Indeed, throughout _The Seasons_ Thomson’s indebtedness to his corrector is incalculable; many of the most felicitous touches are due to him. Now, who was this corrector? Let Mr. Tovey answer. “It has long been accepted as a fact among scholars that Pope assisted Thomson in the composition of _The Seasons_. Our original authority is, we suppose, Warton.” The truth is that our original authority for this statement is neither Warton nor any other writer of the eighteenth century, but simply the conjecture of Mitford--in other words, Mitford’s mere assumption that the handwriting of the corrector is the handwriting of Pope; and, if we are not mistaken,--for Mitford may have given earlier currency to it in some other place--the conjecture appeared for the first time in Mitford’s edition of Gray, published in 1814. In his copy of the volume, containing the MS. notes, he bolsters up his statement by two assertions and references: “That Pope saw some pieces of Thomson’s in manuscript is clear from a letter in Bowles’s _Supplement_, page 194” (an obvious misprint for 294). But on turning to the references all that we find is--it is in a letter dated February 1738/9--“I have yet seen but three acts of Mr. Thomson’s, but I am told, and believe by what I have seen that it excels in the pathetic”; the reference is plainly to Thomson’s tragedy, _Edward and Eleonora_. Again, Mitford writes: “On Thomson’s submitting his poems to Pope” (see Warton’s edition, vol. viii., page 340), and again we get no proof. All that Pope says is, “I am just taken up”--he is writing to Aaron Hill under date November 1732--“by Mr. Thomson in the perusal of a new poem he has brought me;” this new poem being almost certainly _Liberty_, in the composition of which Thomson was then engaged. So far from the tradition having any countenance from Warton, it is as certain as anything can be, that Warton knew nothing about it. In his _Essay on Pope_ he gives an elaborate account of _The Seasons_, and he has more than once referred to Pope and Thomson together; but he says not a word, either in this Essay or in his edition of Pope’s Works, about Pope having corrected Thomson’s poetry. If Pope assisted Thomson, to the extent indicated in these corrections, such an incident, considering the fame of Thomson and the fame of Pope, must have been known to some at least of the innumerable editors, biographers, and anecdotists between 1742 and 1814. It could hardly have escaped being recorded by Murdoch, Mallet, or Warburton, by Ruffhead, by Savage or Spence, by Theophilus Cibber or Johnson. It is incredible that such an interesting secret should have been kept either by Thomson himself or by Pope. Again, whoever the corrector was, he had a fine ear for blank verse, and must indeed have been a master of it. There is no proof that Pope ever wrote in blank verse; indeed, we have the express testimony of Lady Wortley Montagu that he never attempted it, and his Shakespeare