TY - JOUR
AU - Swidzinski, Joshua
AB - Abstract Scholarly accounts of Pope’s Dunciad have tended to dismiss James Douglas as a minor figure in the poem, a London physician whose professional embarrassment Pope happened to mock in passing. In contrast, this article makes a case for Douglas’s unacknowledged importance as a critic, patron, and Horatian scholar whose literary activities were influential enough to elicit a sustained satirical assault from Pope. I base this argument on the discovery of a new document, the manuscript of Douglas’s A Critical Dissertation on the First Ode of Horace, to which Pope cryptically alludes in The Dunciad but which until now has been presumed lost, and I present evidence of the manuscript’s circulation and influence among readers and translators of Horace, including Pope and members of his circle. The dissertation, I argue, provides the context necessary to understand the motivation, extent, and significance of Pope’s attacks on Douglas in The Dunciad. I contend that the dissertation brought Douglas into direct conflict with Pope due to its substance—it proposes a radical emendation to Horace’s first ode that would displace the poet from literary supremacy and instead substitute his patron—as well as its invocation of Pope’s own verse and reputation to advance this view. This article demonstrates that Douglas and his treatise exemplified new habits of scholarship and patronage that Pope found pernicious and to which The Dunciad directly responds. Me doctarum ederae praemia frontium Dîs miscent superis.  Te doctarum ederae praemia frontium Dîs miscent superis.  Be mine the Ivy, fair Reward, Which blissful crowns th’ immortal Bard.  An Ivy-wreath, fair Learning’s Prize, Raises Maecenas to the Skies.    Horace, Odes 1.1.29-301    Horace, Odes 1.1.29–302  Me doctarum ederae praemia frontium Dîs miscent superis.  Te doctarum ederae praemia frontium Dîs miscent superis.  Be mine the Ivy, fair Reward, Which blissful crowns th’ immortal Bard.  An Ivy-wreath, fair Learning’s Prize, Raises Maecenas to the Skies.    Horace, Odes 1.1.29-301    Horace, Odes 1.1.29–302  Me doctarum ederae praemia frontium Dîs miscent superis.  Te doctarum ederae praemia frontium Dîs miscent superis.  Be mine the Ivy, fair Reward, Which blissful crowns th’ immortal Bard.  An Ivy-wreath, fair Learning’s Prize, Raises Maecenas to the Skies.    Horace, Odes 1.1.29-301    Horace, Odes 1.1.29–302  Me doctarum ederae praemia frontium Dîs miscent superis.  Te doctarum ederae praemia frontium Dîs miscent superis.  Be mine the Ivy, fair Reward, Which blissful crowns th’ immortal Bard.  An Ivy-wreath, fair Learning’s Prize, Raises Maecenas to the Skies.    Horace, Odes 1.1.29-301    Horace, Odes 1.1.29–302  James Douglas (c.1675–1742) was a well-respected man-midwife and anatomist in Hanoverian London. A Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, he was appointed Physician Extraordinary to Queen Caroline in 1727 and granted a pension by George II in 1734. Among students of anatomy, he is known, if at all, as the discoverer of a fold in the peritoneum, now often called the pouch of Douglas. Among students of literary history, Douglas is known, if at all, for his unfortunate involvement in a hoax perpetrated by Mary Toft, who claimed in 1726 to have given birth to ‘at least seventeen rabbits and other curious progeny’.3 The tale of Toft’s monstrous births attracted a great deal of attention in London and Douglas was one of the physicians brought in to assess the case. Although ultimately sceptical of Toft and instrumental in forcing her confession, Douglas nonetheless appears to have been briefly and publicly deceived by her, which was reason enough for the satirists—including, most notably, Alexander Pope—to tar Douglas as a credulous quack.4 Pope’s mockery of Douglas in this instance has coloured interpretation of Douglas’s later appearance in The New Dunciad (1742) and The Dunciad in Four Books (1743). Namely, discussions of Douglas’s presence in The Dunciad tend to presume that Pope’s satirical interest in Douglas had not changed over time and that Douglas’s dunce-hood was predicated on his activities as a man-midwife alone.5 This presumption no doubt persists because it accords with the poem, up to a point. In the Annius and Mummius episode, the scatological nadir of Book IV, Douglas is made to serve as man-midwife at the excremental ‘second birth’ of Annius’s swallowed coins, a scene which undoubtedly alludes to the Mary Toft affair.6 However, this presumption does little to explain Pope’s other, quite disparate references to Douglas in Book IV. Scholars have been stymied by Pope’s decision to attach to this scatological passage a seemingly laudatory footnote about Douglas’s library, in which he describes Douglas as ‘A Physician of great Learning and no less Taste; above all curious in what related to Horace, of whom he collected every Edition, Translation, and Comment, to the number of several hundred volumes’ (Dunciad, 4.394n).7 Although Valerie Rumbold suggests that the footnote may have a hint of irony to it (since ‘the exhaustiveness of Douglas’s collection…may have associated him in Pope’s view with the lust for objects displayed by the collectors of antiquities’), this still leaves unexplained what Douglas’s library has to do with his man-midwifery.8 Indeed, the very mention of the library asks us to consider the possibility that Pope’s satirical interest in Douglas was not limited to the doctor’s profession alone. A second, more cryptic allusion to Douglas complicates the case further. Earlier in Book IV, during the episode satirizing education, Pope returns to one of his favourite targets, the quibbling of pedants over mere words: 'Tis true, on Words is still our whole debate, Disputes of Me or Te, of aut or at, To sound or sink in cano, O or A, Or give up Cicero to C or K. … of Me or Te,] It was a serious dispute, about which the learned were much divided, and some treatises written: Had it been about Meum or Tuum it could not be more contested, than whether at the end of the first Ode of Horace, to read, Me doctarum hederae praemia frontium, or, Te doctarum hederae (Dunciad, 4.219–222, 220n)9 At first glance, this academic dispute about the correct reading of Horace’s ode seems to have little to do with Douglas. However, as James Sutherland discovered while preparing the Twickenham edition of the poem, a copy of The New Dunciad in the Victoria and Albert Museum includes, next to this footnote, an illuminating marginal gloss: ‘Dr. Douglas was preparing a Treatise on this Subject, but was prevented by his Death’.10 Pope’s allusion to a lost work by Douglas presents the doctor in yet another guise—this time, as something of a critic. Taken together, Douglas’s recurrence (this passage occurs nearly two hundred lines earlier than the episode that explicitly names and mocks him) and the variety of roles ascribed to him (man-midwife, book collector, and critic) raise the possibility that Douglas was a more prominent figure for Pope than scholars have yet acknowledged. Yet assessing the exact nature of Pope’s interest in Douglas has proven difficult, due in no small part to the fact that Pope’s editors, following Sutherland, have given up the treatise referred to in the marginal gloss as lost.11 As a result, for readers of The Dunciad, Douglas remains largely a cipher, one whose various roles in Book IV have yet to be reconciled in a way that makes sense of Pope’s choice to target a man with whom he apparently had no known contact or conflict. This article aims to shed light on Douglas’s unacknowledged importance as a literary critic, patron, and Horatian scholar, and to argue that Douglas’s far-reaching influence, which brought him into direct conflict with Pope, underlies and illuminates his role in The Dunciad. My chief piece of evidence is the supposedly lost treatise—which does in fact exist and was partially printed c.1741–1742, but which has eluded Pope’s editors due to a confluence of bibliographical confusion and textual imperfection (which I will discuss shortly). In this treatise, Douglas argues that an instance of the word ‘me’ (me) in Horace’s dedicatory ode to his patron Maecenas ought to be emended to ‘te’ (you). This alteration of a single letter has a significant effect on the meaning of Horace’s ode, for it bestows onto the patron (rather than claiming for the poet) the ivy crown associated with the highest poetic accomplishments. Although Douglas was not the originator of this proposed emendation (he first encountered it in a digressive footnote in Francis Hare’s Scripture Vindicated [1721] and, throughout his treatise, styles himself only as Hare’s expositor), he nonetheless became its champion. During the 1730s and until his death in 1742, Douglas, I argue, directed his energies as book collector, patron, and amateur critic to disseminate