conclusively proves that he had anything but a nice ear for its rhythm. With all this collateral evidence against the probability of the corrector being Pope, we come to the evidence which should settle the question, the evidence of handwriting. There is no lack of material for forming an opinion on this point. Pope’s autograph MSS. are abundant, illustrating his hand at every period in his life. It is amazing to find Mitford asserting that his friends Ellis and Combe, at the British Museum, had no doubt about the hand of the corrector being the hand of Pope. Mr. Tovey candidly admits that, “if the best authorities at the Museum many years ago were positive that the handwriting was Pope’s, their successors at the present time are equally positive that it is not.” Such is the very decided opinion of Mr. Warner; such, also, as Mr. Tovey acknowledges, is the opinion of Professor Courthope, and such, we venture to think, will be the opinion of every one who will take the trouble to compare the hands. Mr. Tovey himself is plainly very uneasy, and indeed goes so far as to say that “it has all along been perplexing to me how the opinion that this was Pope’s handwriting could ever have been _confidently_” (the italics are his) “entertained”; and yet in his notes he follows Bell, and inserts these corrections with Pope’s initials. We search in vain among those who are known to have been on friendly terms with Thomson for a probable claimant. It could not, as his other stupid revisions of Thomson’s verses sufficiently show, have been Lyttleton. Mallet’s blank verse is conclusive against his having had any hand in the corrections. Collins and Hammond are out of the question. It is just possible, though hardly likely, that the corrector was Armstrong. He was on very intimate terms with Thomson. His own poem proves that he could sometimes write excellent blank verse, but the touch and rhythm of the corrections are, it must be admitted, not the touch and rhythm of Armstrong. What has long, therefore, been represented and circulated as an undisputed fact--namely, that Pope assisted Thomson in the revision of _The Seasons_--rests not, as all Thomson’s modern editors have supposed, on the traditions of the eighteenth century, and on the testimony of authenticated handwriting, but on a mere assumption of Mitford. That the volume in question really belonged to Thomson, and that the corrections are originals, hardly admits of doubt, though Mitford gives neither the pedigree nor the history of this most interesting literary relic. It is, of course, possible that the corrections are Thomson’s own, and that the differences in the handwriting are attributable to the fact that in some cases he was his own scribe, that in others he employed an amanuensis; but the intrinsic unlikeness of the corrections, made in the strange hand, to his characteristic style renders this improbable. In any case there is nothing to warrant the assumption that the corrector was Pope.