Note 22 — Front matter (continued 6)

An instance of the sort turns up in Pope's correspondence with Addison, and serves to explain a discrepancy between Tickell's edition of the Spectator and the original. In No. 253, Addison had remarked that none of the critics had taken notice of a peculiarity in the description of Sisyphus lifting his stone up the hill, which is no sooner carried to the top of it but it immediately tumbles to the bottom. 'This double motion,' says Addison, 'is admirably described in the numbers of those verses. In the four first it is heaved up by several spondees intermixed with proper breathing places, and at last trundles down in a continual line of dactyls.' On this Pope remarks: 'I happened to find the same in Dionysius of Halicarnassus's Treatise, who treats very largely upon these verses. I know you will think fit to soften your expression, when you see the passage, which you must needs have read, though it be since slipt out of your memory.' These words, by the way, were the last (except 'I am, with the utmost esteem, &c.') ever addressed by Pope to Addison. It was in this letter that Pope with sly malice asked Addison to look over the first two books of his (Pope's) translation of Homer.