and gain acceptance for the proposed emendation among London literati. He proselytized not only by writing and circulating his treatise in manuscript but also by using his status as a book collector to patronize authors eager to propagate this emendation of Horace on his behalf. Although Douglas’s treatise would go unpublished, the views espoused in it had a significant impact on the world of Horatian scholarship and the London literary sphere, including members of Pope’s circle. I argue that Pope’s awareness of particular aspects of the treatise—its scholarly approach, its view of poetry and patronage, and above all its invocation of Pope’s verse to make a case that Pope would have found pernicious—explains not only the ire with which Pope treats Douglas in The Dunciad but also illuminates Douglas’s satirical function within the poem. In short, the recovered treatise offers the points of reference necessary to read Pope’s seemingly scattershot attacks on Douglas as, rather, a sustained and coherent criticism levelled at a false understanding of poetry’s relationship with patronage and criticism. Furthermore, beyond Douglas’s relationship to specific passages of The Dunciad, the circulation of his treatise and the patronage network associated with his library expand our knowledge of literary critical practices in early eighteenth-century England. Douglas’s ability to parlay the wealth and professional contacts he acquired as a man-midwife into a position of literary authority and a radical re-interpretation of Horace’s poetry emblematizes the rapidly shifting critical landscape that Pope viewed as a form of literary anarchy and which he sought to expose and satirize in his poem. Pace Sutherland’s observation that ‘[t]he art which Pope lavished upon this poem has too often been obscured by an unnecessary concern for his victims’, an investigation of Douglas’s literary activities illuminates both the specific philological disputes and the larger critical upheavals that motivated Pope’s satirical artistry in The Dunciad.12 I will use the remainder of this section to discuss the current state of the treatise before turning to its literary influence and its role in The Dunciad. Douglas’s treatise exists in two states: (i) a unique and seemingly complete rough-copy manuscript held in the University of Glasgow Library Special Collections; and (ii) an incomplete printed pamphlet, by all appearances the result of an abortive print run, which has been catalogued under a misleading title. MS Hunter 634 (S.8.13), a bound folio volume of 349 sheets, is one of a number of manuscripts held in the University of Glasgow Library Special Collections that contain writings by Douglas about Horace. This untitled volume, labelled only ‘Quintus Horatius Flaccus’ in the library’s catalogue, includes the rough copy of a work by Douglas entitled ‘A critical Dissertation on the first ode of Horace particularly on the 29. verse’ (156r–227v). This dissertation is written in at least four hands: those of Douglas, his son I. J. Douglas, and his amanuenses Samuel Boyse and David Watson.13 Although the draft is rough—there are numerous deletions, emendations, and additions pinned into the manuscript—it is nonetheless closely consistent with the version that was partially printed. There exist three known copies of a 68-page printed portion of the treatise (analogous to leaves 159r–205r in the manuscript); this pamphlet lacks a title page and breaks off abruptly on its final leaf, leaving approximately forty per cent of the manuscript unprinted. In the English Short Title Catalogue (where it is listed as ESTC T35558), this imperfect work has been assigned to Douglas under a drop-head title and a conjectural date as The First Ode of Horace, Copied From a MS. in my Collection of the Editions of his Works… (London?, 1742?).14 This work closely follows the manuscript, with the one addition of an English translation of Horace’s first ode, presumably by Douglas.To this list of states must be added ii.b. a variant of (ii), held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.15 This instance of the text has no entry in the ESTC and (as far as I can tell) has not been consulted since the mid-nineteenth century when it passed into the hands of Alexander Dyce. This variant is identical to (ii) with the one significant addition that it still possesses its title page, which identifies the work as A Critical Dissertation on the First Ode of Horace; Particularly on the Twenty Ninth Verse (London, 1741).16 The lack of a printer’s or bookseller’s name suggests that these sheets were privately printed at Douglas’s expense.17 A marginal inscription on the back flyleaf written in an eighteenth-century hand corroborates this view, remarking of the textual interruption that ‘No more was printed off, by reason of the Doctor’s death’ on 2 April 1742.Taken together, the existing evidence suggests that between late 1741 and early 1742, Douglas contracted to print the Critical Dissertation at his own expense, that a small number of sheets were printed, but that the process was interrupted by his decease. There is no evidence to suggest that the printed sheets were disseminated or their existence widely known. As a result, we must turn our attention to the manuscript—its origins, its circulation, and finally its literary content—in order to understand fully Douglas’s place in The Dunciad and his influence as a critical figure. I. DOUGLAS AS PATRON AND CRITIC Douglas’s library was well known among the London literati. Pope’s associate William King, principal of St Mary Hall, relates that I made an acquaintance with this gentleman on purpose that I might have a sight of his curious library (if it might be called a library) which was a large room full of all the editions of Horace which had ever been published, as well as the several translations of that author into the modern languages. If there were any other books in this room, as there were a small number, they were only there for the sake of Horace, and were on no other account valuable to the possessor but because they contained some parts of Horace.18 King’s derision is apparent. Characterizing Douglas as ‘Horace-mad’, he describes the library as if it were the symptom of a mania.19 Yet Douglas seems to have regarded his library as an important contribution to the world of Horatian scholarship, for he commissioned the publication of a Catalogus Editionum Quinti Horatii Flacci, Ab ann. 1476. ad ann. 1739. Quae in Bibliotheca Jacobi Douglas… Adservantur (London, 1739), which lists the 557 rare and valuable printed editions, translations, and commentaries pertaining to Horace that were preserved in his library. Others, too, were less willing than King to dismiss this library out of hand. James Boswell reports that Samuel Johnson ‘approved of the famous collection of editions of Horace by Douglas’ and believed ‘every man should try to collect one book in that manner, and present it to a publick library’.20 At issue here is the question of the library’s use: was it merely meant to gratify Douglas’s whims as a collector or did he have larger scholarly ambitions in mind? The absence of any published work about Horace under Douglas’s name has long lent credence to the former view. In 1804 the bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin regarded the library as a missed scholarly opportunity, lamenting ‘that Dr. Douglas did not favour the classical world with an edition of this poet, enriched by such stores of information as he must have possessed’.21 Douglas’s unpublished papers, however, paint a different picture of the library’s use and influence from the mid-1730s until Douglas’s death in 1742. At this time, Douglas appears to have turned in earnest to literary and philological studies, for his papers abound with manuscripts on the topics of grammar, versification, and pronunciation in a variety of languages.22 Yet Douglas’s favourite object of study was clearly Horace. The doctor must have nursed an interest in this poet long before the 1730s, as evidenced by both the scale of his library and his notes about the poet, some of which date back to 1707.23 This interest, however, gave way to something much more ambitious during the 1730s, when Douglas produced a number of Horatian manuscripts devoted to issues of translation, collation, and meter.24 Contrary to the impression of Douglas as a mere collector, his surviving papers reveal his library to have been a fount of scholarly activity. This activity, moreover, was collaborative. Douglas employed a number of amanuenses and assistants, and three of these men, in turn, would publish works dedicated to Douglas and which reflected or worked to advance Douglas’s scholarly interests. Before I discuss these publications in more detail, it is worth sketching the larger pattern to which they seem to contribute. First, the