The Works of Alexander Pope Part 3

The Dean's people promised Pope the copy of the correspondence, that he might correct and expunge what he pleased. "I dare not," he wrote to Allen, "even do this, for they would say I revised it." His mind immediately veered from decision to uncertainty, and in the next sentence but one he states that "he knows not whether to make any use of the permission or not." A little further, and he comes to the conclusion that until he sees the letters he can form no judgment of the proper measures to be pursued. "The excessive earnestness," he adds, "the Dean has been in for publis.h.i.+ng them makes me hope they are castigated in some degree; or he must be totally deprived of his understanding." Lord Mansfield deposed, from the personal information of Pope, that his imperfect memory of their contents increased his anxiety to stop the publication.[148] In the midst of his apprehensions, his knowledge of Swift's incapacity, and his conviction that it would be insanity to allow the correspondence to go forth in its integrity, he yet resolved not to expurgate the copy, and then doubted whether he would expurgate it or not. This easy kind of hesitation, which has none of the appearance of genuine alarm, was what might be expected in a man who had already revised the letters to his heart's content, and was poorly performing a borrowed part. Though he ended by refusing to retouch a text of his own preparing, he employed the interval while the sheets were submitted to his criticism in forestalling the Dublin edition. Mr.

D. Swift believed that the correspondence was first published in Ireland. Faulkner a.s.serted that it was first published in England, and Faulkner, who could not well be mistaken, was right. No advertis.e.m.e.nt of the Irish volume is to be found in the "Dublin News Letter" till some time after the English volume was on sale, and no copy exists in the public libraries, or after long search could be heard of from the second-hand booksellers, which does not contain the additional matter inserted in the quarto.[149] In the prefatory notice to the quarto itself we are told that the letters are taken "from an impression sent from Dublin, and said to be printed by the Dean's direction." This was the impression which had been privately forwarded to Pope, and the language seems to have been carefully selected to avoid the a.s.sertion that there had been a publication of the work. The poet's scheme may be discerned in the account he gave to Allen. He informed him that the book, being most of it printed, was "put past preventing," but that he was "trying all the means possible to r.e.t.a.r.d it." In plain words, he was manoeuvring to keep back the Irish edition till his rival reprint was in the market. When he had succeeded in his device, he repeated his old tactics of advertising that the surrept.i.tious collection was the cause of his own, and at the same time bespoke the preference for his reprint by announcing that it would contain "several additional letters."[150]

Apart from these additions, the quarto of Pope is a reproduction, with some variations, of the Dublin impression, and a few notes which Faulkner had doubtless found in the volume sent from England, are said in the quarto to be taken from Faulkner. Nevertheless there is strong internal evidence that a portion of the quarto had an independent origin, and had been printed off before the Irish edition was received.

The correspondence consists of 209 pages, which are numbered consecutively from 1 to 115. At this point the letters of Swift to Gay commence, and instead of the numbers proceeding in regular order, they go back to page 89, and are thence continued without any break to the final page, 182. That the arrangement is not a typographical mistake is clear from the signatures of the sheets being in accordance with the paging,--a coincidence which was barely possible if the figures had been a misprint. The correspondence of Swift with Gay begins on sheet N, which is the letter of the alphabet that answers to page 89 in a quarto volume, and this keeping between the letters and the figures is preserved throughout. But there is a second coincidence which is absolutely fatal to the idea that the confusion in the paging was an error of the press. The quarto edition was accompanied by an edition in folio, which was the same impression with the matter parcelled out into pages of greater length, and with the requisite changes in the numbering of the pages and the signatures of the sheets. In spite of the change there is the identical peculiarity that distinguishes the quarto. The numbers run on unbroken from 1 to 108, when we arrive at the letters to Gay. Here we recommence with page 85, and starting from this new basis the figures proceed in regular succession to the end. The sheet at page 85 is marked Y, the proper letter for the folio size, and as in the quarto the signatures, in every instance, correspond with the pages. The defect cannot be explained by the supposition that the work had been divided into portions, which were printed separately for the sake of expedition. With the text of the Dublin copy to guide his calculations, no compositor could have committed the error of p.r.o.nouncing that matter which covers 115 pages could he contained in 88. The evident cause of the anomaly is that, after the quarto in its original form had pa.s.sed through the press, Pope saw reason to cancel the opening part of the volume which preceded Swift's correspondence with Gay. The materials in their second form occupied more s.p.a.ce than in their first, and instead of filling only 88 pages in the quarto, and 84 in the folio, run on to 115 in the one, and 108 in the other. The consequence is that the pages in excess bear the same numbers with the succeeding uncancelled pages which could not be altered. The process is rendered further apparent by the signatures to the sheets. In both folio and quarto, those on the surplus pages, in the cancelled division of the volume, have an asterisk affixed to denote that the signatures had been already employed;[151]

