Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/586

 582 Snyder Similarly in the great standard ten-volume edition by Croker, Elwin, and Courthope I find only this brief reference: At this period [about the year 1740] he seems also to have been meditating an epic on the legendary subject of the Trojan Brutus 1 and two moral Odes on the Evils of Arbitrary Power and the Vanity of Ambition, by the non-execution of which nothing has certainly been lost to English poetry. 1 The design of this poem is described in Spence's 'Anecdotes,' p. 288. An exception should perhaps be made of the Rev. Alexander Dyce, who apparently recognized the importance of Ruffhead's find, and quoted the plan of the epic, almost verbatim from Ruffhead, in the numerous editions of Pope to which he wrote the Memoir. But even in Dyce's work one is struck by the fact that he apparently made no attempt to get Pope's autograph notes and the fragment of the poem in blank verse. It occurred very forcibly to me that if Ruffhead's statement was true, and if Pope in the latter part of his life had definitely decided to abandon the heroic couplet in what he designed as his most pretentious original poem, a startling revision would have to be made of nearly every discussion ever written on Pope's use of the heroic couplet. For instance, W. E. Mead's volume, The Versification of Pope, (a Leipzig dissertation) makes no mention of blank verse, and compels the inference that the author was unaware of Pope's actually having begun his experi- ment with this form. The discovery of these lines of blank verse would not, of course, overturn either the generally accepted idea that Pope handled the "rocking-horse couplet" better than any of his contemporaries, or the theory that this couplet is too limiting and rigid a form for the expression of varied moods and powerful emotion. But it would throw new light on the fallacious idea that Pope was unable to discern the greater freedom offered by blank verse. The whole matter seemed to me of enough importance to justify a most careful search for the notes in Pope's hand, which Ruffhead had used a hundred and fifty years ago. They turned up, with the mysterious fragment in blank verse, in the British Museum, where they have been lying neglected for fifty years! The entire group of Egerton MSS 1946-60 are original letters and papers of Pope, William Warburton, and others, comprising fifteen volumes, which were used by Ruff-