n remarkable for its maturity, if, as
Pope professed, it had been the produce of sixteen, but the Discourse
was not printed till he was twenty-nine, and he certainly did not send
it uncorrected into the world.

"It must appear strange," says De Quincey, "that Pope at twenty-one
should choose to come forward for the first time with a work composed at
sixteen. A difference of five years at that stage of life is of more
effect than of twenty at a later; and his own expanding judgment could
hardly fail to inform him that his Pastorals were by far the worst of
his works. In reality, let us not deny, that had Pope never written
anything else, his name would not have been known as a name even of
promise, but would probably have been redeemed from oblivion by some
satirist or writer of a Dunciad."[10] "Expanding judgment" is often a
feeble antidote to the partiality of an author for his own compositions,
and Pope always spoke of his Pastoral effusions with fond complacency.
He did, indeed, pretend to regret their publication. There was some
delay in bringing out the Miscellany, and on November 1, 1708, he wrote
thus to Cromwell: "But now I talk of the critics, I have good news to
tell you concerning myself, for which I expect you should congratulate
with me; it is, that beyond all my expectations, and far above my
demerits, I have been most mercifully reprieved by the sovereign power
of Jacob Tonson from being brought forth to public punishment, and
[have been] respited from time to time from the hands of those barbarous
executioners of the muses, whom I was just now speaking of. It often
happens that guilty poets, like other guilty criminals, when once they
are known and proclaimed, deliver themselves into the hands of justice
only to prevent others from doing it more to their disadvantage, and not
out of any ambition to spread their fame by being executed in the face
of the world, which is a fame but of short continuance." Pope was in his
twenty-first year, an age at which frankness commonly preponderates, and
he already abounded in the ostentatious profession of sentiments he did
not entertain. He had circulated the Pastorals among numerous authors,
he had invited their criticisms, he had continued to correct the poems
with fastidious care, he retained to the last a high opinion of their
merit, and it is impossible to credit his insinuation, that he did not
design them for the press, and that he only printed them to avoid a