dedications to these works reveal that Douglas and his library were regarded as a source of patronage within the world of Horatian scholarship; second, the works themselves proselytize on behalf of Douglas’s views, most notably his radical re-reading of the first ode. These publications, which shed light on the circulation and influence of Douglas’s ideas about Horace at this time, help to explain why Douglas would have caught the attention of Pope, who was preoccupied with translating and imitating Horace during these years.25 Edward Manwaring, who appears to have served as tutor to Douglas’s son, published two works that point to Douglas’s patronage. The first of these, a work on classical education entitled Institutes of Learning (1737), is dedicated to Douglas;26 the second, Stichology: or, A Recovery of the Latin, Greek and Hebrew Numbers (1737), pays particular attention to Horace’s meter and is cited extensively in Douglas’s manuscripts.27 Although Manwaring nowhere advances Douglas’s favourite emendation, the confluence between his writings and his patron’s interests suggests, at the very least, that Douglas viewed his library as an active centre for scholarship rather than a mere gentlemanly collection. A poem by Samuel Boyse lends support to this view and, more importantly, sheds light on the possibility that Douglas’s library was home to a particular scholarly agenda. By the late 1730s, Boyse was serving as one of Douglas’s primary amanuenses. His hand is visible on a number of manuscripts dedicated to the Horatian project, including a commentary on translations of Horace, a partial dictionary to Horace’s odes, and the manuscript of the Critical Dissertation.28 Yet in addition to serving as a copyist, he also played the role of a proselytizer. In the October 1740 issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine, Boyse published a translation of Horace’s first ode, ‘Inscribed to James Douglas, M. D. F. R. S.’, in which he employs, and draws particular attention to, the emendation: For you, my Lord*, the ivy crown (The critic’s prize! and just renown!) Does round your honour’d temples twine, And ranks you with the Gods divine! … * I follow the late Bp of Chichester’s juditious emendation, (which is undoubtedly right) of reading Te Doctarum, &c. for Me.29 In his footnote, Boyse mimics his patron’s diffidence (an important aspect of Douglas’s character that I discuss below) by attributing the emendation to its originator Hare; but his dedication tells another story, for it effectively likens Douglas to Maecenas, the archetypical patron and tastemaker. Boyse manages, not inelegantly, to laud his employer and to help promulgate his employer’s favourite emendation all at once. This poem’s appearance suggests not only that Douglas’s library was home to a loyal circle of Horatian assistants but, more importantly, that these assistants were helping to advance Douglas’s scholarly agenda through their own writings. The clearest support for this theory emerges from the work of David Watson. Watson, like Boyse, served as amanuensis to Douglas during the late 1730s. His hand is apparent on numerous Horatian documents, including an unpublished ‘Biographical & Geographical Dictionary for the whole works of Horace’, a biography of the poet, and the manuscript of the Critical Dissertation.30 Yet Watson was also a classical scholar and translator in his own right. In 1741, he published The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace, a facing-page translation with thorough notes and commentary ‘adapted to the Capacities of YOUTH at School, as well as of PRIVATE GENTLEMEN’.31 This popular work, which ran through a number of editions, bears the imprint of Douglas’s influence at every turn. Watson dedicates the work to Douglas, singles out Douglas’s library as the catalyst for his project (noting that ‘[t]he free Access I had to the valuable Collection of the several Editions of Horace, made by Dr. Douglas, first put me upon this Undertaking’), and, like Boyse, integrates and defends Douglas’s emendation to the first ode.32 Although a recent appraisal of Douglas’s relationship with Watson casts him as a collector merely ‘commission[ing] a protégé to make an edition and translation of the text using Douglas’s assembled spoils’, it may be more accurate to characterize the work as a collaboration (albeit an unequal one) between the two men.33 Notably, Watson’s edition reprints (no doubt, with Douglas’s permission) the 1739 Catalogus in its entirety, thereby establishing Douglas as a co-author of sorts. Moreover, it has gone unremarked that Douglas took an active hand in the composition of the work. In the preface, Watson acknowledges himself ‘indebted for the Key of Ode i. Book I. to my worthy PATRON’. Douglas himself thus seems to have penned the explanatory paraphrase in which Horace is made to say that ‘The Ivy, or Crown of Ivy, the Reward of learned Men, rank you, my Patron and Supporter, among the Gods above’.34 Although Douglas’s Critical Dissertation would never be published, the tenor of his argument, stated in his own words, was already available to the reading public in Watson’s edition. Finally, Watson’s dedication, which entreats Douglas to favour the world with his thoughts on Horace, seems to anticipate the publication of the Critical Dissertation: It was no small Motive to this Address, that I know HORACE to be, in a peculiar manner, your Favourite. A Writer of so great Merit could not miss of the Esteem of ONE remarkable for Justness of Taste, and a nice Discernment; and the great Pains you are at, in collecting the several Editions of his Works, are an incontestable Proof of the Value you have for him. May we not, from this, flatter ourselves, that, some time or other, you will oblige the World with your Thoughts upon an Author, who seems to be so dear to you above all others?35 This could seem a hollow entreaty extended to a dilettantish patron were it not for the fact that we know Douglas’s library to have been bursting with scholarly commentary on Horace, much of it in Watson’s own hand. It is all but certain that Watson knew of the imminent publication of the treatise he had helped to draft. In this light, he appears less concerned in his preface to lavish praise on a patron than to clear the way for Douglas’s Critical Dissertation, which would defend at length the controversial emendation that Watson and Boyse so confidently accept. Douglas’s diffidence, however, appears to have been a sticking point. In the Critical Dissertation, he is careful to attribute the emendation wholly to Hare and seems to have regarded himself only as Hare’s expositor and defender. He appears, moreover, to have held off publishing a version of the Dissertation for at least two years: the manuscript includes several mock-title pages, one of which is dated 1739 and includes a table of contents that is nearly identical to the Dissertation’s final form. Lastly, Douglas courted anonymity, identifying himself on the mock-title page only as ‘a Lover of Horace’ and including no authorial attribution on the title page of the Critical Dissertation (although a later hand has pencilled it in)(MS Hunter 634, 155r–155v). Ultimately, these details paint a picture of a man eager to elaborate and defend a novel reading of Horace, but hesitant to take any credit for it and reticent to commit his defence to the press. The effects of Douglas’s diffidence have made it easy to overlook his informal influence among readers of Horace beginning in the mid-1730s and lasting well beyond. At this time, the manuscript of the Critical Dissertation made inroads beyond those associated with, or even sympathetic to, Douglas’s library. We will recall that William King describes Douglas’s ‘curious’ collection derisively; yet even King is forced to offer a few words of praise on the topic of Douglas’s scholarship: ‘I must acknowledge that the Doctor understood his author, whom he had studied with great care and application. Amongst other of his criticisms he favoured me with the perusal of a dissertation on the first ode, and a defence of Dr. Hare's famous emendation of Te doctarum, &c. instead of Me’.36 That Douglas was ready to share his dissertation with a new acquaintance such as King suggests that he favoured others with the treatise as well, extending its reach beyond his library and into the London literary sphere. Two notable examples are Douglas’s acquaintances John Jones and William Stukeley, both of whom published works in 1736 that accept the emendation.37 In the preface to his edition of Horace’s poems, Jones (who includes a brief footnote citing Hare as his source) offers only a curt rhetorical question in defence of his decision to admit Hare’s conjecture: ‘Who will not prefer Te doctarum…to the readings of all of the manuscripts?’38 Stukeley is even briefer: he merely