but though the sheets have this mark of repet.i.tion, they are placed in the volume before the uncancelled sheets which retain the primitive signatures, and which did not admit of any change. In the quarto, again, a half sheet precedes the letters to Gay, which could not have happened unless it had been a subsequent interpolation, when the matter was insufficient to make the sheet complete. The half-sheet, the duplicate paging, and the duplicate signatures, are all the result of the insertion of fresh materials after the work was struck off, and betray that there was an earlier form of the quarto of 1741, which contained less than the Dublin edition, and which, therefore, being prior to it, is a proof that the correspondence was originally printed by Pope. The letters in the quarto are numbered, and since the series is unbroken throughout, the original cancelled division must ostensibly have comprised as many letters as when it was subsequently enlarged. But a letter to Gay, dated Nov. 23, 1727, is found by the copies preserved in the Oxford papers, to be compounded of three distinct letters, and this system of fusion would have permitted the introduction of large additions without deranging the continuity Of the numbers, which Pope would have been anxious to preserve. The cancels he made to suit his varying views were in accordance with his practice. The miscellaneous prose works, which follow the letters, have in one place alone a cancel of upwards of a hundred pages. Equally characteristic was the desire to preserve any of the old sheets which could be retained, regardless of the blemish to the book, and the trace they might afford of his manoeuvres. It was a repet.i.tion of the paper-sparing policy which led him to incorporate the suppressed sheets of his Wycherley into the volume of 1735.[152]

On the 22nd of March, 1741, Pope called upon Lord Orrery at his house in London, and found him writing to Swift. The poet took the pen from his hand, and continued the letter. After large professions of affection, he went on to say, "I must confess, a late incident has given me some pain; but I am satisfied you were persuaded it would not have given me any, and whatever unpleasant circ.u.mstances the printing our letters might be attended with, there was one that pleased me,--that the strict friends.h.i.+p we have borne each other so long is thus made known to all mankind. As far as it was your will, I cannot be angry at what, in all other respects, I am quite uneasy under. Had you asked me, before you gave them away, I think I could have proposed some better monument for our friends.h.i.+p, or, at least, of better materials." Any words addressed to Swift were lost upon him now, and Pope in reality was speaking to Lord Orrery, and to those who might hereafter read his protestations. He had apparently forgotten that just four years before he had complained to the same Lord Orrery, that the Dean had denied his request when he wished to insert some of the letters in the quarto of 1737.[153] The monument he was eager to erect to their friends.h.i.+p in 1737, he repudiated in 1741. He affirmed that he could have proposed a better, but never hinted what it was; or at least of choicer materials, but never troubled himself further about them. This was the smallest part of the contradiction. He refused his consent to the reprint of the book sent to Dublin, and had even tried, he told Allen, to stop it by threats of law. It is true, he confessed to Mr. Nugent at the outset, and continued to confess to Allen, that he had no hope of prevailing; but his efforts are not the less the measure of his pretended disgust. Yet he instantly appropriated the correspondence he was anxious to stifle in its birth, contrived to antic.i.p.ate the Dublin edition, incorporated the entire collection into his works, and published it simultaneously in folio, quarto, and octavo. He stated in the prefatory notice, that he had refused to revise the letters, because they were committed to the press without his consent; but the annoyance which would not permit him to revise the letters was no check to his haste in adopting, or to his zeal in circulating them. For a man who was "quite uneasy" at their appearance, his eagerness to countenance, to parade, and to propagate them was amazing, and the manifest duplicity is not the least forcible of the arguments which bring the whole contrivance home to Pope.

Warburton applauded him for the little resentment "he expressed at the indiscretion of his old friend." He affected far more than his advocate supposed; but if it had been otherwise it is strange that Warburton should not have perceived that to talk of resentment was ridiculous when the poet was espousing "the indiscretion," and was doing his utmost to disseminate the letters he feigned a wish to suppress.

