A New Eighteenth-Century Juvenal Translator: William Popple's Satires VI and X

Abstract

William Popple (1700/1-1764), a descendant of Andrew Marvell's sister, was like his grandfather and namesake a goverment official of the higher echelons and an occasional writer and translator.1 He first published verse in 1726. Encouraged by Aaron Hill, he wrote two Cibberesque comedies which were performed on the London stage in the mid-1 730s. His career as a civil servant had begun in 1723, and in 1737 he transferred to the Board of Trade and Plantations. In 1745 he became Governor of the Bermudas, remaining there until shortly before his death, apart from an extended visit to England in 1751-4. He published a translation of Horace's ArsPoetica in 1753, and a verse satire called The Age ofDulness in 1757. The former appeared under his own name while the latter was improbably ascribed to 'a natural son of the late Mr Pope'. On his death Popple left behind him a number of unpublished works. They include further verse satires, a miniature epic on the history of the Jews, and a stage adaptation of Petronius' Ephesian Matron. The last is in the British Library, but a handsome folio preserved in the Bodleian Library contains the rest. MS Douce 201 is a leather-bound presentation volume in a uniform professional hand, a collection of Popple's poetical works transcribed at some unspecified date. Several of the items are explicitly attributed to him in ornamental title pages to individual works, and at one point, on the title page of The Age ofDulness, the date 1756 appears, forming a terminus a quo for the