cites the line in passing as ‘Te (as it ought to be read) doctarum hederae praemia frontium’ without offering any source or defence for the emendation.39 That Jones and Stukeley are so confident of the emendation that they pass over it as if it were already an established fact is altogether striking. Between the publication of Hare’s Scripture Vindicated in 1721 and the appearance of Jones’s edition in 1736, only three works published in England make any reference to the emendation, and not one of these attributes it to Hare.40 Whence did Jones’s confidence and Stukeley’s terseness about this attribution arise? Why was Hare’s footnote seemingly forgotten for fifteen years only to re-emerge suddenly as an accepted critical fact that gained increasingly wider currency after 1736? Although one cannot establish the fact with finality, Douglas’s informal advocacy on behalf of the emendation would help to explain its sudden prominence during these years. A revealing glimpse of such behind-the-scenes advocacy appears in John Theobald’s A New Translation of the First Ode of Horace…Restored, which was published in London between 1742 and 1744.41 Not only does Theobald accept the emendation, but his analysis of the ode follows the argument of Douglas’s Dissertation so closely that, at moments, Theobald seems merely to be paraphrasing Douglas’s own words: Douglas’s Critical Dissertation:  Theobald’s A New Translation:  The first Contraste or Antithesis Horace  He introduces opposite Characters; as, in  places between Fame and Ambition. Here Fame, or the Desire of Glory, is represented by a Victor at the Olympic Races, where the Success was attended with the highest Honours and most distinguished Privileges known amongst the ancient Greeks.  the first Place, Fame, and Ambition. Fame here, or Glory, is represented by the Victors in the Olympic Games: on Whom the highest Honours, and greatest Privileges at that Time in Greece were accustomed to be conferr’d. In Contrast to this Representation is placed the Ambitious Roman…42  Sunt quos curriculo –    To this he opposes an ambitious Roman… (Critical Dissertation, 15–16)  Douglas’s Critical Dissertation:  Theobald’s A New Translation:  The first Contraste or Antithesis Horace  He introduces opposite Characters; as, in  places between Fame and Ambition. Here Fame, or the Desire of Glory, is represented by a Victor at the Olympic Races, where the Success was attended with the highest Honours and most distinguished Privileges known amongst the ancient Greeks.  the first Place, Fame, and Ambition. Fame here, or Glory, is represented by the Victors in the Olympic Games: on Whom the highest Honours, and greatest Privileges at that Time in Greece were accustomed to be conferr’d. In Contrast to this Representation is placed the Ambitious Roman…42  Sunt quos curriculo –    To this he opposes an ambitious Roman… (Critical Dissertation, 15–16)  Douglas’s Critical Dissertation:  Theobald’s A New Translation:  The first Contraste or Antithesis Horace  He introduces opposite Characters; as, in  places between Fame and Ambition. Here Fame, or the Desire of Glory, is represented by a Victor at the Olympic Races, where the Success was attended with the highest Honours and most distinguished Privileges known amongst the ancient Greeks.  the first Place, Fame, and Ambition. Fame here, or Glory, is represented by the Victors in the Olympic Games: on Whom the highest Honours, and greatest Privileges at that Time in Greece were accustomed to be conferr’d. In Contrast to this Representation is placed the Ambitious Roman…42  Sunt quos curriculo –    To this he opposes an ambitious Roman… (Critical Dissertation, 15–16)  Douglas’s Critical Dissertation:  Theobald’s A New Translation:  The first Contraste or Antithesis Horace  He introduces opposite Characters; as, in  places between Fame and Ambition. Here Fame, or the Desire of Glory, is represented by a Victor at the Olympic Races, where the Success was attended with the highest Honours and most distinguished Privileges known amongst the ancient Greeks.  the first Place, Fame, and Ambition. Fame here, or Glory, is represented by the Victors in the Olympic Games: on Whom the highest Honours, and greatest Privileges at that Time in Greece were accustomed to be conferr’d. In Contrast to this Representation is placed the Ambitious Roman…42  Sunt quos curriculo –    To this he opposes an ambitious Roman… (Critical Dissertation, 15–16)  Moreover, Theobald concludes his long passage on the topic of the emendation with a revealing note: ‘These Reflections were suggested to Me by an ingenious Friend, since deceased: who was known to entertain a more than ordinary Esteem for the Works of our Author’.43 That the ever diffident Douglas was this ‘ingenious Friend’ seems all but certain (both men were London doctors with mutual friends); what remains unknown is how many others were influenced by Douglas in this informal manner. Taken as a whole, the evidence points toward a proselytizer behind the scenes, someone working informally to advance acceptance of the emendation and to ensure its attribution to Hare throughout the second half of the 1730s. Douglas—ever willing to open up his library and favour friends and visitors with ‘a dissertation on the first ode’—seems the likeliest candidate. The supposition that some version of Douglas’s manuscript was circulating by 1736 would explain the sudden resurgence of, and consensus surrounding, the emendation after this date. The implications of this should not be understated. The emendation would soon make its way into Philip Francis’s popular translation of Horace’s poetry, which received the imprimatur of Samuel Johnson and which remained in print into the nineteenth century.44 When King, writing his Anecdotes near the end of his life, refers to the Te doctarum as ‘Dr. Hare’s famous emendation’, his words unintentionally pay tribute to Douglas, whose efforts all but single-handedly made this emendation into the ‘famous’ misreading it became. Moreover, the emendation would continue to haunt Horatian scholarship deep into the next century. In 1893, John Osborne Sargent (in whose name a prize for Horatian translation is still annually awarded at Harvard) could be found championing the emendation as ‘by far the most important correction that has ever been made in the text of Horace’.45 In this light, Douglas and his library take on new prominence within the world of eighteenth-century philology. The doctor was no lone dilettante, but rather the driving force amid a circle of scholars keen to revise Horace’s first ode and, by extension, understandings of the archetypical poet’s relationship with his patron. In wielding his library, patronage, and network of acquaintances to gain scholarly acceptance for the emendation, Douglas is emblematic of the shifting social landscape of literary criticism in the early eighteenth century, when a professional man-midwife could successfully contend with the gentlemanly criticism of peers and poets. When and how did Douglas’s influence reach Pope? Although there appears to have been no direct contact between the doctor and the poet, knowledge of the emendation arose repeatedly among Pope’s circle throughout the second half of the 1730s. Lewis Theobald appears to have communicated it to Pope’s friend Jonathan Richardson the Younger in 1735.46 Pope’s erstwhile friend and fellow translator William Broome employed it in his translation of the ode in 1739, as did Pope’s friend the Earl of Orrery in his translation in 1741.47 And King—who was Pope’s dining companion, along with Orrery and Warburton, on a number of occasions—would have had ample opportunity to relate his visit to Douglas’s library and discuss his perusal of the manuscript.48 Moreover, throughout the summer and fall of 1741, when Pope would have been composing The New Dunciad, London newspapers carried numerous advertisements for Watson’s edition of Horace in which Douglas’s name featured prominently. Not only was Douglas listed as the work’s dedicatee and as a co-author of sorts (in his capacity as compiler of the Catalogus), but he was singled out as the owner of a Horatian library ‘[a]llowed to be the completest Collection in Europe’.49 Above and beyond the Mary Toft affair, then, there existed a more timely incentive for Douglas’s inclusion in The Dunciad, for the doctor and his famous library had become the source of a new and increasingly influential misreading of Horace at which Pope would take aim. II. DOUGLAS AND POPE I have argued that Douglas’s treatise had the reach and influence necessary to attract Pope’s attention at the end of the 1730s and the beginning of the 1740s. But why would a treatise about a Horatian emendation have merited attack in The New Dunciad and The Dunciad in Four Books at all? Three aspects of Douglas’s Critical Dissertation seem poised to have