NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[ 1 ] H. R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England. 1726-1775 (Oxford, 1932), p. 61.
[ 2 ] The London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 23 October 1740. "This Day is Published. Are these things so? The previous question from an Englishman in his Grotto, to a Great Man at Court."
[ 3 ] The London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 8 November 1740. "This Day is Published. Yes, they are: Being an answer to Are these things so?"
[ 4 ] The Daily Gazetteer, 15 November 1740. "This Day is Published. What of That! Occasioned by a Pamphlet intituled Are these things so? And its Answer, Yes, They are:"
[ 5 ] The London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 17 November 1740. "Tomorrow will be published. The Weather-Menders. A proper Answer to Are these things so? By Mr. Spiltimber."
[ 6 ] The Daily Gazetteer, 22 November 1740. "This Evening will be Published; The Second Edition of What of That!"
[ 7 ] I have been unable to find an advertisement for this pamphlet, but it must have been published at the end of November or very early in December since Have at you All (see following footnote) lists it as one of the pamphlets it is replying to.
[ 8 ] The London Magazine, December 1740. The Monthly Catalogue. Item 13. "Have at you all. By the Author of Yes they are."
This listing can only be taken as giving a terminal date. The pamphlet may well have been published in late November. Are these things so?, for example, is listed in the Monthly Catalogue for November.
[ 9 ] The London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 1 December 1740. "Tomorrow, at Noon, will be published. What Things? or, An Impartial Inquiry What Things are so, and What Things are not so. Occasion'd by two late Poems, the one entitled Are these things so? And the other entitled Yes, they are."
[ 10 ] The Daily Post, 6 December 1740. "This Day is Published. (The Second Edition, corrected; with the Addition of twenty lines omitted in the former Impressions) Are these things so? The previous question from an Englishman in his Grotto to a Great Man at Court."
[ 11 ] The Daily Post, 18 December 1740. "This Day is Published. The Great Man's Answer. In a Dialogue between his Honour and the Englishman in his Grotto. By the author of Are these things so?"
[ 12 ] The London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 20 December 1740. "This Day is Published. A Supplement to a late excellent Poem, entitled Are these things so?"
[ 13 ] The Daily Post, 23 January 1741. "This Day is Published. The Third Edition. They are Not."
[ 14 ] At the same time the South Sea Company agreed to pay a duty of 25% on all profits to the King of Spain. It was the question of the payment of this duty for illegal trips that became the basis of Spain's later claim for reparation. These details are taken from William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, 3 vols. (London, 1798), I, 589.
[ 15 ] Coxe, I, 579.
[ 16 ] These figures are taken from H.W.V. Temperley, "Chapter II, The Age of Walpole and the Pelhams," The Cambridge Modern History, ed. A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero, and Stanley Leathes (Cambridge, 1909), VI, 66.
[ 17 ] Coxe, I, 617.
[ 18 ] Coxe, I, 618 n.
[ 19 ] I have been unable to do any more to settle the authorship and have had to be content here with presenting the evidence.
[ 20 ] D. E. Baker, I. Reed, and S. Jones, Biographia Dramatica, 3 vols. (London, 1812), I, ii, 512-515.
[ 21 ] Robert Watt, Bibliotheca Britannica, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1824), II, 670.
[ 22 ] Most of the details in this brief biography, including these quotations, are taken from "The Life of the Revd. Mr. James Millar," The Lives of the Poets of Great-Britain and Ireland, By Mr. Theophilus Cibber, and other hands (London, 1753), V, 332-334.
[ 23 ] One of these, The Man of Taste, 1735, has sometimes been mistakenly confused with a pamphlet written three years earlier, Mr. Taste, The Poetical Fop, which viciously attacked Pope. See James T. Hillhouse, "The Man of Taste," MLN, XLIII (1928), 174-176. There is no evidence that Miller ever attacked Pope and, indeed, his political and literary sympathies put him strongly on Pope's side.
[ 24 ] Cibber, p. 333.
[ 25 ] Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City (Toronto, 1969), p. 190. Mack is the first critic to pay any attention to these pamphlets and this reprint is largely offered to supplement his illuminating and suggestive book.
[ 26 ] A. Pope, The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated (London, 1733), l. 121. It is perhaps interesting to note that according to J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope 1711-1744 (London, 1969), p. xlviii, "No other line more infuriated the dunces, it was for them Pope's ultimate hypocrisy."
[ 27 ] Walpole visited Pope sometime in the summer of 1725. See Pope's letter to Fortescue, 23 September 1725. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), II, 323.
[ 28 ] For a full account of the ways in which Pope's actual retired life in his Twickenham villa, garden, and grotto became, in the 1730's, emblematic of the ideal of cultivated virtue, see Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City, especially Chapter VI. According to Mack, Pope becomes "spiritual patron of the poetical opposition to Walpole" (p. 190).
[ 29 ] James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1953), p. 91.
[ 30 ] This assumption is based on Johnson's comment in his life of Pope that "the whole process was probably intended rather to intimidate Pope than to punish Whitehead." S. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), III, 181.
[ 31 ] The Gentleman's Magazine, IX, 104.
[ 32 ] The London Daily Post and General Advertiser, Saturday, 15 November 1740. "WHEREAS it has been generally reported that I am the Author of a Poem, lately publish'd, entitled ARE THESE THINGS SO? I think it necessary to assure the Public, that the said Report is without any Foundation, being entirely a Stranger both to that Piece and the Author of it. P. Whitehead."
[ 33 ] "There is just now come out another imitation of the same original [Ars Poetica], Harlequin Horace, which has a good deal of humour." Sherburn, III, 173.
[ 34 ] See Fog's Weekly Journal, 14 April 1733.
[ 35 ] For an account of the publication of these verses see Mack, p. 70, n. 1.
[ 36 ] It should be noted that the pamphlet is full of typographical errors. Lines 104-106, p. 6, should be prefixed by "G.M.," since Walpole must be the speaker, as should the last two lines in the poem, lines 251-252, p. 13. Page ten mistakenly carries the number twelve at the top of the page.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The facsimiles of Are these things so? (1740; the Second Edition, corrected; 163.n.57) and of The Great Man's Answer (1740; 11630.h.50) are reproduced from copies in the British Museum by kind permission of the Trustees.