ABSTRACT
In his 'Life of Sir John Denham', Samuel Johnson famously stated that Coopers Hill 'had such reputation as to excite the common artifice by which envy degrades excellence'. Robert Arnold Aubin has recorded 315 'English hill-poems' between 1642, when Coopers Hill was first published, and 1884. 'Between 1650 and 1841', Aubin has pointed out, 'more than two hundred works in verse or prose either referred to or borrowed slightly from. Devoid of omissions, gaps, and discontinuities, the text of Cooper's Well does not have the makings of a 'fragment' in the manner of more famous contemporary works such as Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling. If Cooper's Hill, Surrey, was the vantage point from which the seventeenth-century poet had surveyed the surrounding landscape, giving rise to 'historical retrospection, or incidental meditation', Cooper's Well is both the parodist's 'Helicon' and the object of his voyeuristic gaze.
