Opening it, I found, by the title page,
the book to be The Poetical Works of Elijah
Fenton: With the Life of the Author.
Embellished with Superb Engravings. London:
Printed for the Booksellers. Seventeen
hundred and odd. The superb engravings
I found comprised in one bald little plate,
in which an overgrown Cupid was
represented fighting in a most ungallant manner
for the possession of a bow with a lady with
powdered hair, a short waist, and no shoes or
stockings. The superb engraving was
surrounded by a border, in which more bows and
arrows, a comic mask, some clouds, the
Roman fasces, a wreath of laurel, and the
Royal arms, were tastefully intermixed.
Lastly, on the fly-leaf of the cover, it was
recorded that Samuel Burrell was the happy
possessor of Fenton fifty-seven years ago—
said Samuel, in the pride of possession,
expressing the most uncharitable wishes towards
whoever stole this book. Beneath, there was
some little private trade-mark—a large
figure of four and a small d; which, together,
led me to suppose that the book must have
been, in the long run, stolen from Burrell, or
that after his death it had been, at the sale
of his effects, disposed of by public auction,
and that ultimately it had been offered for
sale at a bookstall for fourpence.

Now, who was Fenton? I hope ladies and
gentlemen will not be ashamed to avow
their ignorance if they never heard of Fenton
before. A man may have read eight hours
a day for half a century and have never
read Fenton: a man may be as wise as
Solomon, and Fenton still be a sealed book to
him. I came across, the other day, some
remarks of Fuller's about schoolmasters. He
mentions "that gulf of learning, Bishop
Andrews." How many ordinarily well-read
men could tell anything now about Bishop
Andrews, and his gulf of learning? The
gulf has swallowed him up altogether, and
he is learned at the bottom of Lethe.

All that I had ever known of Fenton
before I took his poetical works in the swop
with the cross-barred waistcoat, was that his
life had been written by Doctor Johnson in
the Lives of the Poets, and that I had always
skipped it in turning over that voluminous
work in quest of the glorious biographies of
Milton and Savage; next, that Fenton had
something to do with Pope. Whether he was
Pope's Homer, or one of the heroes of Pope's
Dunciad, I was, Heaven help me, quite uncertain.
I am proud now, after studying his life,
to inform my readers that he was Mr. Pope's
friend.

I know, now too, that Mr. Pope's friend was
the hero of a joke—a joke, not quite seasoned
enough for the spicy company of Joe Miller,
but risible enough to find admission to some
"Wit's companion," or "Collection of humourous
and diverting anecdotes."

"Fenton," says the historian, "was one
day in the company of Broome, his associate,
and Ford * a clergyman, at that time too well
known, whose abilities, instead of furnishing
convivial merriment to the voluptuous and
dissolute, might have enabled him to excel
among the virtuous and the wise. They
determined all to see "The Merry Wives of
Windsor," which was acted that night; and
Fenton, as a dramatic poet, took them all to
the stage door, where the doorkeeper inquiring
who they were, was told they were three
very necessary men: Ford, Broome, and Fenton;
as composing a part of the characters
in the comedy: and it is to be observed that
the name in the play which Pope restored to
Brook was then Broome. It is not stated
whether the door-keeper admitted the three
very necessary men for their joke's sake; nor
do I know of what stuff, penetrable or not,
the janitors of theatres were made of in the
reign of Queen Anne; but I should not
counsel any humourist of the present day to
essay penetration through the stage door of
a London theatre on the strength of a witticism.
I am afraid, even, that the funniest of
government clerks, if his name happened to
be Box, and his friend's, in the post-office,
Cox, would be sternly refused ingress at the
stage-door of the Lyceum, were he to claim
admission on the score of self and friend
being two "very necessary men."

* Hogarth's "Parson Ford."

Let us see how Elijah Fenton came to be
Mr. Pope's friend, and what his friendship
brought him. It appears by my book, the
narratives of Jacobs and Shiels, and the
Life by Doctor Johnson, that Elijah was
descended from an ancient and honourable
family at Shelton, near Newcastle-under-Lyne;
that his father possessed a considerable
estate, but that he, being a younger son, was
precluded from heirship; was educated at a
grammar school; then entered as a student
at Jesus College, Cambridge; but retaining
an attachment to the family of the Stuarts
refused to qualify himself for public employment
by taking the necessary oaths, and left
the university without a degree. The maladroit
Elijah thus managed to make a stumble
upon the very threshold of life. As a
non-juror he was not even eligible for the post of
a tide-waiter, or a parish constable. Mediocrity
seemed determined to mark him for her
own.

"As obscurity," his biographer finely
remarks, "is the inseparable attendant upon
poverty" (of which I am not quite certain,
though I know that poverty is the inseparable
attendant upon obscurity), "the incidents of
his life cannot be accurately traced from year
to year, or the means traced from which he
derived a support." With what sonorous
comprehensiveness does the historian gloss
over Mr. Pope's friend's probably desperate
battle for bread. Poor Elijah! Who shall say
how many times he slept upon bulks, or
among the cabbage stalks in Fleet Market,