Curll republished the letters under the t.i.tle of "Dean Swift's Literary Correspondence." Pope filed a bill in Chancery against Curll on June 4, 1741. The poet not only demanded protection for his own letters, but desired that the bookseller should be restrained from vending the letters of Swift, who was not a party to the suit, nor had commissioned any one to interfere on his behalf. The case was memorable both from its intrinsic importance, and from the celebrity of the plaintiff. In his answer, on the 13th of June, Curll admitted that n.o.body had authorised his work. He rested his defence on three propositions. He maintained that private correspondence did not come within the Copyright Act of Queen Anne, because the Act was declared in the t.i.tle to be for the "Encouragement of _Learning_," whereas letters on familiar subjects were not _learned_ productions; and because the Act was designed to protect books which were avowedly composed for the press, whereas letters were written without the intention of converting them into a literary commodity. He said that he was informed, and believed, that the letters were first "printed"[154] at Dublin, and he contended that all persons in England had a right to reproduce books which were first "published"

in Ireland. He finally argued that letters were in the nature of a gift to the receiver, and that after they were delivered to the Dean they became his property. On the motion to dissolve the injunction on these grounds, Lord Hardwicke decided that they were none of them valid. He refused to recognise a distinction between letters and other compositions. He denied that a prior publication in Ireland could deprive an English author of his English rights. He, above all, determined that though the paper on which the letter was written might possibly be the property of the receiver, the matter remained the property of the writer. For the same reason that he admitted Pope's t.i.tle to his own letters, he declined to continue the injunction with respect to the letters addressed to him, which had never ceased to belong to the persons who penned them.[155] The celebrated Murray was one of the counsel for the poet,[156] and afterwards, when Lord Chief Justice, he quoted and confirmed the decision of the Chancellor. "The question," he said, "was whether the property was not transferred to the correspondent. Lord Hardwicke thought not, and that the writer was still the proprietor."[157] "Dean Swift," he said subsequently, "was certainly the proprietor of the paper upon which Pope's letters to him were written; but no disposition, no transfer of paper upon which the composition is written can be construed a conveyance of the copy, without the author's express consent to print and publish, much less against his will."[158] Just and valuable as is the rule of law which prohibits the publication of a letter without the permission of its author, the manner in which Pope invoked it was singular. According to his statement it was Swift that had prepared and put forth a correspondence, in which more of the letters were from the pen of the Dean than from the pen of the poet. Pope, while professing to be vexed beyond measure at this exposure of private papers, asked for an injunction, not for the purpose of suppressing them, but to obtain a monopoly of the sale. He was not even content to reclaim his personal share in the publication of the friend whom he upbraided for the act.

He tried to prevent any one except himself from profiting by Swift's part of the book, and at the same time that he was endeavouring to secure goods which did not belong to him, he reproached their owner for displaying them. His conduct once more betrayed the truth he laboured to conceal. He was the compiler of the collection, and instinctively regarded a rival edition as an invasion of his rights. His proceedings were unnatural, if Swift was the sole originator of the work; but if it had a different source we can perceive why Pope was jealous of the least interference with property which, from the outset, he considered to be exclusively his own.

A fatality attended the correspondence of Pope. Curll, in defiance of him, printed his letters to Cromwell. Lord Oxford, in spite of his disapproval, printed his letters to Wycherley. An unknown person, by unknown means, obtained the whole of the collection of 1735, printed it secretly at his own expense, and sold it for a song. To render the history uniform and complete, Swift, who would not permit Pope to print their letters, printed them himself, while Pope, changing sides with him, remonstrated and threatened. That nothing might be wanting to the singularity of the case, the three last sets of letters stole into the world when they were under the vigilant guardians.h.i.+p of the poet, and the two last sets got abroad after the abiding paroxysm of terror, engendered by the indiscretion of a single dissolute friend, had induced him to wrest his correspondence from friends of every degree for the purpose of securing it from the possibility of publication. Mrs.

Whiteway remarked to Lord Orrery, that among the letters in the Dean's st.i.tched book were numbers from the greatest men in England for genius, learning, and power,--from Bolingbroke, Oxford, Bathurst, and Peterborough; from Addison, Congreve, Prior, Parnell, and Gay. She said these were as easily pilfered, and would have been as interesting to the world, as the letters of Pope and Swift;[159] but n.o.body invaded the sanct.i.ty of the private correspondence of the poet's contemporaries, even when the papers were open to half the gossips of Dublin. He stood alone in a misfortune which happened to him no less than four times, and which it is to be feared would have happened a fifth if he had lived long enough to acc.u.mulate the materials for a fresh volume. He relaxed his correspondence with Caryll in 1729, and with Swift in 1737, as a means to compel them to resign his former letters, and to both he used the same expression,--that "he did not write upon the terms of other _honest_ men."[160] The fallacy of the parallel was in the epithet. If he had resembled other men in their honesty he might have shared in their immunity from the alleged treachery of friends like Oxford and Swift, and of enemies like Curll.

