name with her story, he wound up his verses with the celebration of his devoted attachment to her. He laid the scene of her death abroad to account for English ignorance of the tragedy, and he endeavoured to authenticate the fable for posterity by a posthumous note which involved the assumption that the unfortunate lady of his letters was the same lady commemorated in his poem. The note which was designed to accredit the tale has answered the opposite purpose, and convicted him of a puerile deception, not the mere impulse of youthful vanity, but renewed on the brink of the grave, with a final sense of satisfaction in propping up and perpetuating the petty fraud. The supposition that the story was true has seduced Warton, Wakefield, and Roscoe into some weak critical fancies. Warton thinks the Elegy the most pathetic of Pope's writings, and says "that the cause of its excellence is that the occasion of it was real." Wakefield remarks that the text of the latest edition does not differ from the earliest, and conjectures that "the author's interest in the subject rendered the poem too affecting for his own perusal." Roscoe, to excuse the principles inculcated in the piece, alleges that it was "a spontaneous burst of indignation," and that "the first line demonstrates that Pope was no longer under the control of reason." Similar causes have dissimilar effects. Unfortunate ladies who are "no longer under the control of reason" are prone to stab or hang themselves. When Pope is "no longer under the control of reason" he sits down and writes an elegy which Roscoe says "is not exceeded in pathos and true poetry by any production of its author." Had the grief been as genuine as it was imaginary the apology is manifestly futile; for the man whose mind is sufficiently calm to permit him to sing his woes in polished verse, must have passed beyond the stage when he is incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. The plea might have justified the sentiments in a drama where the speaker was represented as pouring out his feelings while the calamity was fresh, but in an elegy the poet embodies his own opinions at the time of composition, and the bad morality becomes deliberate doctrine.