Poor Pope, as he says in the
verses on his own death,--
will grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day;
and they were the only friends to whom he attributes sincere sorrow.
Meanwhile two volumes of Miscellanies, the joint work of the four wits,
appeared in June, 1727, and a third in March, 1728. A fourth, hastily
got up, was published in 1732. They do not appear to have been
successful. The copyright of the three volumes was sold for 225_l._, of
which Arbuthnot and Gay received each 50_l._, whilst the remainder was
shared between Pope and Swift; and Swift seems to have given his part,
according to his custom, to the widow of a respectable Dublin
bookseller. Pope's correspondence with the publisher shows that he was
entrusted with the financial details, and arranged them with the
sharpness of a practised man of business. The whole collection was made
up in great part of old scraps, and savoured of bookmaking, though Pope
speaks complacently of the joint volumes, in which he says to Swift, "We
look like friends, side by side, serious and merry by turns, conversing
interchangeably, and walking down, hand in hand, to posterity." Of the
various fragments contributed by Pope, there is only one which need be
mentioned here--the treatise on Bathos in the third volume, in which he
was helped by Arbuthnot. He told Swift privately that he had "entirely
methodized and in a manner written it all," though, he afterwards chose
to denounce the very same statement as a lie when the treatise brought
him into trouble.
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