Of all the deceptions which the poet practised to get his correspondence under the eye of the world, his dealings towards Swift are the worst. He had failed to gain his consent to putting forth the letters while any judgment yet remained to him; but no sooner had he sunk into dotage than, trusting to his inability to detect the cheat, Pope beguiled him into sanctioning the publication by sending him the volume ready printed, with a flattering exhortation, the echo of what he had written on a former occasion,[161] "importing that it was criminal to suppress such an amiable picture of the Dean and his private character."[162] The moment Swift fell into the pit his friend had dug for him, his friend denounced him for the act. "I think," he wrote to Mr. Nugent, "I can make no reflections upon this strange incident but what are truly melancholy, and humble the pride of human nature,--that the greatest of geniuses, though prudence may have been the companion of wit (which is very rare) for their whole lives past, may have nothing left them at last but their vanity. No decay of body is half so miserable!"

Extraordinary language to come from the pen of the man whose vanity, without any excuse from the decay of his faculties, had made him eager to print the letters in 1737, and who had been only thwarted in his desire because Swift was wanting in the vanity by which he himself was impelled,--infamous language when the deed he reprobated was his own, and Swift the innocent dupe; and when having traded successfully in the mental afflictions of his friend, he proceeded to hold up his victim, as the criminal. But the simulated indignation is less revolting than the simulated fondness. "When the heart is full of tenderness," he said to the Dean, in the letter of March 22, 1741, "it must be full of concern at the absolute impotency of all words to come up to [it]. I value and enjoy more the memory of the pleasure and endearing obligations I have formerly received from you than the perfect possession of any other.

Think it not possible that my affection can cease but with my last breath. If I could think yours was exhausted I should grieve, but not reproach you. If I felt myself even hurt by you I should be confident you knew not the blow you gave, but had your hand guided by another."

The hand which guided him was the same hand that was at that moment aiming a blow at his reputation. Taking advantage of his cruel malady and prostrate understanding, Pope was even then endeavouring to fasten upon him the stigma of his own personal treachery, and this pretended magnanimity in forgiving a deed which he had contrived and instigated was in itself a calumny and a fraud.

If any doubt could exist that it was Pope who put forth the collection of 1735, and the Swift collection of 1741, we have still in the quarto of 1737 his own avowed version of a large portion of his correspondence.

He published it with the express object of correcting the corrupt text of spurious editions, and there remains the inquiry whether he published it truly. When he burnt three-fourths of it, and deposited copies of the rest in the library of Lord Oxford, he professed to have preserved the originals from which the copies were taken. Lord Bolingbroke discovered a great number of returned letters among his papers after his death, and told Dr. Heberden that they contained many alterations and corrections, which he supposed had been made with the intention of printing them some time or other.[163] From this it would be inferred that those which had been printed were not part of the collection, and that the poet had found it inexpedient to retain vouchers, which would condemn if they did not acquit him. Unfortunately the whole of the ma.n.u.scripts were destroyed by Lord Bolingbroke, and beyond the unsatisfactory information conveyed in his remark, nothing can now be known of them. The literal interpretation of his language is favoured by the evidence yet within our reach, and we should conclude that Pope had not kept originals which would have revealed alterations in the published letters of a far more serious nature than any which Bolingbroke appears to have suspected.

John Caryll, a Roman Catholic country gentleman residing in Suss.e.x, was among the intimate correspondents of Pope for twenty-five years, from 1710 to 1735. The poet wrote to him on Nov. 19, 1712, and asked to have the "whole cargo of his epistles returned," which he said might be of use "in a design he had lately engaged in." This design was probably to furnish some essays to the "Guardian," which commenced on the 12th of March, 1713. He promised to restore the letters when he had done with them, and his friend at once complied with his desire. After the surrept.i.tious publication of his correspondence with Cromwell, Pope, in December, 1726, renewed his pet.i.tion to Caryll to make over to him "all such papers as he had too partially preserved;" but the object of the request this time was "to put them out of the power of Curll." The poet announced that he would send back those which could do no hurt to the character of himself, his friend, or any other person; that he would retain those which "would serve to bear testimony of his own love for good men, or theirs for him;" and implied, as a consequence, that he would destroy those which did not fall under either of these heads. By this division the insignificant letters alone would have been restored to Caryll, and whether he was mistrustful of the use to which Pope might apply the remainder, or whether he was anxious to preserve intact the memorials of his intimacy with a celebrated man, he did not think fit to accede to the demand. A diminution in the frequency and cordiality of their correspondence ensued, and lasted for upwards of two years. Caryll at length complained, and Pope replied in February 1729, that he could not open his mind to his acquaintances unless they would return him at the end of every year "the forfeitures of his discretion, and commit to his justice what he trusted only to their indulgence." Upon this intimation that compliance was to be the condition of intimacy, Caryll yielded the point, and the receipt of the letters was acknowledged by the poet on the 8th of April. The Suss.e.x squire defeated the purpose for which they were extorted by copying the greater part of the collection.

