One month later, on 22 November, Admiral Vernon captured Porto Bello, the port in which the guarda-costas had been fitted out. The news of this victory did not arrive in England until nearly four months later on 13 March 1740, but it brought with it great public excitement and jubilation. Thus by the end of 1740 the revenge on the Spanish had begun. Those who had demanded war seemed justified and Walpole had been discredited. This is the political background against which these pamphlets are set.
Both pamphlets have been attributed to James Miller, but the evidence for such attribution is cumulative rather than definitive.[ 19 ] Are these things so? has been far more frequently attributed to Miller than The Great Man's Answer. The earliest attribution is found in D. E. Baker's Biographia Dramatica which, although it was not published till 1812, was originally compiled by Baker sometime before 1764.[ 20 ] Robert Watt also lists Are these things so? as Miller's work in his Bibliotheca Britannica, Edinburgh, 1824.[ 21 ] The entries under Miller in the CBEL and DNB both accept these attributions as does the British Museum Catalogue. The evidence for attributing The Great Man's Answer to Miller is far more slender and rests largely on the publisher's claim on the title page, which may well have been made for the sake of promotion, that it is "By the Author of Are these things so?".
James Miller, 1706-1744, is better known as a comic dramatist than as a poet. He was the son of a clergyman from Upcerne in Dorset, and was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, where he wrote a comedy, The Humours of Oxford, which was successfully performed at Drury Lane in January 1730. On leaving Oxford he had been expected by his relations to go into business, but "not being able to endure the servile drudgery it demanded," he took holy orders and continued to write plays "to increase his finances."[ 22 ] From 1730 until his death in 1744 he wrote ten plays, several of which were performed with considerable success.[ 23 ]
But it is as a poet that we are primarily interested in Miller. He was the author of several occasional poems of which his Harlequin Horace, or the Art of Modern Poetry, 1731, was the best known. This poem, yet another imitation of Horace's Ars Poetica is an attack on John Rich, the manager of Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent-Garden. The poem is ironically full of perverse modern advice on how to write poetry. Miller adopts the persona of a modern Grub Street poet who scorns the classical values. Consequently Pope, who insists on standards of excellence, is seen by the persona as the great enemy of modern poets. At the same time it is quite clear that for Miller himself Pope is the greatest of poets. The poem includes an attack on Walpole (ll. 209-216), and perhaps it was this that led the agents of the Ministry to make him the large offer referred to in the biography of Miller found in Cibber's Lives. But, as the anonymous writer of this life goes on to point out, Miller "had virtue sufficient to withstand the temptation, though his circumstances at that time were far from being easy."[ 24 ]
A second verse satire in the manner of Horace, Seasonable Reproof, 1735, has also been attributed to Miller. The poem is a general satire on Britain's "State of Reprobation," and only makes a passing glance at Walpole. London has been so forsaken by people all rushing to the Italian opera that
By Excisemen, it might now be taken,
And great Sir Bob ride through, and save his Bacon (ll. 6-7).
But more significant in our context is that, as Maynard Mack has shown, the author creates a speaker "who by his careful echoings of the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot seems to labor to be mistaken for Pope."[ 25 ]
If Miller was the author of both Seasonable Reproof and Are these things so? his fascination with the persona of the poet in his grotto emerges as no sudden whim of wit, but as a continuing concern with the symbolic significance of Pope's actual life. Furthermore, the poet who attacked Walpole so violently in October 1740 emerges as no upstart Patriot cashing in on Walpole's current unpopularity, but as a consistent and courageous opponent of Walpole since at least 1731.
In Are these things so? Pope is imagined to be speaking throughout, although he in turn imagines what Walpole might say at various points. The poem is full of allusions and references intended to support the pretense that Pope is speaking. In line eight the speaker says his luxury is "lolling in my peaceful Grot"; in lines fifteen and sixteen he echoes Pope's famous claim in To Fortescue that he is "TO VIRTUE ONLY and HER FRIENDS, A FRIEND,"[ 26 ] when he says:
Close shut my Cottage-Gate, where none pretends
To lift the Latch but Virtue and her Friends;