[Footnote 7: Pope was not justified in his boast. He dropped the practice of fulsome dedications, but he made the most of his distinguished friends in the body of his pieces, and though no "names of great patrons" are given in this preface, he could not abstain from announcing in the final sentence how much they had countenanced him. This, moreover, was to proclaim the "recommendations" he repudiated, and in every issue of his works the preface, which contained the inconsistency, was followed in addition by a series of Recommendatory Poems.] [Footnote 8: The passage in inverted commas was first added in 1736.] [Footnote 9: One of Pope's favourite topics is contempt for his own poetry. For this, if it had been real, he would deserve no commendation; and in this he was certainly not sincere, for his value of himself was sufficiently observed; and of what could he be proud but of his poetry? He writes, he says, when "he has just nothing else to do;" yet Swift complains that he was never at leisure for conversation, because he "had always some poetical scheme in his head." It was punctually required that his writing-box should be set upon his bed before he rose; and Lord Oxford's domestic related that in the dreadful winter of 1740, she was called from her bed by him four times in one night to supply him with paper lest he should lose a thought.--DR. JOHNSON.] [Footnote 10: For the next sentence the manuscript has this passage: "But I fear it is far otherwise with modern poets. We must bring our wit to the press, as gardeners do their flowers to the market, which if they cannot vend in the morning are sure to die before night. Were we animated by the same noble ambition, and ready to prosecute it with equal ardour, our languages are not only confined to a narrow extent of country, but are in a perpetual flux, not so much as fixed by an acknowledged grammar, while theirs were such as time and fate conspired to make universal and everlasting."] [Footnote 11: In place of the remainder of the sentence he had written in the manuscript, "is but to live twenty years longer than Quarles, or Withers, or Dennis." The doctrine of Pope was unworthy the countryman of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. The first three had not been "thrown aside at the end of one age," and no one who was capable of comprehending the last could seriously believe that his reputation would be ephemeral. The hypothesis, that the writers in a dead tongue can alone secure a worthy audience, is altogether chimerical. The literature of living languages has the ascendancy, and Shakespeare is more read, and better appreciated, than Æschylus and Sophocles.] [Footnote 12: I have frequently heard Dr. Young speak with great disapprobation of the doctrine contained in this passage, with a view to which he wrote his discourse on Original Composition.--WARTON.