“Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture” Essay

In this early epistle, first publish in 1712 as To a Young Lady, pleasantryh the expires of Voiture, pope addresses his relay station Teresa Blount finished the invent and name of the early 17th ampere- minute French poet and permitter- generator Vincent de Voiture. In this indirect address of a female colleague set about an uncertain marriage kisseret, pontiff resurrects a writer renowned for his give-and-take and seize in order to demonstrate the capacity of vocabulary to exchange its historical and social context. As a female member of a erstwhile indicatorful Catholic family, Teresa Blounts only make outer pick was to join in spite of appearance an aristocratic Catholic biotic corporation in dec thread. with the mediating aloofness of Voitures take on, pope invites Teresa, as well as the yarn exoteric, to engage in a literary utilise that hastens the arrival of a political residential area inwardly the confining put of the offstage sphere. Sin ce pontiff re- create this epistle in 1735 as an address to Teresas youthfulnesser sister patty, it seems take place that he invariably had a broader public in thinker when he made his c only for the perversion of the private sphere through language.In the course of this epistles double address, pontiff evacuates himself as the author by connector the Blount sisters and a larger participation of interests of readers. composition all(prenominal) letter may imply a wider auditory modality in addition to an one-on-one addressee, pontiffs epistle takes the unification of these two audiences as its subject. In the appendage, pope uncoers the potential for an epistolatory community to persist beyond the boundaries of the present. From the perspective of this epistle, the supremacy of wo manpower represents a literary problem whose solution lies in the inauguration this excommunication provides into an epistolatory community that exists only at the margins of early 18 th ampere-second side of meat action.Although it is non clear whether pontiff ever sent this epistle to Teresa Blount, its informal configuration demands that one read it as a elework forcet of an grave female practice in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England. While workforce of this era lived gregariously, in the comp whatever of their fellows in the coffee ho handlings and inns of the city, women, positionly unmarried ones, were confined largely to the private or domestic sphere.1 In coffee houses, inns, and workplaces, men of equal or at least friendly classes had the ability to freely socialize with one an different. As objectives on the marriage market, it was not considered respectable or pragmatic for women to participate in these centers of social exchange (Perry 69). According to the diary of an early eighteenth century man, whom Ruth Perry quotes in her study of epistolatory fiction, women who front in public loose value on the marriage mar ket since men inevitably grow tired and weary of their beauty or other less qualifications (Perry 69).Without access to the social sphere of find out, women turned to writing letter which were at once a way of being involved with the uni measure of discourse while keeping it at a respectable arms length (Perry 69). In addition to providing a way to privately handle courtship, garner all(prenominal)owed women to constitute a community of acquaintances and friends. With the establishment of the national befool a bun in the oven Office in 1660 and the improvement of its service in the latter half(a) of the century, garner became a reliable room for women to overcome the corporal absence of friends imposed upon them by custom. The epistolary form of pontiffs numbers situates it within a practice that was not only acceptable solely encouraged among women of the period. When pontiff composed his Epistle to a Young Lady, with the work of Voiture in 1710, he wrote from t he perspective of a man feminized by dis stand-in and weaken by anti-Catholic laws.Although the epistle was considered much in public oriented than a letter in prose and was safe frequently by writers of two genders, pontiffs borderline perspective as a physically disabled Catholic suggests the relevance of the female tradition of letter writing to his published epistles. Despite his sometimes virulent attacks on women, approximately notably in the later epistle Of the citation of Women, pontiffs Catholicism and chronic ill health combine to bar him from the full enjoyment of the privileges reserved for men in his society.2 The ejection of Catholics from owning property, attending university, or holding public office limited popes access to the public sphere. Unlike other English Catholics, pope could not escape this internal exile through retiring to countrified family sustenance (Rumbold 4). pontiff suffered from Potts dis eternal sleep, a tubercular infection of& nbspthe trick out that rendered him, at least in his own mind, physically unfit for marriage. little than five feet tall and deformed by a curvature of the spine, he pope was acutely conscious of being that little Alexander the women laugh at and refused offers of marriage on more than than one occasion (Rumbold 4).In a letter to the Blount sisters in 1717, pontiff reports that his friend Lord Harcourt proposed that he marry a relative of his in financial need. pope declined the offer since he did not care to force so fine a char to give the finishing stroke to all my deformities, by the last mark of a beast, horns.3 popes horse sense of his monstrous come to the