He persevered in the practice till near the close of his life. The last letter from Pope which he caused to be transcribed is dated July 17, 1735, and he died on the 6th of April, 1736. When his grandson sold the hereditary estate in 1767, and retired from England to the continent, the family papers were left behind, stowed away in boxes, where they remained for nearly three quarters of a century. They then came into the possession of Mr. Dilke, and have since been presented by his grandson, Sir Charles W. Dilke, to the British Museum. Among the ma.n.u.scripts were a dozen folio books, containing the farm and domestic accounts, and in a volume similar in appearance Mr. Dilke discovered the copies of the letters of Pope, together with copies of others from the Dukes of Berwick, Beaufort, and Norfolk, from Dryden, Wycherley, Steele, Roger Lestrange, St. Evremond, and Le Grand. The external and internal evidence leaves no doubt of their authenticity. One unexpected confirmation of their genuineness turned up in an autograph letter of Pope to the younger Caryll, dated Nov. 8, 1712, and which was sent by Mr. Tuckwell to Mr. Croker. The letters to the younger Caryll remained with his widow. The few which exist are originals in the custody of different collectors, and this letter of Nov. 8 is a link in a series of facts that are only known through the transcripts in the Caryll folio.

The recovery of doc.u.ments, which Pope did not suspect were in existence, discloses to us his mode of dealing with his correspondence when, having no idea that it could rise up against him, he ventured to use it without reserve.

After calling in his letters to his friends, Pope proceeded to arrange them in order, and said "they formed altogether an unimportant, but yet an innocent history of himself." "You make, I a.s.sure you," he wrote to Caryll, July 8, 1729, "no small figure in these annals from 1710 to 1720 odd. Upon my word, sir, I am glad to see how long, and how often, and how much I have been obliged to you, as well as how long, how often, and how much I have been sensible of and expressed it." Notwithstanding this a.s.surance, Caryll made a very small figure indeed in the published collection. Four letters only were addressed to the "Hon. J. C., Esq."

in the volume of 1735, and these initials, in the quarto of 1737, were added to a fifth letter which had previously been headed, "Mr. Pope to ----." One other letter, in the quarto, bore the t.i.tle to "Mr. C----"; but it was separated from the former group, and it is from the Caryll copy that we learn how to fill up the blank. Both in the edition of 1735 and 1737 Pope published a letter to the "Hon. James Craggs, Esq.," which induced Roscoe to conclude that he was the person indicated by the initials, and it is not improbable that the poet designed to mislead his readers, especially as the claim of Caryll to be styled Honourable was only a Jacobite a.s.sumption, derived from his being heir to his uncle, who had been created a peer by the exiled James II. But though Pope did not wish to repeat in public his profuse professions in private, and appear as the familiar friend and constant correspondent of a Roman Catholic country gentleman, he as little desired to suppress the choicer portions of the effusions he had addressed to him. He conceived the idea of re-directing them, and compiled from them, in whole or in part, four fict.i.tious letters to Blount, four to Addison, two to Congreve, and one each to Wycherley, Steele, Trumbull, and Digby. A second letter to Digby, which appeared in the edition of 1735, was transferred to Arbuthnot in the quarto of 1737. Half a dozen letters at most were allotted to the initials of the Suss.e.x squire, while fifteen were a.s.signed to more imposing names, and a sixteenth was printed in a group of three to the "Hon. ----" Rather than credit an imposition so childish, and yet so unwarrantable, we should have recourse to the theory that Pope sometimes sent the same letter to different persons.

