1. Cit. Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Worthy Montagu (Oxford, 1999) 273.
2. All four of the poems appear in GM 8 (August 1738) 429. James M. Kuist, The Nichols File of ‘The Gentelman’s Magazine’: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentations in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library (Madison, Wisconsin, 1982) throws no light on the identity of ‘Alexis’, or of ‘Sylvius’ mentioned below, pp. 85–6.
3. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven and London, 1985) 652 and 914 n.
4. On the continuity of imagery and enduring relevance of the South Sea Bubble in the early 1730s, particularly in connection with the crisis over Walpole’s Excise Bill in 1733–34, see Vincent Carretta, ‘Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst and The South Sea Bubble’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 77 (1978) 212–31;
5. and Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994) 141–57.