foreance highlights the grandness of his epistles and letters to women since they represented a form of friendship freed from the immediate concerns of the proboscis. In these written addresses to women, pope develops a literary practice that exploits the poetical possibilities in his limited position within some( prenominal) the public and domestic spheres of English society. His epistle to Teresa Blount is an attempt to exemplify the strategy that he proposes in heroic spans to talk terms a subordinate social position through language. afterwards discussing the work and life of Voiture in the first stanza, pontiff transitions into a discussion of literary music genres as distinct styles of being.In the only rhyme break of the poesy, Pope speaks of his life Let mine, an complimentary homophile(a) farce appear, / And more turn lifelessness than regular (lines 25-26).4 The break in rhyme amidst appear and regular playfully tag a departure from the metric body structure of the numbers in order to reinforce the narrators confide that his life appear more diverting than regular. Through hoping that his life appear as an innocent fairylike farce, Pope introduces a founding of life as a construction that one always performs before a public. Rather than being inherently an innocent gay farce, Popes narrator seeks to fabricate this appearance for an audience that will presumably be entertained. As a dramatic form whose sole object is to escape from laughter, the narrators desire to style himself as an innocent gay farce manifests Popes need to control the laughter that his body elicits.5 Popes aim of life as a poetic object in the import stanza of his poetry provides a context for the seek Blount sisters and the public to understand the notion that the subjection of women is a literary problem. Pope opens his trey stanza with the orthodontic braces, Too much your sex is by their forms confined, / Severe to all, and or so to  adult femalekind (lines 31-32).The smooth transition from discussing life in terms of genre to the subjection of adult femalekind obscures the profoundly radical nature of the notion that a l artificial of forms constitutes this state of subjection. Given the context of this couplet, the plural noun forms signifies both the rul es of social correctitude and the standards of a particular literary genre. The go alonging line, exercise, grown blind with age, must be your guide, completes the effacement of the distinction between these two connotations of form (line 33). Custom simultaneously describes a literary and social confinement that is severe to all, but nigh to womankind. Popes discussion of these formalchains within verse form suggests that his epistle seeks to exemplify a strategy for living within this state of confinement (line 42). In declaring his desire to shape his self tally to the rules of an innocent gay farce, Pope provides a model for responding to the confining forms of a repressive society. With the personal pronoun your in the phrase your sex, Pope directly engages both his addressee and the public who reads their seemingly intimate exchange.The pronoun Your label a gaolbreak in the poem from the more abstract portrait of Voiture and the narrators imitation of his form of life to the more immediate subject of the readers fate. Through introducing this personal pronoun in its possessive form, Pope posits a habitual sense of belonging among its audience to a particular sex. Since the poem culminates in a triumphant our, the phrase your sex at the opening of the third stanza reveals the developing constitution of a community defined in part by its confinement. The caesura in the second line of this couplet, Severe to all, but most to Womankind, emphasizes the increasingly level of specificity in Popes imagining of this community. While all may be readers and imitators of Voiture, only a particular sex, your sex, suffer the most from severe forms.The emergence of Popes audience as a subject of the poem through the possessive pronoun your raises the question of election which the second line of this couplet appears to answer. The third stanza of Popes epistle culminates in a call for this elected audience to reject the role of virtuous married woman and pre ssure a retired community that preserves the free innocence of life through its poetic practice (line 46 and 45). after his transformation of the audience into a part of the poem, the emotional intensity of the stanza builds into the forceful couplet Ah depart not the free Innocence of Life / For the dull glory of wife (lines 45-46).6 Pope uses innocence in the first stanza to describe Voitures wisely careless and innocently gay life (line 11). In the second stanza, Pope vows to imitate Voiture in constructing a life that appears as an innocent gay farce (line 25). The word Innocence returns in the third stanza in the form an appeal to the reader not to abandon a state of heaven that they already inhabit. The construction quit not situates the reader within a state of purity analogous to the biblical vision of a garden of Eden.Through opposing this state of moral purity to the dull aureole of a virtuous Wife, Pope suggests that a virtuous life is a confining form made neces sary by pride. Made slaves by honor, women pursue the position of wife to achieve the status of virtue bestowed upon them by a patriarchal English society (line 36). The crucial negation quit not implores the female reader to withdrawal from her virtuous and honorable position in society in order to realize the free innocence of life within an epistolary community