between friends, in Pope's "Rape of the Lock." Lord Petre, aged
twenty, audaciously cut from the head of Miss Arabella Fermor,
daughter of Mr. Fermor of Tusmore, a lock of her hair while she was
playing cards in the Queen's rooms at Hampton Court. Pope's friend,
Mr. Caryll, suggested to him that a mock heroic treatment of the
resulting quarrel might restore peace, and Pope wrote a poem in two
cantos, which was published in a Miscellany in 1712, Pope's age then
being twenty-four. But as epic poems required supernatural
machinery, Pope added afterwards to his mock epic the machinery of
sylphs and gnomes, suggested to him by the reading of a French
story, "Le Comte de Gabalis," by the Abbe Villars. Here there were
sylphs of the air and gnomes of the earth, little spirits who would
be in right proportion to the substance of his poem, which was
refashioned into five cantos, and republished as we have it now in
February 1714.

"John Gilpin" was written by William Cowper in the year 1782, when
Lady Austin was lodging in the Vicarage at Olney, and spent every
evening with Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, cheering Cowper greatly by her
liveliness. One evening she told the story of John Gilpin's ride in
a way that tickled the poet's fancy, set him laughing when he woke
up in the night, and obliged him to turn it next day into ballad
rhyme. Mrs. Unwin's son sent it to the Public Advertiser, for the
poet's corner. It was printed in that newspaper, and thought no
more of until about three years later. Then it was suggested to a
popular actor named Henderson, who gave entertainments of his own,
that this piece would tell well among his recitations. He
introduced it into his entertainments, and soon all the town was
running after John Gilpin as madly as the six gentlemen and the
post-boy.