Columbia Library columns (v.14(1964Nov-1965May))

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  v.14,no.1(1964:Nov): Page 14  



14                                  Robert Halsband

session both of an example of Pope iconography and of a Pope
autograph manuscript.

The Fortran

The portrait of Pope (reproduced here) is signed George
Lumley, 13 April 1750. Lumley was a solicitor by profession
and a painter by avocation; he lived in the city of York where
he died in 1768 at the age of sixty. Since Pope lived until 1744
the two men's lifetimes overlapped. But Pope did not sit for this
portrait (as its date makes certain); instead Lumley copied it
from an important one now lost. Its archetype was an oil painted
by WiUiam Hoare of Bath soon after Christmas, 1739, when
Pope was visiting his friend Ralph Allen there. The original,
commissioned by Robert (later Earl) Nugent, can be traced
until it disappeared from sight in 1917. The Lumley copy differs
from its parent portrait in being darker and more Italianate in
style—as we know from comparing it with Hoare's other sur¬
viving portraits of Pope. A handsome picture in its own right—
particularly as restored by Ingrid Held—the Lumley Pope gives
us a close look at the poet at the height of his fame.'

The Mmiuscript

Among Pope's Minor Poems in the recent Twickenham Edi¬
tion is an eight-line poem entitled "Inscription on a Grotto of
Shells at Crux-Easton. The Work of Nine young Ladies" (p.
353), included only as an attributed piece. The editors' caution
arises from the fact that the poem, first printed after Pope's death,
lacks definite proof of his authorship. But the newly acquired
autograph at Columbia, which is a fair copy entirely in his hand
and signed, rescues the poem from the limbo of probability; it
can now be firmly placed in the canon of his authentic works.
The provenance of the manuscript supports this certainty, for it

11 am indebted to Professor Wimsatt for some of the above information.
  v.14,no.1(1964:Nov): Page 14