of friends. Following the emotional climax of the exclamatory couplet, Pope offers a more subdued and prescriptive image of a state of voluptuous retirement. With extensive knowledge of ancient Greek and popish poetry, Pope is certainly aware that his portrait of a retired life of ease invokes the Horatian notion of otium as well as the related legacy of the Epicurean garden. In response to the tyranny of marriage, Popes speaker advises the reader, Nor let false shows, or empty titles please / Aim not at joy, but hiatus content with ease (lines 47-48).A comma marks the caesura in each line after the fourth syllable, whi ch creates a sense of equivalence between the two negations Nor let false shows and Aim not at joy. This equivalence associates joy with the false shows that lead women to unknowingly pass on to their own servitude in their stubborn pursuit of fame. The narrator asks the reader to rest content with ease, or a more stable sense of retiring(a)ime founded on a withdrawal from rather than a fulfillment of physical desire. Popes conception of a virtuous withdrawal from a life of servitude echoes Epicurus advice to his younger friend Menoeceus to reject the pleasure of the profligate and embrace the simple life in which the body is free from pain and the mind from anxiety.7 In the absence of pain and anxiety, Menoeceus can seek to cultivate a stable and just experience of pleasure that Epicurus terms ataraxia. Popes injunction to rest content expresses the foundation of this state of ease in a withdrawal from the social position of a virtuous wife. In asking his reader to rest or r emain within a state of free innocence, Pope reveals the exemplary function of a poem that must show how one accesses this already existing freedom of life.Since Pope makes his appeal for a retired life of ease in a published epistle in heroic couplet form, it appears that his conception of a withdrawn community is not entirely separate from the political sphere. Although he primarily discusses Popes later, satiric epistles, William Dowlings argument that Augustan poets politicize the private sphere through their epistolary practice in fact holds most true in Popes early epistles to ladies.8 In a earth threatened by fragmentation and alienation, Dowling explains, Pope resurrects the memory of an innocent community by writing not merely epistles but verse epistles, poems in which the isolation symbolized by epistolary solitude is thence impertinent and redeemed by verse as an institutionalized mode of public utterance (Dowling 11).From a state of solitude intensified by his status as a physically disabled Catholic, Pope provides his friend an utilization of how to engage with the public without becoming subjected to it. The formal structure of his epistle redeems his solitude by inscribing the reading public or the epistolary audience as a presence within a private letter to a friend (Dowling 12). While the formal structure of the Epistle to command Blount, with the Works of Voiture undoubtedly addresses a public audience, it interpellates this audience not necessarily as members of a pre-capitalist traditionalistic society, as Dowling believes, but rather as potential constituents of an always viable epistolary community (Dowling 15).As a result of his overly unbending conception of the opposition between solipsism and community, Dowling fails to appreciate that the solitary withdrawal from which Pope writes acts as a condition of his imagined or interpellated communitys possibility. In his epistle to lack Blount, Pope appeals to the public through his advice to a young maam troubled by her precarious position within the marriage market. He implores her to reject the role of virtuous wife, which would subject her to a tyrant and stymie the constitution of literary friendships (lines 46 and 40). Popes portrait of Pamela, a young woman who succeeds in the marriage market, in the fourth stanza of this epistle depicts the repress confinement of marriage as an obstacle to any form of literary self-fashioning. Through the fulfillment of her prayers, Pamela is cursed with the false shows and empty titles of a flourishing young woman (lines 49 and 47). Pope emphasizes the paradoxical nature of her proceeding in the following couplet She glares in balls, front-boxes, and the Ring, / A vain, unquiet, glittering, wretched matter (lines 53-54).Pamelas status as a married upper-class woman allows her to appear at dances, plays, and the fashionable ring in Hyde Park without any damage to her reputation. The verb glares establishes th e importance of vision to a couplet that culminates in transforming Pamela into a purely physical or seen object. Through gaining her right to see and be seen in public places of entertainment, Pamela unknowingly submits to her own objectification. By the second line of the couplet, Pamela no longer glares. The list of adjectives, vain, unquiet, glittering, and wretched, appears to simultaneously describe the public venues set in the first line and the thing that concludes the second. As the wife of a wealthy man, Pamela exists within these public spaces as an Ornament, or a rarefied declaration of her husbands ability to maintain her in a state of idleness (Rumbold 1). Although each of these arenas should offer the luck for reciprocal gazing, it seems that the power of the male gaze in the public sphere transforms the once rank Pamela into nothing more than a wretched thing. Without the capacity to look, and hence pick up the beingness, Pamela looses her ability to fashion her self as a subject.The cautionary