Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Seven autograph letters, six signed (‘A. Pope’), to his lawyer and close friend William Fortescue, Twickenham and n.p., [February 1723/4-4 April 1743]
12 pages, various sizes (155 x 97mm to 235 x 183mm), of which five are bifolia and six with integral address panels. Provenance: Arthur A. Houghton, Jnr (1906-1990); his sale, Christie's, 11 & 12 June 1980, lot 383.

Letters giving a view into Pope’s thoughts on a range of literary, social and personal topics, freely expressed to a close friend during a fertile period of his career. Pope directs Fortescue to draft an agreement with Bernard Lintot for his translation of the Odyssey ([February 1723/4]), reports on the progress of his Moral Essays (21 September 1736), mourns his mother on the day of her death (7 June 1733), and provides detail on the social life which he regarded with such ambivalence: ‘I shall dye of Hospitality […]. Those who think I live in a Study and make Poetry my business, are more mistaken than if they took me for a Prince of Topinambou’ (23 August 1735).

It is indeed a grief to me w^ch I cannot express, & w^ch I should hate my own heart if it did not feel, & yet wish no friend I have ever shd feel. All our Passions are Inconsistencies, & our very Reason is no better. But we are what we were made to be ... (7 June 1733).

... I sent yesterday all ab^t after you in hopes to fix an hour for us to meet & chatt, not upon business, but joy & society. [...] In y^e meantime I beg you to draw up a draught of an article on y^e enclosed leaves between Mr L. & me, & to speak to him to give you his former agreem^t for y^e Iliad, w^ch will help y^e wording of some part, better than this Scroll. The purport however of this is clear (n.d.).

These letters provide an excellent specimen of Pope’s extensive correspondence with Fortescue, an intimate of both Pope and Gay, and the addressee of Pope’s First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (1733). The common thread of these letters is Pope’s deep pleasure in their friendship: ‘when shall you & I sit by a Fireside, without a Brief or a Poem in our hands, & yet not idle, not thoughtless, but as Serious, and more so, than any Business ought to make us, except the great Business, that of enjoying a Reasonable Being, & regarding its End … God deliver you from Law, me from Rhime! And give us leisure to attend what is more important’ (23 August 1735).