ABSTRACT
‘Verses design’d to be prefix’d to Mr. Lintott’s Miscellany’ was first published on 20 May 1712. The period of composition of the ‘Verses’ can be established with some specificity. On 12 November 1711, Pope wrote to Cromwell: ‘Pray assure Mr Gay of my Service. I shou’d be glad to see the Verses to Lintott which you mention, for methinks something very odly agreable may be produc’d from that Subject’ (Corr., I.136). Six weeks later, on 21 December, Pope wrote again to Cromwell: ‘His [Gay’s] Verses to Lintot have put a Whim in[to] my head, which you are like to be troubled with in the opposite p[age]. Take it as you find it, the Production of half an hour, to[ther] Morning’ (Corr., I.138–9). Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (1712) contained poems addressed to Lintot by both Gay and Pope, each offering a teasing commendation of the project. Both are anonymous, and neither is ‘prefix’d’ to the volume: Gay’s ‘ON A Miscellany of Poems. To BERNARD LINTOTT’ appears at pp. 168–74 and Pope’s ‘Verses design’d to be prefix’d to Mr. Lintott’s Miscellany’ follows it at pp. 174–5. McLaverty (2001: 16) suggests that Lintot probably considered the two poems ‘too undignified’ to act in a prefatory capacity and that he ‘sandwiched’ them in the middle. Together they form a something of a bridge between the more serious first half of the volume and its more satirical second part. The ‘Verses’ were the sixth of Pope’s seven certain contributions (for further discussion of the extent of Pope’s role in the publication of Miscellaneous Poems see Headnote to ‘The First Book of Statius his Thebais’). It is the only one for which no payment from Lintot is recorded (McLaverty 2001: 17), so it remains possible that it was inserted without Lintot’s knowledge of Pope’s authorship. The version of the poem printed by Edmund Curll, and attributed to Pope – ‘Written, (as he says) by Mr. Pope’ – in his Court Poems in Two Parts Compleat (1719), mischievously alters Pope’s reference to Thomas Rawlinson at line 10 into a hit at ‘JOHNNY GAY’ – a gesture typical of Curll’s fencing with Pope.