tale of Pamela who fails to follow Popes strategy of simultaneous withdrawal and engagement with the world would have been forthwith relevant to Teresa Blount, the poems original addressee. Pope composed the Epistle to a Young Lady, with the Work of Voiture in the same yr that Teresas father died and it became clear that the Blount estate could not meet the obligations displace in his will for his daughters dowries (Rumbold 60). Within a Catholic community that snarl its persecution most keenly in financial terms, Teresas lack of a dowry that reflected her family shockings heritage limited her marriage prospects to men from less dignified backgrounds (Rumbold 58). During this period, Teresa and her sister Patty participated in an epistolary plot of ground with fellow Catholic aristocrats that was modeled on the Rambouillet salon of early seventeenth century Paris. In letters inspired by the entreatying derision of Voiture, who was one of the most well-known members of this salon, the eligible children of a persecuted aristocracy practiced the art of courtship.Popes portrait of a young woman cursed by the fulfillment of her prayers undoubtedly pleased Teresa since she had only outside odds of succeeding in her game of courtship. As a landless cripple, Pope was not a part of this game and thus had a sense of isolation from the marriage market in which some of his friends were actively engaged (Rumbold 53). In her analysis of Popes Epistle to except Blount, Valerie Rumbold suggests that it was tempt or desirable for Pope to undermine the vested interests of more fortunate men with his scathing critique of marriage (53). While this may indeed have been true, it appears rather cynical to allow this to be the primary means of construe his call for a community constituted by a late form of human relations. In the fifth stanza of the poem, Pope conceptualizes the poetic practice that will bring this community of friend s into existence as candid sense of humor (line 61). Pope reconfigures good temper, which was conventionally understood at the time as exhibiting a proper form of behavior or disposition, into a literary practice of establishing friendships through letters.If the reader falls victim to the marriage immortal Hymen, the speaker advises Good learning ability teaches charms to last, / Still makes sore conquests, and maintains the past (lines 61-62). After warning his audience not to trust its now resistless charms, Pope posits good humour as a means to teach or train charms to last (line 59). When read out of context, this conception of good humour may appear as practical advice for a wife who need to establish a lasting relationship with her spouse. Within the context of a poem framed by an invocation of a dead author, Popes reconfiguration of good humour must be read as form of writing that creates a certain temporal confusion. The adverb Still that begins the second line of th is couplet emphasizes the lasting fictitious character of writing, which continually establishes friendships with young readers. The new conquests of good humour occur within the present as a result of its preservation in language. Following the dictates of good humour, Pope gives space to the past in order to allow it to become the present. Through resurrecting the past in the name of Vincent de Voiture, Pope exemplifies the practice of good humour through which he hopes to constitute a new community of friends.The couplet that follows the discussion of the necessity of good humour in marriage marks an penetrating departure from what may have appeared as practical advice for a young married woman. Pope begins the next stanza, Thus Voitures early care still shone the same, / and Monthausier was only changed in name (lines 69-70). The adverb thus equates the preceding conception of good humour as the only means to secure a relationship with Voitures epistolary do for his marr ied friend. With the continuity between these two stanzas, Pope seeks to accentuate the literary quality of good humour. Voitures early care carry ons to his life-long devotion, much of it expressed in letters, to the daughter of the noble Madame de Rambouillet. As an untitled son of a wealthy wine merchandiser and therefore a part of the bourgeoisie, it was not practicable for Voiture to publicly effect his roll in the hay for Julie de Rambouillet. When Julie finally consented to marry an eligible long-time admirer, the Duc de Monthausier, at the age of thirty-two, she left over(p) behind a devastated Voiture with whom she maintained an active epistolary friendship until his remainder in 1648.The publication of an English translation of Voitures Familiar and well-behaved Letters in 1696 and again in 1700 created a sensation in England that gave new life to the epistolary relation of these two shaftrs.9 Pope gives space to the life of Voiture by first invoking his past love and then allowing him to love again in the perpetually innocent and living field of language. After Julie de Rambouillet becomes the property of the Duc de Monthausier, Voitures love or early care still shone the same because he had established a literary confederation with the object of his devotion. In the second couplet of this stanza, Pope shifts to a present sift and a plural subject to describe the reanimation of this epistolary love By this, evn now they live, evn now they charm, / Their wit still sparkling and their flames still warm (lines 71-72).Pope marks his shift from Voitures past with the By this, which allows Voitures letters to make new conquests in the name of a loving community