inspired Pope’s ire: (i) its method, influenced by Pope’s enemy Richard Bentley; (ii) its implicit argument about the ideal relationship between patron, critic, and poet; and (iii) its use of Pope’s poetry to advance literary views that Pope would have found pernicious. The issue of method can be dealt with briefly since it is such a familiar object of Pope’s satire. Throughout the treatise, Douglas praises and emulates one of Pope’s favourite targets, Richard Bentley. Douglas lauds Bentley as ‘the greatest Critic England ever produced’ and the ‘Prince and Tyrant among Critics’ (Critical Dissertation, 61, 34); and his papers reveal that he studied Bentley’s editorial procedures closely over a period of many years.50 As one might expect, Douglas is particularly drawn to Bentley’s habits of conjectural emendation, or his willingness to admit readings unsupported by any manuscript if reason seemed to necessitate it.51 Douglas thus cites Bentley as a precedent for his critical approach and associates his reading of the passage with several comparable emendations in Bentley’s edition of Horace (Critical Dissertation, 61–4, 34–6). Pope famously despised such ‘verbal criticism’ because it allowed the modern critic to usurp the position proper to the poet. When Pope writes in a footnote to The Dunciad that ‘The Goddess [of Dullness] applauds the practice of tacking the obscure names of Persons not eminent in any branch of learning, to those of the most distinguished Writers…by printing Editions of their works with impertinent alterations of their Text’, Douglas’s treatise—a critical emendation to Horace’s first ode by a man-midwife—would have been just the sort of impertinent, parasitic publication Pope had in view (Dunciad, 4.119n). Moreover, implicit in Douglas’s treatise is a radical re-appraisal of the roles of the poet, patron, and critic. Horace’s first ode follows a classical form called a priamel, or a catalogue of options that concludes with a preferred choice.52 In this case, after sketching various ways of life and their ruling passions (e.g. that of the charioteer, politician, and merchant), Horace ends the poem by singling out as his preference the life of a poet: ‘as for me, it is ivy, the reward of learned brows, / that puts me among the gods above’.53 In this (the accepted) reading, the poet represents at once a culmination and an exception to the catalogue: a culmination in that, like the charioteer, merchant, or politician, he too is driven by a fierce passion, and yet an exception in that his poetic aspirations set him markedly apart from—indeed ‘above’—others. These lines, simply put, offer a paradigmatic expression of the poet’s exceptionality. However, emending ‘me’ to ‘te’ fundamentally shifts the focus of the poem, for it ascribes the culminating position in the priamel not to the poet but to his patron: For you the blooming Ivy grows, Proud to adorn your learned Brows; Patron of Letters you arise, Grow to a God, and mount the Skies.54 Douglas espouses this view in the Dissertation, contending that Horace aims ‘to cast a stronger Light on that of his PATRON; who, for his superior Knowledge, and Love of Learning, is placed in the foremost Point of View as the principal Figure in this Groupe, and a Companion to the Gods themselves’ (Critical Dissertation, 15). This shift in focus, which might seem merely to reflect the sycophancy toward patrons often found in eighteenth-century poetry, also carries with it an argument about the nature of authority within the republic of letters. At this time, critics of the emendation would dismiss it on the grounds that, by tradition, the hedera or ivy wreath belongs exclusively to the poet, thus rendering it inconceivable that Horace would bestow it upon Maecenas.55 However Douglas disagrees with ‘those who confine the Edera to Poetry alone’ and instead contends, at great length and with such a wealth of classical parallels as would have made Bentley proud, that the ivy crown ‘is frequently given in a more extensive Sense to Such as were remarkable for polite Learning, and a Taste in Poetry; or distinguished by their Love of Learning and Liberality to Learned Men’ (MS Hunter 634, 205r–205v). In defending the emendation, then, Douglas would also broaden (or, less generously, dilute) the definition of poetic accomplishment by extending it to those who merely enjoy (‘Taste’) and facilitate the labours of the poet. Ultimately, for Douglas, the patron’s ‘extensive Learning’ and ‘fine Taste’ seem to set him above the poet who, stripped of these qualities, can only distinguish himself through ‘Success in Lyric Poetry alone’ (Critical Dissertation, 18). In like fashion, Douglas’s argument on behalf of the emendation also enhances the role of the critic at the expense of the poet. For to justify the notion that Horace would bestow the marks of poetry and learning upon Maecenas in such lavish terms, Douglas must suggest that Maecenas was something more than a mere patron: ‘It was not the approbation of the Statesman or the General’, Douglas argues, ‘but that of the Critic and Judge of Learning that Horace desired’ (MS Hunter 634, 209r). To characterize Maecenas as a ‘Critic and Judge of Learning’, over and above his role as patron and provider, is to conceive of a composite figure, a patron-critic, to whom the ivy crown especially belongs. Douglas injects just such an interpretation into his rather free translation of the crux: ‘Tis Thine to wear, and to bestow The Wreaths that grace the learned Brow; This lifts thee to the blest Abodes, And mixes with superior Gods. (Critical Dissertation, 9) Even in the emended version of the ode, there is no source for the image of Maecenas bestowing ivy upon others. Yet this addition perfectly accords with Douglas’s belief that Horace’s ode depicts a heroic patron and critic towering above the world around him. In this light, the once exceptional poet is reduced, in Douglas’s reading, to little more than a supplicant pleading for his patron-critic’s favour: ‘nothing could be more just or natural on this occasion than for Horace to offer the Ivy wreath to Maecenas for as he was then addressing him for his approbation as a Lyrick Poet, so it was highly proper for him to acknowledge his superior Taste and Judgement in Learning in order to obtain that Favour’ (MS Hunter 634, 208r). Ultimately, Douglas’s emendatory sleight-of-hand manages to steal the ivy away from the poet and to bestow it instead upon the patron-critic—precisely the sort of topsy-turvy inversion Pope targets in The Dunciad. The final aspect of the treatise likely to have invited Pope’s ire directly involves Pope’s poetry and touches upon an important facet of the poet’s self-fashioning. Throughout the Critical Dissertation, Douglas employs a number of quotations from Pope’s verse in support of his argument for the emendation.56 The most significant of these arises near the end of the treatise where, as a final proof for his contention that the ivy crown belongs properly to the critic, Douglas introduces as evidence a passage from Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711): The most celebrated of our English Poets Mr. Pope has given likewise the Ivy Crown to Vida, an Italian Writer of the Tenth Century, who was no less famous for his being a just Critick than an elegant Poet   Immortal Vida! on whose honoured Brow   The Poets Bays, and Critic’s Ivy grow. (MS Hunter 634, 209r)57 Douglas’s use of this couplet would almost certainly have struck a nerve with Pope, for it recalled an ideal that Pope had long held but about which he had increasingly grown bitter. During the early decades of his poetic career, Pope had been as interested as Douglas in the literary significance of the ivy—in large part, because its literary significance was so ambiguous. Unlike the laurel or bay, whose status as a symbol of poetic triumph was well established, the ivy presented something of a cipher. While there existed a pair of classical precedents (most notably, the Horatian crux under discussion) that associated the ivy with poetry and learning, the exact nature of this association remained an open question to early modern commentators.58 Out of this ambiguity, Pope had fashioned a wholly new and influential interpretation of the ivy crown. His decision in the Essay on Criticism to crown Vida with ‘The Poet’s Bays and Critick’s Ivy’ was unprecedented, for it ascribed to the ivy a significance it had never possessed before. ‘[C]ritical ivy, tout court, seems to be Pope’s invention’, remarks J. B. Trapp.59 This invention was no mere whim but rather a key aspect of Pope’s self-representation. During the early stages of his career, Pope was preoccupied with what we might term the figure of the poet-critic, or the idea that critical judgment and poetic wit could dwell undivided in one supremely gifted individual. Pope’s own labours at this