Of all Ill Poets by their Lumber known,
Who nere Fame’s favor wore, yet sought them long,
Sir Daphne [D’Avenant] gives precedency to none,
And breeds most business for abstersive Song.
From untaught Childhood, to mistaking Man,
An ill-performing Agent to the Stage;
With Albovin in Lumber he began,
With Gondibert in Lumber ends his rage.
“Albovin” refers to D’Avenant’s first play, The Tragedy of Albovine. To be “in lumber” can mean to be in debt, but (as we have seen) it can also mean to be imprisoned, or simply (see Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang) to be in big trouble — senses that Denham wants here, since D’Avenant “began” with a bad case of syphilis about the time Albovine came out (the illness was, according to Drabble’s Companion, “a subject referred to in his own works and in the jests of others”), and he was held captive in the Tower from 1650 to 1652, while working on Gondibert.4
Then there was Dryden’s
Damn me, whate’er those book-learned blockheads say
from his translation, the “Third Satire of Persius,” line 152 (1693). It impelled Pope toward the “bookful blockhead” in the first half of his couplet. (“Bookful” itself is a rare word; Pope’s choice of it over Dryden’s “book-learned” is characteristic of his fine-tunefulness.) And finally there was this anonymous translation of some lines from the beginning of the Fourth Satire of Boileau, dated 1687:
The haughty Pedant, swoln with Frothy Name
Of Learned Man, big with his Classick Fame;
A thousand Books read o’re and o’re again,
Does word for word most perfectly retain,
Heap’d in the Lumber-Office of his Brain;
Yet this cram’d Skull, this undigested Mass,
Does very often prove an arrant Ass;
Believes all Knowledge is to Books confin’d,
That reading only can inform the Mind.…
The “lumber-office” here — a colorful pawnbrokering of what is merely a “teste entassez” (a heaped head) in the original5—was perhaps the first time the lumber-room metaphor was applied inside the skull.
These poetical uses—“learned Lombard,” “Ill Poets by their Lumber known,” “book-learned blockheads,” and “the Lumber-Office of his Brain”—in addition to others by Dryden, Butler, Rochester, Oldham, and Swift, supplemented by Locke’s figure of the contents of the mind-magazine as “a Collection of Lumber not reduc’d to Use or Order”—were the various tributary strands, I theorized, that Pope boondoggled into the great keychain of his couplet.
But then in December of 1994, more knowledgeable by this time about Pope’s habits, I went through the hundred-odd instances of lumber from 1660 to 1800 one more time, onscreen. I stopped again at the four lumber-uses in Samuel Garth’s Dispensary, more than in any other single poem. Here was a poet who really liked the word.6 One lumber comes in a description of Chaos’s underground home:
To these dark Realms much learned Lumber creeps.
Up till then I had dismissed this particular “learned ~” as a straightforward borrowing by Garth from Pope — just as Samuel Boyce’s “With loads of lumber treasur’d in his head” (1757), and Paul Whitehead’s “Loads of dull lumber, all inspir’d by Pay” (1733), and Thomas Paget’s “Much hoarded Learning but like Lumber lies” (1735), and George Ogle et al.’s. “Small Store of learned Lumber fills my Head” (1741) were all borrowings — since on the bibliographical screen of the database, Garth’s work (a popular and much discussed mock-heroic satire on uncharitable apothecaries) was dated 1714, three years after the Essay on Criticism. But Chadwyck-Healey is in the business of text-conversion, not literary history: the year they so scrupulously associate with each electrified book is the year of the edition from which they keyed their text, which is not necessarily the year that the text was first published. Presented with a poem published sometime in the seventeenth century, but transcribed from an edition published in 1908, you know, of course, not to trust 1908 as your rough date of original appearance, but in the case of poems that went through multiple editions in close succession, the nearly correct year can sometimes throw you off. Here (through simple ignorance on my part: Samuel Garth was one of the best-known poets of the period) I had been thrown off badly. The Dispensary first came out in 1699, and was “universally and liberally applauded,” according to Samuel Johnson, in his “Life of Garth.” Chadwyck-Healey had worked from the seventh edition, advertised on the title page as having “several Descriptions and Episodes never before printed.” What I had to find out, then, and what the database couldn’t tell me, was whether Garth’s “learned lumber” had appeared in one of the editions prior to the 1711 publication of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, or in one of the editions subsequent to it.
There would, however, be no difficulty in establishing that Pope could have read Garth’s “learned lumber” if Garth’s use of the phrase did precede Pope’s. It was not possible, in other words, that the two poets discovered it independently, for Pope and Garth were friends and collaborators. Garth read Pope’s early Pastorals (1709) in manuscript, and “Summer,” the second pastoral, was dedicated “To Dr. Garth” in editions after 1717. Later still, Pope (anxious to show the world that he didn’t feud with everyone) added this note:
Dr.
Samuel Garth
, Author of the
Dispensary
, was one of the first friends of the author, whose acquaintance with him began at fourteen or fifteen. Their friendship continu’d from the year 1703, to 1718, which was that of his death.
Both poets’ biographers (John F. Sena and Maynard Mack) are cautious about accepting the 1703 date as marking the inception of the friendship. Fifteen seems a trifle early, and Pope was childishly vain about his literary precocity, confusing and falsifying the epistolary record whenever he could, and even in middle age decking his reissued poems with boy-wonder dates and testimonials in the most pathetic way. (“Written in the Year 1704,” “Written at sixteen years of age,” etc.) John Sena thinks Garth may have met Pope at Will’s Coffee House—1706 or 1707 might be a better date than 1703. Whatever the circumstances, they knew each other several years before Pope published the Essay on Criticism, and remained friends after it was published. (Garth was probably fortunate in dying before Pope had a chance to become infuriated at some imagined slight and draw-and-quarto him in verse, as he was wont to do with old friends and allies.)