Nicholson Baker: The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

And better still, in poetry:

Though old the thought and oft expressed,

’Tis his at last who says it best.

(“For an Autograph.”)

Bartlett’s gives Lowell’s couplet, and refers us in a footnote not to Pope but to Emerson’s “Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.” Emerson’s problem, though, was that when he quoted he didn’t always remember to use quotation marks.

14Normanby is John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, Duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1648–1721), a patron of Dryden, Wesley, and Pope, and author of An Essay Upon Poetry , 1682. He, too, uses the phrase “true wit” in a couplet, following Dryden (“True Wit is everlasting, like the Sun”), and regarding the Soul of Poetry, he happily asks:

what caverns of the Brain

Can such a vast and mighty thing contain?

15Wesley’s brother-in-law and editorial partner, John Dunton, tells us that Wesley “usually writ too fast to write well. Two hundred couplets a day are too many by two-thirds, to be well furnished with all the beauties and graces of that art.” (John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century , ed. Colin Clair, p. 404. Nichols says that Wesley’s poetry is “far from being excellent.”) In the Epistle Wesley is resolutely humble, claiming that he is himself no poet, and is “Content to Rime,” like Tom Durfey. Durfey (1653–1723) was a tireless dramatist, poet, and songster whom Dryden and (later, predictably) Pope made fun of. Defoe called him “Pun-Master-General Durfey.” But Durfey had his good days, too, as Wesley did: he wrote “I’ll Sail Upon the Dog Star,” which Purcell set to music; Auden included it in his Oxford Book of Light Verse .

16See the note to line 126 in the Twickenham Dunciad , Book 1, pp. 78–79, which cites Norman Ault as the source of this information.

17 The Life of Our Blessed Lord & Saviour Jesus Christ. An Heroic Poem Dedicated to Her Most Sacred Majesty, In Ten Books. Attempted by Samuel Wesley . It was accompanied by laudatory poems by unknowns like Taylor, Pittis, Luke Milbourne, Peter Motteux (the translator of Rabelais and Cervantes) and Nahum Tate, then poet laureate—

The vast Idea seem’d a subject fit

To exercise an able Poet’s Wit;

But to Express, to Finish and Adorn,

Remain’d for you, who for this Work was Born.

A poet named Cutts was stoutly Keatsian in his praise of Wesley’s attempt:

You, (with Columbus,) not alone descrie,

But conquer (Cortez-like), new Worlds in Poetry.

18There is a nice footnote to William Harness’s memoir of Coleridge in the fourth volume (1875) of Stoddard’s Bric-a-Brac Series: “Wordsworth and Rogers called on him [Coleridge] one forenoon in Pall Mall. He talked unin-terruptedly for two hours, during which time Wordsworth listened with profound attention. On leaving, Rogers said to Wordsworth, ‘Well! I could not make head or tail of Coleridge’s oration: did you understand it?’ ‘Not a syllable,’ replied Wordsworth.” Stoddard’s book (an ad for which was mentioned above, in an earlier footnote) is embossed on the cover with the motto “Infinite riches in a little room,” as well as an image of a lumber-room filled with statues, halberds, missals, and urns. I bought it at the rare-book room of the Holmes Book Store in Oakland, California (since closed), for $12.50.

19The commentary was eventually finished and published posthumously, with a dedication to Queen Caroline. John Wesley knelt before the Queen and presented his father’s book in October of 1735. “It is very prettily bound,” said the Queen politely. She set it aside without opening it.

20The letter is quoted in Franklin Wilder’s Father of the Wesleys , pp. 79–82, a biography of Samuel Wesley “proudly dedicated” to Mr. Wilder’s late son, Robert Seab Wilder. (“Born January 2, 1948—Died September 10, 1966.”) I found the letter on the evening of November 23, 1994, in the library of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, where I’d never been before, accompanied by my own beautiful son, who had just had his first birthday, and who was in a deep sleep, with his head flopped sideways in the stroller, unaware of the silent aisles of book-lumber towering above him. It must have been painful for Mr. Wilder to type Wesley’s account of the miraculous survival of a son.

21The Mr. Hoare in Wesley’s letter, the silver-broker, not the coincidental Hoare who wrote about “loads of learned lumber” in the special collections of the university library.

Despite Pope’s evident reliance on Wesley’s unsung Epistle while he was working on the Essay on Criticism , Wesley’s “lumber-thoughts” are not responsible for the lumber in (and let me quote it whole again for convenient reference) Pope’s great couplet:

The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read

With Loads of Learned Lumber in his Head.

I now believe, however, that I know where Pope’s phrase came from. The EPFTD -florist has delivered it to me. While I may preserve some pedantic pride by citing the pre-Popian lumber-finds that I made solo, unaided by concordances, indexes, the OED , the Library of the Future , or Chadwyck-Healey (the only significant find, come to think of it, is the lumber -pair in Locke’s “Of the Conduct of the Understanding”), 1it is Chadwyck-Healey that triumphed in the end. 2

For several months I misunderstood what it was trying to tell me. In November of 1994 I was confident that I had the chronology of the derivation of Pope’s couplet sketched out. There was a “learned Lombard” prominently mentioned (Book I, canto i) in D’Avenant’s huge poem Gondibert (1651), set in Lombardy. 3This use prepped the ear for “learned lumber” without inventing it. And then there was a fairly complicated Lombardy-lumber pun, probably the handiwork of the debt-harassed Sir John Denham (1615–1669), in one of the anonymous satires on Gondibert that were bundled with the second edition of D’Avenant’s poem (1653) and attributed to “severall of the Authors Friends”:

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: