However, the separate publication of the two poems in a quarto of 1720 is a wholly unrecorded fact, and important to bibliographers. _The Peasant in Search of his Heifer_ is added apparently as an after-thought, to fill up the sheet. _An Impossible Thing_ opens with these lines: To thee, Dear Dick, this Tale I send, Both as a Critick and a Friend. I tell it with some Variation (Not altogether a Translation) From _La Fontaine_; an Author, _Dick_, Whose Muse would touch thee to the quick. The Subject is of that same kind To which thy Heart seems most inclin'd. How Verse may alter it, God knows; Thou lov'st it well, I'm sure, in Prose. So without Preface, or Pretence, To hold thee longer in Suspense, I shall proceed, as I am able, To the Recital of my Fable. He does proceed, not without considerable indelicacy, but in excellent running verse. The "Dick" who was to enjoy it I conjecture--and in this Mr. Austin Dobson confirmed me--to have been Richard Shelton, who is connected with Prior's _Alma and A Case Stated_. Prior and Congreve have so much in common that it is tantalizing not to be able to persuade them to throw light upon one another; they were haunting the same coffee-houses when Swift was writing to Stella in 1710. The discovery, after 200 years, of a unique copy of an unsuspected separate publication by Congreve confirms a suspicion of mine that other such pamphlets may exist. The earliest attempt at a bibliography was made by Giles Jacob, evidently under the poet's own eye, in 1720. Jacob gives a list of poems, with which "the ingenious Mr. Congreve, besides his excellent Dramatick Works, has oblig'd the Publick," but he adds no dates. Of these poems the first is _An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles Lord Halifax_, and the six next are odes of each of which we possess the text in folio form. But of the _Epistle to Halifax_ no separate edition is known, and it appears first in the octavo of 1710. But I cannot help suspecting that Giles Jacob possessed, or could refer to, a folio sheet of (probably) 1694, the year in which Halifax, to reward Congreve for the dedication of _The Double Dealer_, is supposed to have appointed him a Commissioner for licensing hackney coaches. But I have shown how confused is all the evidence with regard to Congreve's offices, which roused Thackeray to such superfluous indignation. Perhaps the shilly-shallying of Charles Montague had something to do with the suppression of an original folio of the _Epistle_, if it ever existed. In any case, a single sheet with, or more likely without, the signature of Mr. Congreve is worth looking out for.