An Unrecorded Critical Response to Pope's Imitations of Horace by William Popple, c. 1755

Abstract

Bodleian MS Douce 201, one of four dispersed folio volumes which contain professional scribal copies of the later literary works of William Popple (1700–1764) in a form evidently intended for the printer, contains three extensive dialogues ‘between a certain … Doctor of D––y and A Critic’. The first and last of these discussions, none of which were printed in Popple's time, or have been printed since, are among the earliest critical works to address Alexander Pope's Imitations of Horace (first published 1733–8). They focus on Pope's versions of Horace's Satires 2.1 and 2.2 respectively, and their primary target is the editorial presentation of these texts by William Warburton in his edition of Pope's Works, 1751. They are closely related to Popple's own complete sequence of Horatian imitations (also largely unprinted) of the 1750s.