Swift a.s.sured him that the best system extant for the conduct of human life might be collected from his epistles, and they certainly abound in generalities which, like the clown's answer, that suited all questions, might have been written to anybody. But a comparison of the printed letters with the Caryll copies, shows that this solution is inadmissible, and the observation of the clown, when his answer proved inopportune, is equally applicable to the contrivance of Pope--"I see things may serve long, and not serve ever."[164]

The "Spectator" of the 10th of November, 1712, contained some remarks by Pope on the verses which the Emperor Hadrian composed when he was dying.

The poet asked Caryll's opinion of the criticism, and the substance of his reply is embodied in the rejoinder of Pope. "The supposition you draw from the suspicion that Adrian was addicted to magic, seems to me a little uncharitable,--that he might fear no sort of Deity, good or bad,--since in the third verse he plainly testifies his apprehension of a future state by being solicitous whither his soul was going. As to what you mention of his using gay and ludicrous expressions, I have already owned my opinion that the expressions are not so, but that diminutives are often in Latin taken for expressions of tenderness and concern." This comment is introduced, in the printed correspondence, into the letter to Steele of November 29, 1712, and if it was sent to him as well as to Caryll both must have objected to the gay and ludicrous expressions of Hadrian, both must have spoken of the suspicion that he was addicted to magic, both must have inferred from it that he feared no sort of Deity, good or bad, and the language of both must have been as identical as their ideas.

"I know," Pope wrote to Caryll, August 22, 1717, "you will take part in rejoicing for the victory of Prince Eugene over the Turks, in the zeal you bear to the Christian interest, though your cousin of Oxford, with whom I dined yesterday, says there is no other difference in the Christians beating the Turks or the Turks beating the Christians, than whether the Emperor shall first declare war against Spain, or Spain declare it against the Emperor." In the published version the pa.s.sage forms part of a letter to Edward Blount dated September 8, 1717, and either we must admit that it was never written to him, or believe that Caryll and Blount had each an Oxford cousin, that the poet dined with the Oxford cousin of Caryll on August 21, and with the Oxford cousin of Blount on September 7, that both these cousins made, at their respective dinners, the same epigrammatic observation in the very same words, and that the extraordinary coincidence struck Pope so little that he did not even remark upon it.

Another pa.s.sage of a letter to Caryll, dated September 20, [1713]

reappears in a letter to Blount dated February 10, 1716. "I am just returned from the country, whither Mr. Rowe did me the favour to accompany me, and to pa.s.s a week at Binfield. I need not tell you how much a man of his turn could not but entertain me; but I must acquaint you there is a vivacity and gaiety of disposition almost peculiar to that gentleman, which renders it impossible to part from him without that uneasiness and chagrin which generally succeeds all great pleasures. I have just been taking a solitary walk by moons.h.i.+ne in St.

James's Park, full of reflections of the transitory nature of all human delights, and giving my thoughts a loose into the contemplation of those sensations of satisfaction which probably we may taste in the more exalted company of separate spirits, when we range the starry walks above." Thus Pope, who on his return to town in September, 1713, after a week's companions.h.i.+p with Rowe, took a solitary walk by moonlight and meditated on the transitory nature of human delights, and the happy intercourse of spirits, was led by the power of a.s.sociation, after another week spent at Binfield with Rowe in February, 1716, to renew the solitary walk by moonlight the instant he returned, and indulge in the old contemplation on the transitory nature of human delights, and the happy intercourse of separate spirits. What renders more singular the second moonlight walk is that the date a.s.signed to it was the memorable season when the Thames was frozen over, and when the quant.i.ty of snow was as unusual as the intensity of the cold. The thaw commenced the day before the fragile little bard sallied out for his stroll, and he must indeed have been lost in contemplation "of the starry walks above" not to have been checked in his moonlight rambles by the deplorable condition of the walks below. None of the phenomena which were attracting the attention of the rest of the world,--the breaking up of the long and terrible winter, the deluge of melting snow, the chilling atmosphere, the dreary prospect,--received a pa.s.sing notice from him. He saw nothing except the moons.h.i.+ne, despite its watery gleam, and thought of nothing except the spirits in the stars.

In the collection of 1735 there appeared a letter to Digby, which is dated September 10, 1724, and is compounded from two letters, to Caryll of November 23 and December 25, 1725. In the letter of November 23, Pope says to Caryll, "My time has been spent in a trembling attendance upon death, which has at last seized one of our family,--my poor old nurse."