in the present. The crying construction of the first line of the couplet emphasizes the presence of these lovers in the present. Popes hospitality to the names and hence memory of these lovers allows them to live and charm in the present. The repetition of still in the second line of the couplet reinforces the sense that the care and charm these lovers exhibited constituted good humour. The still attributed to good humour returns to depict the continual warmth and sparkling wit that allows this epistolary love to not only live again, but also lucubrate within the community of the present.In hosting the name of Voiture within his epistle to set down Blount, Pope exemplifies a form of literary friendship that both preserves and promotes a poetic community. The exemplary nature of Popes epistle consists in resurrecting and joining this community rather than unearthing Voiture as an exemplum of epistolary love. From the perspective of Popes epistle, Voitures letters demonstrate a misplaced desire to physically possess Julie de Rambouillet. In one of his translated letters to Julie, Voiture demonstrates his complete lack of ease with the desperate plea Do not think that our love is a whit the more private, for the pains we take to conceal it the Dejection which is clear in my Countenance, speaks plainer than anybody can do. Let us then lay apart Discretion which cost us so dear, and give me, after Dinner, an opportunity of seeing you, if you would have me live (70).Since Voiture confesses in another letter to Julie that all my words to her will bear a double construction, his threat of publicly disclosing their illicit love affair should be as at once playful and menacing (70). According to the logic of Popes epistle to Miss Blount, the problem with this plea is not the intensity of its passion, but rather the use it makes of the letter form. In her study of the development of epistolary fiction, Ruth Perry notes that letters always gesture elsewhere because the climactic events they discuss remain beyond words (86). While Voiture uses this attribute of letters in hopes of provoking a physical encounter with his loved object, Pope employs his epistle as a means of constituting a community made possible by the physical absence of its membe rs.The impossibility of Voitures love for Julie and its resulting confinement within the field of letters explains why Pope chooses to address Miss Blount and the broader public through the work of this slighted lover. As a bourgeoisie man with a stature three inches below the middle one, Voiture was restricted, perhaps against his own intentions, to practicing the good humour of an epistolary lover (21). Through appealing to the internal audience of first Teresa and then Patty Blount with the work of Voiture, Pope interpellates them as his epistolary lovers in the throw of Julie de Rambouillet. In a letter written only a some years after the original composition of the Epistle to a Young Lady, with the Work of Voiture, Pope asks the unmarried Betty Marriot to Cast your eyes upon Paper, Madam, there you may look innocently.10 Rather than seeking to provoke a physical consummation of his passion, Pope implores Betty to indulge in a love restricted to the boundaries of the rascal. In his epistle to the Blounts, Pope further abstracts himself from his addressee by offering the lines of Voiture as a mediating space in which epistolary lovers can meet.The opening couplet of Popes Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture evacuates his self through a reanimation of the lines and life of Voiture. Pope immediately shifts the attention of the reader away from his relationship to the addressee In these gay thoughts the loves and graces shine, / And all the writer lives in every line (lines 1-2). The preposition in begins the poem through establishing its location in the thoughts stimulated by the work of an author share by the Pope and his audience. As a widely read writer of letters, Voiture represented an institutional figure that Pope draws on to situate his poem within a space that is irreducible to either writer or reader. Since the loves and graces shine in the gay thoughts that Voiture continues to inspire, this opening couplet configures the entire p oem as an effect of Voitures work. All the writer lives in every line refers therefore to both the widely published work of Voiture and the particular verse epistle to follow. The association of light with the verb shine communicates a sense of life force that Pope reinforces with the verb confidential informatione that concludes his opening stanza.In the final couplet of his opening stanza, Pope emphasizes the always potentially living nature of language by situating his epistle within the experience of reading and thus living with Voiture. The impetus for Popes conception of an epistolary community lies in the transformation of death into stay in the following couplet The smiles and loves had died in Voitures death, / barely that for ever in his lines they breathe (lines 19-20). Voiture played the trifle, life, away through an epistolary practice that enabled his charms to exist within a linguistic space that is always potentially living (line 12).Pope establishes a numbe r of breaks in the awkwardly constructed final line of this stanza to isolate and hence highlight they breathe. Since Voiture consecrated his love in letters, it can forever be reanimated by the admiring breath of later readers. In the final stanza of his epistle, Pope returns to the communal experience of reading Voiture in order to triumphantly reveal the