Maybe I should start over and say I'm looking for early occurrences of the
phrase heroic couplet. If Randi Eldevik is right and it doesn't come in
before Pope, that would be interesting.
Though it does not answer your specific question,you will probably have seen
William Bowman Piper's entry
I'm afraid I don't know the answer to this question, though I'm sure I
should. I suspect that it is indeed the case that the term 'heroic couplet'
is surprisingly late, and that that has something to do with the history of
the word 'couplet'. So if you do a free text search in the OED on 'couplet'