time—as the author of An Essay on Criticism (1711) and the translator and commentator of Homer’s Iliad (1715–1720)—necessarily led him to idealize such a figure and to fashion his poetic persona upon it. The idealized poet-critic appears not only in Pope’s portrait of Vida but emerges even more strikingly in his depiction of the archetypical poet-critic Horace: Horace still charms with graceful Negligence, And without Method talks us into Sense, Will like a Friend familiarly convey The truest Notions in the easiest way. He, who Supream in Judgment, as in Wit, Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ, Yet judg’d with Coolness tho’ he sung with Fire; His Precepts teach but what his Works inspire.60 Pope’s praise of Horace doubles as an emblem of literary self-sufficiency: at once rhymer and reasoner, text and teacher, wit and judge, Pope’s Horace condenses an entire republic of letters into one man. Such self-sufficiency no doubt appealed to the poet who later declared, in one of his Horatian imitations, that his writing allowed him ‘to thrive, / Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive’.61 For early modern readers, ‘Horace’s me doctarum hederae praemia frontium gave expression…to the congenial concept of the doctus poeta, the learned poet’.62 Pope’s innovative approach to the ivy grew out of this traditional reading, which validated the category of poet-critic he wished to embody. This idealized poet-critic is nowhere more visible than in Godfrey Kneller’s 1721 portrait of Pope. As W. K. Wimsatt notes, the presence of the ivy crown (as opposed to the more traditional poetic foliage) and the use of a numismatic motif (which depicts Pope in profile, after the manner of a Roman coin) are unusual and striking choices, especially when compared to Kneller’s other portraits of poets.63 Pope and Kneller were friends; knowing how carefully Pope crafted his public persona, it stands to reason that the poet had a hand in these choices, which effectively cast him as a latter-day Horace. The ivy’s allusion to the me doctarum passage was not lost on Pope’s contemporaries. In 1735, when Edmund Curll employed an engraving of Kneller’s portrait as the frontispiece to one of his volumes of Pope’s correspondence, he would make explicit the ivy’s subtext by adding beneath the poet’s name ‘Horatius Anglicanus’.64 As banal as the choice of leaf might seem to modern eyes, the presence of the ivy here and throughout Pope’s early writings carries with it the force of a manifesto. It suggests that Pope regarded the me doctarum passage as a licence for, and the ivy as a symbol of, the poet-critic who weds genius and scholarly learning. In light of these efforts to invest the ivy with symbolic meaning, Pope’s increasing distaste for the ivy in subsequent years appears all the more striking. In The Dunciad (1728), Pope revises his own lines from the Essay on Criticism. Associating the ivy with scholastic pedantry, he laments those writers who mix ‘the Owl’s ivy with the Poet’s bays’.65 This gentle mockery soon gave way to bitterness. In an attack on the new laureate written for The Grub Street Journal in 1730, Pope advocates for the laureate’s wearing of ivy, ‘[n]ot only as it anciently belonged to poets in general; but as it is emblematical of the three virtues of a court poet in particular; it is creeping, dirty, and dangling’.66 Pope would express this sentiment more concisely in The Dunciad in Four Books: ‘Bring, bring the madding Bay, the drunken Vine; / The creeping, dirty, courtly Ivy join’ (Dunciad, 1.303–04). Whence Pope’s antagonism toward a symbol of which he had once been so fond? The publication of Lewis Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored (1726) with its scathing attack on the quality of Pope’s gentlemanly criticism no doubt played a part in this shift, as did the general drift of scholarship away from Pope’s Horatian sensibilities toward the emendatory and philological criticism of Bentley and Theobald. Whatever the exact reasons, it is apparent that by the 1730s an embittered Pope viewed the ivy crown as all but lost to the sycophantic court poet and the myopic emendatory critic. Although he refused to abandon the synthetic ideal for which the ivy had once stood—a new note appended to the 1744 edition of An Essay on Criticism praises Vida as the ‘perfect idea’ of ‘the true Critic’ on the grounds that he was ‘a critical Poet’ capable of writing ‘poetical Criticism’—he nonetheless seemed increasingly willing to relinquish the sullied symbol of the ivy to his enemies.67 When Jonathan Richardson painted Pope in 1738, he closely followed the pattern of Kneller’s 1721 profile but revised it, significantly, by replacing the Horatian ivy with the more traditional bays.68 In this light, Douglas’s treatise on the ivy would have been especially unwelcome to Pope during the late 1730s. For when Douglas insists that ‘[t]he most celebrated of our English Poets has likewise applied the Ivy Crown as the Reward of Criticism’, he not only rehearses a belief about which Pope had grown embittered but, moreover, he employs this belief as a warrant to justify precisely the sort of emendatory criticism that had helped to sour Pope’s fondness for the critic’s ivy in the first place (MS Hunter 634, 201r). Indeed, much to his chagrin, Pope would have encountered in Douglas’s treatise his own words being used to support a view of patronage and a species of criticism entirely inimical to his conception of Horace’s status as a poet and critic. III. DOUGLAS’S ROLE IN THE DUNCIAD On these grounds, we ought to read Pope’s inclusion of Douglas in The Dunciad as a timely return volley, a satirical attack levelled at one who (at least in Pope’s eyes) had recently misinterpreted and misused the poet’s words in order to advance a misguided understanding of poetry’s subservient relationship to patronage and criticism. Indeed, Pope’s knowledge of the Critical Dissertation allows us to illuminate and coherently interpret the significance of Douglas’s presence in The Dunciad in a number of ways. First, the content of the Critical Dissertation provides evidence for Rumbold’s surmise that the footnote identifying Douglas ought to be read ironically. The seemingly laudatory note, which describes Douglas as a ‘Physician of great Learning and no less Taste’, pointedly echoes a collocation Douglas uses repeatedly throughout his treatise to describe the characteristic qualities of the patron-critic, who is said to possess ‘extensive Learning and a fine Taste’, ‘polite Learning, and a Taste in Poetry’, and ‘superior Taste and Judgement in Learning’ (Critical Dissertation, 18; MS Hunter 634, 205v, 208r). This close resemblance strongly suggests that Pope or Warburton possessed first-hand knowledge of Douglas’s treatise. As a result, whereas scholars have supposed the note to be sincere, and thus an attempt to deflect from the offensiveness of the verse, Pope’s echoing of the Critical Dissertation actually works to heighten the offensiveness: the poem lauds Douglas in the polite terminology of his own pet theory at precisely the moment it plunges him into the scatological indecency of the Annius and Mummius episode. Yet Pope’s allusion to the Critical Dissertation does more than simply sharpen the satire. Until now, Pope’s satirical rendering of Douglas has seemed ‘inconsistent’ at best.69 The lack of any apparent connection between Douglas’s various guises (emendator, man-midwife, and book collector) has led scholars either to treat Douglas as merely an incidental figure in the poem or to reconcile his various roles in more symbolic terms.70 However, Pope’s awareness of and allusion to the treatise resolves these difficulties. First, the pointed reappearance of the language of the treatise in the passage satirizing Douglas’s man-midwifery and collecting brings all three of Douglas’s roles into direct contact with one another, which suggests that Pope perceived them as in some way synthetic. Furthermore, the content of Douglas’s treatise offers a model for such a synthesis. If, as I have argued, the Critical Dissertation idealizes a patron-critic figure that Pope would have found odious, then the poet’s treatment of Douglas in The Dunciad can be read as a satire of just such a figure. For in mocking Douglas as a ‘curious’ and obsessive collector, and thereby trivializing his library and its Horatian scholarship, Pope takes dead aim at Douglas’s status as a patron; and in ridiculing Douglas’s emendation and feigning surprise that such a topic could even be regarded as a ‘serious dispute’, Pope likewise questions Douglas’s standing as a critic (Dunciad, 4.394, 4.220). Simply put, the poet’s barbs about Douglas’s collecting and emendating go hand-in-hand. Pope takes direct aim at the ivy-crowned patron-critic figure that Douglas fetishizes in his treatise and, using Douglas himself as