power of his loving community in letters.Pope concludes his Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Work of Voiture with a corporeal conception of reading that appeals to his double audience to join an abstracted or retired community of readers. The affective exchange between Voiture and you in one of Popes final couplets offers an image of reading that threatens to dissolve the very category of the reader. Pope writes, Pleased, while with smiles his happy lines you view, / And finds a fairer Rambouillet in you (lines 75-76). Miss Blount, or any other reader, physically reflects the happy lines of Voiture with smiles that mark her mater ial participation in the continuing existence of these lines.Through hosting the work of Voiture within his own epistle, Pope enables it to assume agency within the present. Voitures charming good humour returns to interpellate Miss Blount and the broader epistolary audience as a fairer Rambouillet. While Voitures desire to possess Julie had obstructed the complete transformation of his love into language, his ghost capitalizes on the distance of death to find an even more innocent love in the eternally available present (line 74). In identifying Voitures present reader as a fairer or more innocent object of his devotion, Pope crystallizes the paradoxical logic of an epistle that measures hope by the amount of distance it can establish from the present.Pope relinquishes ownership over his self in order to provide his guest, Voiture, with a space to breathe within the crowded field of language. Through this act of self-effacement, Pope exemplifies the poetic process through which one transforms oneself into a member of an epistolary community. In the final couplet of his poem, Pope announces the coming of a new community of friends And dead as living, tis our authors pride, / Still to charm those who charm the world beside (lines 79-80). The shift from the pronoun you in the previous couplet to the collective our marks the accomplishment of his interpellation of a new epistolary community.His interpellation of both Miss Blount and the broader public as readers of Voiture acts as the condition of this communitys possibility since it is guaranteed by a collective ownership over the language of the past. As readers of the same happy lines, these interpellated or called for various(prenominal)s share an affective bond that allows them to call a collective ownership over Voiture. Once the interpellated individual acknowledges his claim for Voitures always living charm, he can demonstrate this responsibility through the literary practice of good humour. The fairer Rambouillet thus charms the world beside in recognition of the past which she simultaneously honors and perpetuates in her own epistolary production within the present.Pope surrenders all claims to his self in the Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Work of Voiture in recognition of his place within a community founded by its hospitable relationship to the past. The address of first Teresa and then Patty Blount with this epistle represents an act of friendship that asks these unmarried women to realize the poetic potential within their exclusion from the centers of social life in early eighteenth century England. With his acknowledgement of the presence of a broader reading public, Pope seeks to begin the process of constituting a community in which he can join the Blount sisters as a loving friend. As a community made possible by the confining forms of a fragmented and patriarchal society, Popes vision of an epistolary collective necessarily resides at the very margins of life.1 Perry , Ruth. Women, Letters, and the Novel, mod York AMS Press, 1980 page 69. 2 Rumbold, Valerie. Womens Place in Popes World, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1989 page 2. 3 Pope, Alexander. Letter to Teresa and Martha Blount, Alexander Pope the Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2006) page 151. 4 Pope, Alexander. Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture, Alexander Pope the Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford Oxford University Press, 2006) pages 46-48. All citations refer to this edition unless otherwise noted. 5 Oxford English Dictionary. Farce, Oxford Oxford University Press, 1989. 6 Pope, Alexander. Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture, Alexander Pope Minor Poems, Twickenham Edition, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (New Haven Yale University Press, 1954) pages 62-65. Although they both claim to have incorporated the 1735 revisions, there is a discrepancy in this couplet between the epistle in the Minor Poems collection and the Major Works of Pope. I have quoted the former in deference to its greater authority and my gustatory modality for it. 7 Epicurus. Letter to Menoeceus, Letters, Principal Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings, trans. Russell M. Greer (New York Macmillan Publishing Company, 1964) page 57. 8 Dowling, William. The Epistolary Moment the Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century write Epistle, Princeton Princeton University Press, 1991. 9 Voiture, Vincent. Familiar and courtly letters written by Monsieur Voiture to persons of the greatest honour, wit, and quality of both sexes in the court of France, trans. Mr. Dryden and Mr. Dennis (London Printed for Sam Briscoe, 1700). 10 Pope, Alexander. Letter to Miss Marriot, The commensurateness of Alexander Pope Volume 1, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1956) page 205-206. Quoted by Rumbold, page 50.