The last clause shows the carelessness with which this letter was written. It is evidently copied from what Mr. Pope had himself written; but then Mr. Pope's account of the matter is, that one brother was slain, and the other died, in the service of King Charles the First. To what Mr. Pope had said of his maternal grandfather, the writer of this letter adds, that he was of Burfit Hall in Yorkshire. "Burfit" is the country people's pronunciation of Birthwaite, an old seat of the Yorkshire Baronet family of Burdet. I would not say that he may not have been a temporary inhabitant of this house, but it can have been but a short tenancy by Mr. Turner, whose far more proper designation was that which Pope had given him, "of York," where he for the most part resided. The seventeen children is but a repetition of what Pope had himself told us, and which is supported by better evidence than the testimony of this anonymous writer. That he acquired a fortune by merchandise is doubtless true, though, probably, but a small one; but when he says that the elder Pope had been put to a merchant in Flanders, this is at variance with what we are told by a relation of the family (of whom immediately), that it was to Lisbon that he was sent for the purpose, and that there it was that he became a Roman Catholic. That he was a posthumous child is peculiar to this communication. I think I shall show it to be a little uncertain, supposing that his age at the time of his death is truly stated on his monument: of the brother studying and dying at Oxford, also peculiar to the letter, I have seen nothing to support or to disprove. This will be sufficient to show that there can be no good reason to attribute this letter to Pope himself, or to any person who had received information from him to be given to the world in this form; and, secondly, that in the points where this communication is at all at variance with what Mr. Pope had himself sanctioned, or professes to carry our information beyond what he had told us, its testimony is to be received, if at all, with great caution.