a convenient example, depicts him as little more than a dilettante and pedant rather than a fount ‘of great Learning and no less Taste’. To read Pope’s remarks about Douglas as a pointed attack on the Critical Dissertation is also to shed new light on the Annius and Mummius episode as a whole. Until now, Douglas’s sudden appearance amid the scatological climax of this episode has been interpreted as a stray allusion to his unfortunate role in the Mary Toft affair. Yet a fuller knowledge of Douglas and his treatise alters this reading, for it prompts us to view Pope’s treatment of Douglas as an attempt to combine the follies of Annius and Mummius into one culminating, composite dunce. Rumbold has already noted that the doctor, in his capacity as a collector of Horatiana, bears a resemblance to Mummius.71 The Critical Dissertation, in turn, invites us to regard Douglas as resembling Annius as well. Although Annius is often glossed as a forger of antique coins, it is vital to recall that Pope’s and Warburton’s footnote associates Annius with ‘Forgeries of ancient manuscripts’ too (Dunciad, 4.347). Douglas’s library included at least one much-publicized manuscript copy of Horace’s odes, the reading of which it was Douglas’s entire scholarly project to alter. To Pope, ever distrustful of minute verbal critics, such emendatory marring would have seemed little different from outright forgery. Moreover, Douglas’s attempts to disseminate a radically new reading of Horace through the influence of his friends and collaborators would likely have struck Pope as effectively analogous to Annius’s fraudulent trafficking in false antiquities (‘other Caesars, other Homers’) (Dunciad, 4.360). Far from an incidental joke rehearsing an old disgrace, then, Douglas’s appearance represents the perfect conclusion to the episode to the extent that Douglas unites all of Annius’s and Mummius’s follies into one individual. A chaotic satire of the patron-critic figure venerated in the treatise, Pope’s vision of Douglas combines both the illegitimacy of the forger and the folly of the imperceptive collector in one, self-sufficient blight upon the world of letters. This union, moreover, is implicit in the closing depiction of Annius's and Mummius's departing ‘hand in hand’ (Dunciad, 4.394). It is in this light that the satirical significance of Douglas’s role as man-midwife becomes entirely clear. In eighteenth-century England, the role played by midwives in the hiding and policing of illegitimate births led midwifery to be associated more generally with notions of illegitimacy and fraud; and Douglas in particular, through his involvement in the Mary Toft affair, had earned (albeit unfairly) a reputation for credulity.72 Pope’s decision to target Douglas in his capacity as a man-midwife plays on both of these negative associations and, moreover, the degree to which Douglas’s treatise seemed to confirm them. By depicting Douglas as ‘lend[ing] his soft, obstetric hand’ at the scatological ‘second birth’ of Annius’s forged coins, Pope plays on his readers’ awareness of Douglas’s treatise. Who, Pope seems to ask, would be better suited to delivering Annius’s forged antiquities than one who has been so eager to assist in the birth of a changeling Horace? Pope’s attack on Douglas ultimately advances the view that the doctor’s critical pursuits and his medical pursuits are somehow relatedly illegitimate. Notably, Pope’s description of the doctor’s ‘soft, obstetric hand’ offers the first recorded use of the word ‘obstetric’ in English.73 To modern ears, this is an unobtrusive and respectable medical term. However, in Pope’s time, the man-midwife was still a novelty, a fact implicit in the gender confusion of the formulation ‘man-midwife’ itself. The term ‘obstetric’, derived from the feminine obstetrix (Latin for ‘midwife’), was thus still associated, both semantically and historically, with a realm closed off to men. In his Dictionary entry for ‘obstetrick’, Johnson would offer as a definition ‘Midwifish; befitting a midwife; doing the midwife’s office’, and would quote Pope as his lone source.74 In Pope’s time, then, the word was not a term of art (as it is for us) but a pedantic Latinism that carried with it a clear suggestion of effeminacy. Pope’s invocation of Douglas’s trade, with its telling description of the doctor’s hand as ‘soft’, wields this effeminacy as a weapon. As John Sitter notes, the Annius and Mummius episode tars its two central figures, who depart the scene ‘hand in hand’, as unnaturally effeminate;75 the mention of Douglas’s ‘soft, obstetric hand’ only two lines earlier seems aimed to heighten this overall effect. Pope’s denigration of Douglas as an illegitimate trespasser into the gentlemanly sphere of letters thus forms a part of the poem’s oft-noted misogyny: Pope, always keen to satirize the confusion of normative gender binaries, employs the same strategy here in order to distinguish the critic of gentlemanly taste from the squabbling and bickering of emendators and dilettantes. The conflict between the ‘disinterested and gentlemanly humanism’ of the wits and the ‘increasingly specialized and even professionalized philology’ of those whom Pope classed with the dunces is here fought in starkly gendered terms.76 Taken as a whole, the range and unity of the satire directed at Douglas in The Dunciad suggests that Pope regarded him as a more serious threat than scholars have previously granted. For Pope, Douglas was not simply a laughable man-midwife who had fallen prey to a hoax decades earlier. Rather, this would-be patron-critic was a timely instance of the literary anarchy Pope sought to pillory in the poem. Ultimately, Douglas’s Critical Dissertation emerges as an important intertext for The Dunciad. On a purely semantic level, the treatise provides us with the context necessary to grasp for the first time the true acrimony and coherence of Pope’s attack on Douglas. It likewise provides a key with which to re-interpret the Annius and Mummius episode as a unified attack on the habits of scholarship and views of poetry espoused in the Critical Dissertation. Equally important, however, is the glimpse this treatise offers of the historical development of literary criticism during these years, when entirely new sorts of readers could contend with poets and peers ‘to wear, and to bestow / The Wreaths that grace the learned Brow’. Although Douglas’s treatise would soon be forgotten, and his much sought after emendation eventually dismissed as a fanciful misreading, his influence was such as to elicit from Pope a satirical attack best understood as a rear-guard action in a battle between the men of taste and learning who claimed poetry as their privileged domain and the outsiders and interlopers who dared aspire to the ivy crown. Footnotes 1 Philip Francis (tr.), The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace… (Dublin, 1742). As this article makes frequent reference to Horace’s many translators, I give priority to their names throughout the notes for the sake of clarity. 2 Philip Francis (tr.), A Poetical Translation of the Works of Horace…, 3rd edn (London, 1749). 3 Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, ‘This Long Disease, My Life’: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 109–10. 4 For a detailed discussion of the Toft case, see Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, IL, and London, 1995). For Pope’s satirical treatment, see ‘The Discovery’, Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 6 (London; New Haven, CT, 1954), 259–64. 5 See Richard Nash, ‘Translation, Editing, and Poetic Invention in Pope’s Dunciad’, Studies in Philology, 89 (1992), 470–84; and Jessie Rhodes Chambers, ‘The Episode of Annius and Mummius: Dunciad IV 347-96’, Philological Quarterly, 43 (1964), 185–92. 6 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. Valerie Rumbold (London and New York, NY, 2009), 4.347–96. All parenthetical citations from The Dunciad refer to this edition. Line numbers followed by an ‘n’ will be used to cite Pope’s and Warburton’s footnotes. 7 On the apparent incongruity of the footnote, see Nicolson and Rousseau, Pope and the Sciences, 124. 8 Pope, Dunciad, ed. Rumbold, 4.394n. 9 When this note first appeared in The New Dunciad, it added and concluded with ‘Me gelidum nemus, or Te gelidum nemus, &c’, another contested emendation to Horace’s first ode, which was endorsed and employed by Leonard Welsted in his 1727 translation of the poem. Douglas disapproved of this double emendation (as he wished to retain the contrast it produced between the supposed ‘te’ of the patron and ‘me’ of the poet). It is thus possible that Pope originally had in his sights both Douglas and Welsted but that when revising the footnote for The Dunciad in Four Books he chose to focus exclusively on Douglas. See Alexander Pope, The New Dunciad: As it was Found in the Year 1741 (London, 1742), 4.210n and Leonard Welsted (tr.), A Discourse…To which is annex’d, Proposals for Translating the Whole Works of Horace… (London, 1727), 24–5. 