This sentence was inserted in the letter to Digby, but as the nurse did not die till November 5, 1725, the information could not have been communicated to him in September, 1724. The motive of the poet in altering the dates of his letters when he a.s.signed a fanciful address to them was probably to adapt the chronology to the circ.u.mstances of his new _dramatis personae_. His earliest letter to Edward Blount is dated August, 1714, and when he transferred the moonlight reverie from 1713 to 1716, he may have been influenced by the consideration that in the former year his correspondence with Blount had not commenced. The letter to Caryll of November 23, and the letter to Digby of September 10, both open with the same compliment on their return from the Continent, and the date may have been altered from 1725 to 1724 to make it harmonise with Digby's travels abroad. In remedying one inconsistency, Pope fell into another. A new use was found for the letter in the quarto of 1737.

Arbuthnot died in February, 1735, at the very time when there is reason to suppose that the poet printed the P. T. collection. The final letter in the volume is from the Doctor, and it was apparently added at the last moment. It was then too late to be thinking of a re-distribution of the materials, and the idea was not executed, or perhaps conceived till 1737, when the address, which had been changed from Caryll to Digby, was once more changed from Digby to Arbuthnot. In the interval Pope appears to have detected the anachronism. He retained the day of the month, but struck out the year. He preserved the announcement, "death has seized one of our family," but dropped the words "my poor old nurse." Her death nevertheless could alone have been meant; for in the letters to Caryll, as in the letter to Digby, several contemporaneous particulars are mentioned, which being repeated in the letter to Arbuthnot, limit its date to the period of the poor old nurse's decease. In both cases Pope's time had been spent in attending upon the dying patient, in both cases he and his mother had been ill together, in both cases these incidents had hindered his writing, in both cases he had been questioned respecting the effect produced upon his mind by the attacks upon his translation of the "Odyssey," and in both cases he had been less troubled by the criticisms upon his writings than by the imputations upon his morals, in consequence of some reports which had been spread of his intrigues with Martha Blount. It follows that the letter to Arbuthnot, though dated September 10, must have been written subsequent to the death of the nurse on November 5. But there is unanswerable evidence that at that time, and for weeks and months afterwards, he had constant personal intercourse with the poet. He was at his elbow, and not on the Continent,[165] and the event could not have been communicated to him as news upon his return from any journey he ever made to France. The year was omitted by Pope exactly because he could fix upon none which would bear the test of examination.[166] When it is plain that the letter could not have been addressed to Arbuthnot, it is superfluous to dwell upon the improbability that he and Caryll should have put the same question with regard to the "railing papers about the 'Odyssey,'" or to enumerate the other coincidences which are beyond the range of belief. The letter in all its shapes contains a pa.s.sage which forms a strange comment upon Pope's proceedings, and is the bitterest sentence that will ever be p.r.o.nounced upon them: "Falsehood is folly, says Homer, and liars and calumniators at last hurt none but themselves, even in this world. In the next, it is charity to say, G.o.d have mercy on them. They were the devil's vice-regents upon earth, who is the father of lies, and, I fear, has a right to dispose of his children."

On June 12, 1713, Pope wrote to Caryll, "As I hope, and would flatter myself, that you know me and my thoughts so entirely as never to be mistaken in either, so it is a pleasure to me that you guessed so right in regard to the author of that 'Guardian' you mentioned." On June 23 he wrote again, and said, "Your last is the more obliging as it hints at some little niceties in my conduct which your candour and affection prompt you to recommend to me." Both these sentences are inserted in an undated letter to Addison, which is compiled from three letters to Caryll, and no one could credit that Caryll and Addison had independently, and almost simultaneously communicated their guesses to Pope that he was the author of a particular essay in the "Guardian," and at the same time "hinted at little niceties in his conduct." The remainder of the letter to Addison is full of inconsistencies. The result of the imposition is to confound dates, events, opinions, and persons. Addison knows Pope and his thoughts so entirely as never to be mistaken in either; Addison's candour and affection prompt him to advise Pope in little niceties of conduct, and the perfect knowledge, the affection, the candour, and the advice, which are represented as proceeding from the most exquisite genius of the age, all appertain to an obscure country gentleman whose intimacy could not confer, in the eyes of the world, any l.u.s.tre upon his friend. The whole of the letters to Addison are an absolute fiction. Four out of the five are from the Caryll correspondence, and the internal evidence is opposed to the genuineness of the fifth. The deception is aggravated by the erroneous aspect it imparts to the celebrated quarrel. In the letters which preceded the commencing rupture Pope appears as the zealous champion and bosom a.s.sociate of the man he afterwards maligned, and we are left to suppose that the vaunted generosity on one side had been met by envy and hostility on the other. It is of virtual forgeries like these, which were specially concocted for the public, that the poet had the hardihood to say in his preface, "Many of them having been written on the most trying occasions, and all in the openness of friends.h.i.+p, are a proof what were his real sentiments, as they flowed warm from his heart, without the least thought that ever the world should be witness to them." He not only pretended that they derived a value from being the spontaneous expression of his feelings as they rose, but pledged his word that his motive in treasuring them up was to supply an authentic register of historical, literary, and personal events, and especially to provide a corrective to the misrepresentations of less scrupulous chroniclers. "I think more and more of it," he said to Lord Oxford, September 15, 1729, when dwelling upon the value of the collected letters and the importance of preserving them, "as finding what a number of facts they will settle the truth of, both relating to history and criticism, and parts of private life and character of the eminent men of my time." In the preface to the quarto of 1737 he made a statement of the same nature, and protested that the letters he kept were selected from the letters he destroyed, "merely as they preserved the memory of some friends.h.i.+ps which would be ever dear to him, or set in a true light some matters of fact from which the scribblers of the times had taken occasion to asperse either his friends or himself." He volunteered the declaration to Lord Oxford when he was engaged in the manufacture of the correspondence which was to falsify the facts he pretended it "would settle the truth of," and he renewed the a.s.sertion in public as a prelude to the fabrications themselves.

