Note 140 — POPE. (continued 2)

Since discovered to have been Atterbury, afterwards bishop of Rochester. See the collection of that prelate’s Epistolary Correspondence, vol. iv. p. 6. N. This I believe to be an error. Mr. Nichols has ascribed this preface to Atterbury on the authority of Dr. Walter Harte, who, in a manuscript note on a copy of Pope’s edition, expresses his surprise that Pope should there have described the former editor as anonymous, as he himself had told Harte fourteen years before his own publication, that this preface was by Atterbury. The explication is probably this; that during that period he had discovered that he had been in a mistake. By a manuscript note in a copy presented by Crynes to the Bodleian library, we are informed that the former editor was Thomas Power, of Trinity college, Cambridge. Power was bred at Westminster, under Busby, and was elected off to Cambridge in the year 1678. He was author of a translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost; of which only the first book was published, in 1691. J.B.