10 London, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Dyce 7747, 16. 11 Rumbold goes so far as to offer a brief conjecture about the possible significance of the lost treatise. See Pope, Dunciad, ed. Rumbold, 4.220n. 12 Pope, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, Twickenham Edition, vol. 5 (London; New Haven, CT, 1953), xlii. 13 These identifications (made by consulting letters signed by Douglas and his amanuenses) confirm identifications previously made in James Douglas on English Pronunciation, c. 1740, ed. Börje Holmberg (Lund, 1956), 10–11; and C. H. Brock, Dr. James Douglas’s Papers and Drawings in the Hunterian Collection, Glasgow University Library: a Handlist (Glasgow, 1994), 11, 113–15. Unless otherwise indicated, all cited manuscripts are located in Glasgow, University of Glasgow Library Special Collections. For the sake of brevity, I will henceforward refer to the manuscript portion of Douglas’s treatise as MS Hunter 634. 14 Two are housed in the British Library (shelfmarks BL 77.h.20 and BL 116.i.5) and one at the University of Aberdeen (shelfmark MN 1.312). 15 London, National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Dyce 3165. 16 Henceforward I will refer to the printed portion of Douglas’s treatise as the Critical Dissertation in place of the misleading drop-head title. 17 See Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago, IL, 2006), 267. 18 William King, Political and Literary Anecdotes of his own Time (London, 1818), 70–72. 19 King, Anecdotes, 70. 20 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1980), 1281. 21 Thomas Frognall Dibdin, An Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics (London, 1804), 198. 22 On dating, see Holmberg, 18–19; and K. Bryn Thomas, James Douglas of the Pouch and his Pupil William Hunter (Springfield, IL, 1964), 69. 23 Bryn Thomas, Douglas of the Pouch, 71. 24 Brock, Douglas’s Papers, 106–13. 25 See Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge, 1985). 26 Edward Manwaring, Institutes of Learning (London, 1737). The author describes the work as intended for the use of Douglas’s son; see Manwaring, Institutes, sig. A3r. 27 Edward Manwaring, Stichology: or, A Recovery of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew Numbers (London, 1737). Douglas cites from this work in MSS Hunter D553 and 584 (S.5.11). 28 See respectively MSS Hunter D556, D558, and 634. 29 The Gentleman’s Magazine (October, 1740), 521. On Boyse’s authorship, see Donald F. Bond, ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’, Modern Philology, 38 (1940), 90. 30 See respectively MSS Hunter 573 (S.4.18); 577 (S.5.3) and 633 (S.8.12); and 634. 31 David Watson (tr.), The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace… (London, 1741), title page. 32 Watson, Odes, iii, vi, 4–5. 33 Kristine Louise Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA; London, 2011), 131. 34 Watson, Odes, xviii–xxviii, viii, 7. 35 Watson, Odes, iv. 36 King, Anecdotes, 72. 37 It is clear that Jones, Stukeley, and Douglas knew one another from a comment recorded by Stukeley in his diary entry for 3 August 1744: ‘Mr. Jones, Rector of Uppingham, editor of Horace, visited me. He thinks our friend Dr. Douglas’s life was shortened by Pope putting him into his Dunciad’. See William Stukeley, The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley…, vol. 2 (Durham, 1883), 352. 38 ‘Quis non praetulerit *Te doctarum… manuscriptorum omnium lectionibus?’ Quintus Horatius Flaccus, ed. John Jones (London, 1736), ‘Praefatio’ (n.p.). 39 William Stukeley, Palaeographia Sacra… (London, 1736), 20. 40 See Samuel Shaw, A Short and Plain Syntax…, 2nd edn (London, 1727), 128; Welsted, Discourse, 24–5; and Historia Litteraria…, vol. 2 (London, 1731), 281–5. A handful of continental works discuss the emendation—see Alexander Cunningham, Alexandri Cuningamii animadversiones… (Hague, 1721), 3, 285; André Dacier (tr.), Oeuvres d’Horace…, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, 1727), 17; and Noël Étienne Sanadon and André Dacier (trs.), Oeuvres d’Horace…, vol. 8 (Amsterdam, 1735), 265–6—but the only mention of Hare occurs in a review of Hare’s Scripture Vindicated; see Michel de la Roche (ed.), Mémoires littéraires de la Grande-Bretagne, vol. 8 (Hague, 1722), 439–45. 41 John Theobald (tr.), A New Translation of the First Ode of Horace… Restored (London, [1740?]). The conjectural date assigned to this work in the English Short Title Catalogue is incorrect. Internal evidence suggests the work was published between 21 January 1742 (when Edward Milward, whom Theobald addresses in a closing Latin ode, was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, a fact Theobald mentions) and 18 September 1744 (the death of Lewis Theobald, whom John Theobald refers to as if he were still living). 42 Theobald, New Translation, 10. 43 Theobald, New Translation, 12. 44 Boswell, Life, 997. 45 John Osborne Sargent (tr.), Horatian Echoes: Translations of the Odes of Horace (Boston, MA, and New York, NY, 1893), 218. 46 Reported in Theobald, New Translation, 14–15. 47 William Broome, Poems on Several Occasions…, 2nd edn (London, 1739), 45; John Boyle, Earl of Orrery, The First Ode of the First Book of Horace Imitated… (London, 1741), 10–13. 48 The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1956), 180, 380. 49 Daily Gazetteer [London Edition], Friday, 19 June 1741; issue 1874. 50 MSS Hunter 579 (S.5.6) and 634 exhaustively catalogue Bentley’s emendations of Horace and compare them with those of other editors. 51 Haugen, Richard Bentley, 133–49. 52 D. A. West (tr.), Horace, Odes I: Carpe Diem (Oxford, 1995), 5–6. 53 West, Odes, 1.1.29–30. 54 Broome, Poems, 45. 55 Dacier, Oeuvres, 1:17. 56 He cites several passages from Pope’s translation of the Iliad as evidence of a tendency among classical authors to develop contrasts using ‘Me’ and ‘Te’. Douglas, Critical Dissertation, 48–9. 57 See Pope, An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, Twickenham Edition, vol. 1 (London; New Haven, CT, 1961), 320; lines 705–6. 58 For a thorough discussion of the symbolic tradition surrounding the ivy, see J. B. Trapp, ‘The Owl’s Ivy and the Poet’s Bays: An Enquiry into Poetic Garlands’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958), 227–55. 59 Trapp, ‘Poetic Garlands’, 252. 60 Pope, Essay on Criticism, 313–14; lines 653–60. 61 Pope, Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt, Twickenham Edition, vol. 4 (London; New Haven, CT, 1939), 169; lines 68–9. 62 Trapp, ‘Poetic Garlands’, 243. 63 See William K. Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope (New Haven, CT, 1965), 50–59. 64 Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence, Volume the Third… (London, 1735), frontispiece. 65 Pope, The Dunciad. An Heroic Poem. In Three Books ([London], 1728), line 46. 66 Pope, Dunciad, ed. Rumbold, 387; ‘Appendix VI. Of the Poet Laureate’. The article originally appeared in The Grub Street Journal, 19 November 1730, issue 46. 67 Pope, An Essay on Criticism…With the Commentary and Notes of W. Warburton, A. M. ([London], [1744]), 697n. 68 Wimsatt, Portraits, 218–9. 69 Nicolson and Rousseau, Pope and the Sciences, 124. 70 See Chambers, ‘Annius and Mummius’, 185–92; and Nash, ‘Poetic Invention’, 470–84. 71 Pope, Dunciad, ed. Rumbold, 394n. It is worth noting that Douglas was a friend of Richard Mead, who is often identified as a possible source for Mummius. 72 On midwifery and its association with policing illegitimate births, see Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660-1770 (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 38. On Douglas’s supposed credulity, see Todd, ‘New Evidence for Dr. Arbuthnot’s Authorship of ‘The Rabbit-Man-Midwife’’, Studies in Bibliography, 41 (1988), 257–9. 73 ‘obstetric, adj.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online 3rd edn (pubd online March 2017) <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/129946> accessed 17 May 2017. 74 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language… (London, 1755), s.v. ‘obstetrick’. 75 John E. Sitter, The Poetry of Pope’s Dunciad (Minneapolis, MN, 1971), 127. 76 Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725-1765 (Oxford, 1995), 21. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press 2017; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - James Douglas and the Ivy Crown: Contested Horatian Scholarship in Pope’s Dunciad
JF - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgx079
DA - 2018-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/james-douglas-and-the-ivy-crown-contested-horatian-scholarship-in-pope-sPFL53i6cN
SP - 277
EP - 297
VL - 69
IS - 289
DP - DeepDyve
ER -