Pope wrote An Epistle To The Right Honourable Richard Lord Viscount Cobham during the autumn of 1733 and first published it on 16 January 1734, a year after An Epistle to Bathurst. Viscount Cobham (1675-1749) was a soldier and Whig politician who supported Walpole until the latter introduced the Excise Bill, in the spring of 1733, after which Cobham formed an independent Whig section, known as the Boy Patriots that opposed the government. He rebuilt his house at Stowe and, with the help of Charles Bridgeman and William Kent, laid out the most celebrated landscape garden in the country, praised by Pope in An Epistle to Burlington, line 70, as a “Work to wonder at”. Pope became friendly with Cobham in 1725, eight years

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Published 24 January 2002

Citation: Gordon, Ian. "An Epistle to Cobham [Moral Essay I]". The Literary Encyclopedia. 24 January 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6678, accessed 20 November 2009.]