IN the debates over whether Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, influenced Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, considerable attention has been given to Bolingbroke’s ‘Letter to Mr Pope’, which was used to preface the ‘Letters or essays addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq.’ in the third volume of Bolingbroke’s collected Works (1754).1 Particular disagreement has surrounded the question of whether Bolingbroke was writing in response to a specific work by Pope and whether he used the phrase ‘ethic epistles’, which occurs near the beginning of the letter, to refer to such a work.2 A close reading of the letter reveals that Bolingbroke did have a specific work in mind and that this was An Essay on Man. The first scholar to address the point was William Roscoe in 1824, who argued that ‘by the Ethic Epistles it is probable Lord Bolingbroke here meant some of those which are printed as the Moral Essays’, meaning the Epistle to Burlington, the Epistle to Barthurst, the Epistle to Cobham, and the Epistle to a Lady.3 The next scholar to address the point was Walter Sichel in 1902, who quoted the letter in relation to the Essay, but neglected to analyse it in detail.4 Maynard Mack, writing in his influential edition of the Essay in 1950, largely avoided the point, implying in a footnote that Bolingbroke’s comments in the letter pertained to the Essay, but otherwise referring to the letter only to argue that Bolingbroke began work on his philosophical essays after Pope had written much of the Essay.5 He was followed in this by G. W. Atkins and A. D. Nuttall, who endorsed Mack’s use of the letter to date Bolingbroke’s essays, but did not otherwise discuss the letter.6 The most popular approach has been to quote the letter in relation to the Essay, but without saying whether Bolingbroke was actually discussing the Essay.7 The only scholars who have positively asserted that Bolingbroke was referring to the Essay are D. G. James, who did so only in passing, and R. L. Brett, who insisted that Bolingbroke used the phrase ‘ethic epistles’ to refer both to the Essay on Man and to the Moral Essays.8 But the fixation of critics on the phrase ‘ethic epistles’ is misleading. The phrase was coined by Pope to refer to a projected scheme of philosophical poetry, which was to include An Essay on Man as its first book and the Moral Essays as its second. Bolingbroke’s use of the phrase, if taken in isolation, could refer to the whole of this scheme or to a part of it. But the phrase is in fact only one of several references to the Essay in Bolingbroke’s letter and these other references are more useful in identifying the Essay as the work under discussion.9