attracting the attention of the rest of the world,--the breaking up of the long and terrible winter, the deluge of melting snow, the chilling atmosphere, the dreary prospect,--received a passing notice from him. He saw nothing except the moonshine, despite its watery gleam, and thought of nothing except the spirits in the stars. In the collection of 1735 there appeared a letter to Digby, which is dated September 10, 1724, and is compounded from two letters, to Caryll of November 23 and December 25, 1725. In the letter of November 23, Pope says to Caryll, "My time has been spent in a trembling attendance upon death, which has at last seized one of our family,--my poor old nurse." This sentence was inserted in the letter to Digby, but as the nurse did not die till November 5, 1725, the information could not have been communicated to him in September, 1724. The motive of the poet in altering the dates of his letters when he assigned a fanciful address to them was probably to adapt the chronology to the circumstances of his new _dramatis personæ_. His earliest letter to Edward Blount is dated August, 1714, and when he transferred the moonlight reverie from 1713 to 1716, he may have been influenced by the consideration that in the former year his correspondence with Blount had not commenced. The letter to Caryll of November 23, and the letter to Digby of September 10, both open with the same compliment on their return from the Continent, and the date may have been altered from 1725 to 1724 to make it harmonise with Digby's travels abroad. In remedying one inconsistency, Pope fell into another. A new use was found for the letter in the quarto of 1737. Arbuthnot died in February, 1735, at the very time when there is reason to suppose that the poet printed the P. T. collection. The final letter in the volume is from the Doctor, and it was apparently added at the last moment. It was then too late to be thinking of a re-distribution of the materials, and the idea was not executed, or perhaps conceived till 1737, when the address, which had been changed from Caryll to Digby, was once more changed from Digby to Arbuthnot. In the interval Pope appears to have detected the anachronism. He retained the day of the month, but struck out the year. He preserved the announcement, "death has seized one of our family," but dropped the words "my poor old nurse." Her death nevertheless could alone have been meant; for in the letters to Caryll, as in the letter to Digby, several contemporaneous particulars are mentioned, which being repeated in the letter to Arbuthnot, limit its date to the period of the poor old nurse's decease. In both cases Pope's time had been spent in attending upon the dying patient, in both cases he and his mother had been ill together, in both cases these incidents had hindered his writing, in both cases he had been questioned respecting the effect produced upon his mind by the attacks upon his