JAMES CROSSLEY.
Bunyan and the "Visions of Heaven and Hell" (Vol. iii., pp. 70. 89. 289. 467.).
—The work referred to by your correspondents is so manifestly not the Composition of John Bunyan that it is extraordinary that the title-page, which was evidently adopted to get off the book, should ever have imposed upon anybody. The question, however, put by your correspondents F. R. A. and N. H., as to who G. L. was, has not yet been answered. The person referred to by these initials is the real author of the book, who was George Larkin, a printer and author, and great ally and friend of the redoubted John Dunton, who gives a long character of him, in his Life and Errors, in his enumeration of London printers. (See Life and Errors, edit. 1705, p. 326.)
"Mr. Larkin, Senior—He has been my acquaintance for Twenty years, and the first printer I had in London. He formerly writ a Vision of Heaven, &c. (which contains many nice and curious thoughts), and has lately published an ingenious Essay on the noble Art and Mystery of Printing. Mr. Larkin is my alter ego, or rather my very self in a better edition."
The book itself was first published about 1690, and went through many editions in the early part of the last century.
JAMES CROSSLEY.
Pope's Translations or Imitations of Horace (Vol. i., p. 230.; Vol. iv., pp. 58. 122.).
—I am much obliged to MR. CROSSLEY for having corrected the error (for which I cannot account) in the title of the pamphlet in question, which was certainly not by "the author of the Critical History of England," and certainly was by Dennis, as is marked by Pope's own hand in the copy now before me. As MR. CROSSLEY puts hypothetically the correctness of my quotation, I subjoin the whole passages.
"After having been for fifteen years as it were an imitator, he has made no proficiency. His first imitations, though bad, are rather better than the succeeding, and this last Imitation of HORACE the most execrable of them all."—P. 7.
Again: