Pope's satire. entitled '1738[1];' so that England had at once its Juvenal and Horace[2] as poetical monitors. The Reverend Dr. Douglas, now Bishop of Salisbury, to whom I am indebted for some obliging communications, was then a student at Oxford, and remembers well the effect which London produced. Every body was delighted with it; and there being no name to it, the first buz of the literary circles was 'here is an unknown poet, greater even than Pope.' And it is recorded in the Gentleman's Magazine of that year[3], that it 'got to the second edition in the course of a week.'
One of the warmest patrons of this poem on its first appearance was General Oglethorpe, whose 'strong benevolence of soul[4],' was unabated during the course of a very
- ↑ The first dialogue was registered at Stationers' Hall, 12th May, 1738, under the title One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight. The second dialogue was registered 17th July, 1738, as One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, Dialogue 2. Elwin's Pope. iii. 455. David Hume was in London this spring, finding a publisher for his first work, A Treatise of Human Nature. J. H. Burton's Hume, i. 66.
- ↑ Pope had published Imitations of Horace.
- ↑ P. 269. Boswell. 'Short extracts from London, a Poem, become remarkable for having got to the second edition in the space of a week.' Gent. Mag. viii. 269. The price of the poem was one shilling. Pope's satire, though sold at the same price, was longer in reaching its second edition (Ib. p. 280).
- ↑ 'General Oglethorpe, died 1785, earned commemoration in Pope's gallery of worthies by his Jacobite politics. He was, however, a re-'One driven by strong benevolence of soul
Shall fly, like Oglethorpe, from pole to pole.'
Pope's Imitations of Horace, ii. 2. 276.
solence;' the witnesses against him were of the lowest character, and his judge had shewn himself as ignorant as he was brutal. Sinclair had been drinking in a brothel, and Savage asserted that he had stabbed him 'by the necessity of self defence' (Ib. p. 1 17). It is, however, not unlikely that Wales was suggested to Johnson as Thales's retreat by Swift's lines on Steele, in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (v. 181), published only three years before London:—
And flourished by imputed wit.
From perils of a hundred jails
Withdrew to starve and die in Wales.'
