
absolutely necessary that a man should use this double date,
because else he was liable to be seriously misunderstood. For
instance, it was then always said that Charles I had suffered on
the 30th of January 1648/9, and why? Because, had the historian
fixed the date to what it really was, 1649, in that case all those
(a very numerous class) who supposed the year 1649 to commence on
Ladyday, or March 25, would have understood him to mean that this
event happened in what we _now_ call 1650, for not until 1650
was there any January which _they_ would have acknowledged as
belonging to 1649, since _they_ added to the year 1648 all the
days from January 1 to March 24. On the other hand, if he had said
simply that Charles suffered in 1648, he would have been truly
understood by the class we have just mentioned; but by another
class, who began the year from the 1st of January, he would have
been understood to mean what we _now_ mean by the year 1648.
There would have been a sheer difference, not of one, as the reader
might think at first sight, but of _two_ entire years in the
chronology of the two parties; which difference, and all
possibility of doubt, is met and remedied by the fractional date
1648/1649 for that date says in effect it was 1648 to you who do
not open the new year till Ladyday; it was 1649 to you who open it
from January 1. Thus much to explain the real sense of the case,
and it follows from this explanation, that no part of the year ever
_can_ have the fractional or double date except the interval
from January 1 to March 24 inclusively. And hence arises a
practical inference, viz, that the very same reason, and no other,
which formerly enjoined the use of the compound or fractional date,
viz, the prevention of a capital ambiguity or dilemma, now enjoins
its omission. For in our day, when the double opening of the year
is abolished, what sense is there in perplexing a reader by using a
fraction which offers him a choice without directing him how to
choose? In fact, it is the _denominator_ of the fraction, if
one may so style the lower figure, which expresses to a modern eye
the true year. Yet the editors of Pope, as well as many other
writers, have confused their readers by this double date; and why?
Simply because they were confused themselves. (period omitted
in original; but there is a double space following, suggesting one
should have been there) Many errors in literature of large extent
have arisen from this confusion. Thus it was said properly enough
in the contemporary accounts, for instance, in Lord Monmouth's
Memoirs that Queen Elizabeth died on the last day of the year 1602,
for she died on the 24th of March, and by a careful writer this
event would have been dated as March 24, 1602/1603. But many
writers, misled by the phrase above cited, have asserted that James
I. was proclaimed on the 1st of January, 1603. Heber, Bishop of
Calcutta, again, has ruined the entire chronology of the Life of
Jeremy Taylor, and unconsciously vitiated the facts, by not
understanding this fractional date. Mr Roscoe even too often leaves
his readers to collect the true year as they can. Thus, e. g. at p.
509, of his Life, he quotes from Pope's letter to Warburton, in
great vexation for the surreptitious publication of his letters in
Ireland, under date of February 4, 174-0/1. But why not have
printed it intelligibly as 1741? Incidents there are in most men's
lives, which are susceptible of a totally different moral value,
according as the are dated in one year or another That might be a
kind and honorable liberality in 1740, which would be a fraud upon
creditors in 1741. Exile to a distance of ten miles from London in
January, 1744 might argue, that a man was a turbulent citizen, and
suspected of treason, whilst the same exile in January, 1745, would
simply argue that, as a Papist, he had been included amongst his
whole body in a general measure of precaution to meet the public
dangers of that year. This explanation we have thought it right to
make both for its extensive application to all editions of Pope,
and on account of the serious blunders which have arisen from the
case when ill understood, and because, in a work upon education,
written jointly by Messrs Lant Carpenter and Shephard though
generally men of ability and learning, this whole point is
erroneously explained.