A 'tender Correspondence': Pope and The Spectator

Abstract

Some time around 1710 Pope sent his female friend, Miss Blount, a small present, a book: 'the Works of Voiture'. Vincent de Voiture, whose life (1598 1648) occupied the first half of the seventeenth century, was a poet, but he was celebrated more particularly as the author of correspondence (his Lettres were published posthumously in 1650), which distilled the moral and stylistic qualities of the aristocratic French culture of his age. Pope accompanied his gift to Martha Blount with a letter, or more properly an 'Epistle' as it was called in its title when it was published in Lintot's Miscellany in 1712. The root meaning of 'epistle' is clear in its origin in the Greek verb 'stellein', to send, and the prefix 'epi', on the occasion of. An epistle was a missive for a particular occasion, the little occasion in this case being the present of the book. The concept of the epistle links the written word to the world of living, and this is underlined in Pope's verse epistle by his making his first theme the extent to which Voiture's life was expressed in his text: ' . . .all the Writer lives in ev'ry Line'.1