11“Tennysonian” is stretching it — I’m thinking of:
And Enoch Arden, a rough sailor’s lad
Made orphan by a winter shipwreck, play’d
Among the waste and lumber of the shore …
See the Tennyson concordance by “Arthur E. Baker, F.R.Hist.S., F.L.A., Secretary and Librarian, Taunton. Author of ‘A Brief Account of the Public Library Movement in Taunton,’ etc.,” which gives only that one lumber, as against six uses of luminous that immediately follow. Richard Blackmore (an enemy of Garth and eventually of Pope), in his Creation (1712), offers a beautiful intermediating image. Without the winds, he writes, a ship would
lye a lazy and a useless Load,
The Forest’s wasted Spoils, the Lumber of the Flood.
12 “Creeps” also sounds Popish; unfortunately, though, Pope’s famous prosodic precept about monosyllables—“And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line”—happens to be, as the Twickenhamites note, straight from Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poesy”: “he creeps along with ten little words in every line.” The presence of Milbourne in the new passage (if it is he) does perhaps attest to Pope’s authorship, though: Pope went on to condemn Milbourne several times, e.g., in The Essay on Criticism (1. 463), and in The Dunciad (Book II and Appendix). Milbourne came to be thought of by Pope as Dryden’s Theobald.
13 Apropos of word-frequency: of those writers whose careers preceded or overlapped Pope’s, Edward (“Ned”) Ward, the one who mentioned “lumber pies” some sections back, is the one who, according to the English Poetry Database, employs lumber the most frequently — eight times. He is followed by Pope himself: six unique lumbers and one lumberhouse (which must be searched for separately), after you subtract the duplicate lines from Dunciad I and Dunciad II. Dryden is next with five lumbers, if you add in the one from Mr. Limberham that the concordance gives, but which isn’t in the EPFTD because it’s from a play. Butler, Garth, Oldham, and Swift (though Swift isn’t on the disks) are next with four apiece; Denham has three; while underachievers like John Byrom, Aaron Hill, William Meston, and Samuel Wesley have career totals of only two lumbers. A relatively lumber-rich poetical loam, then, seems to be a good predictor of literary merit. Based on the statistics, it may be time for a revaluation of Ned Ward.