The Wycherley correspondence furnishes fresh ill.u.s.trations of the malpractices of the poet. For Pope's own share in it the published version is our only authority. The originals of Wycherley's part in it were placed in Lord Oxford's library in October, 1729, and withdrawn in June, 1735; but there still exist among the Oxford papers copies of six out of the eighteen published letters, besides six which are unpublished.[167] Imperfect as is the series, it is sufficient to show the infidelity of the work Pope put forth to the world. The letter borrowed from the Caryll group may conveniently be considered in connection with the rest. It was probably not included in the original volume of the Wycherley correspondence, which Pope published in 1729, for it is printed in the edition of 1735 on an interpolated half sheet signed * C. This is placed between sheet B and sheet C, and the numbers of its four pages--11 to 14--are repeated on sheet C. The s.p.a.ce being greater than was required the letter has been divided into an unusual number of paragraphs, which are double the ordinary distance from each other, and as this device for spreading out the matter only brought it three or four lines over the top of the fourth page the remainder is left blank, contrary to the plan adopted in the rest of the book.[168]

Pope we may presume had not completed in 1729 his task of reconstructing his letters to Caryll, and first introduced the manufactured letter into the old sheets of the Wycherley when he incorporated them into the volume of 1735. A single circ.u.mstance is enough to prove that the letter is fict.i.tious. It is made up of extracts from two letters to Caryll of July 31, 1710, and January 25, 1711, and in the former of the two the poet quotes a remark from the "Tatler" on the reason why women are vainer than men. The pa.s.sage is repeated in the letter to Wycherley which is dated June 23, 1705, nearly four years before the "Tatler"

commenced, and Pope imagined he had obliterated the anachronism by changing the phrase "the 'Tatler' observes of women" into the general formula "it is observed of women."

The concoction of the letter to Wycherley out of the letters to Caryll is attended by the usual distortion of facts. The extract from the letter of July 31 is an expostulation against Caryll's extravagant compliments. A few months after the date which Pope a.s.signed to the pa.s.sage when he applied it to Wycherley, the old dramatist had addressed a kindred remonstrance to Pope. "I must confess," he wrote March 22, 1705-6, "you try my patience, as you say in the beginning of your letter, not by the many lines in it, but the too many compliments you make me for nothing, in which you prove yourself, though a sincere friend, a man of too much fiction; for I have not seen so much poetry in prose a great while, since your letter is filled with so many fine words and acknowledgments of your obligations to me, the only a.s.severations of yours I dare contradict; for I must tell you your letter is like an author's epistle before his book,--written more to show his wit to the world than his sincerity or grat.i.tude to his friend, whom he libels with praise, so that you have provoked my modesty even whilst you have soothed my vanity; for I know not whether I am more complimented than abused, since too much praise turns irony, as too great thanks for small favours turns ingrat.i.tude, or too much ceremony in religion hypocrisy."[169] Pope thought fit in the published letters to reverse the parts. He ascribed the adulation to Wycherley, and the rebuke of it to himself. He gives a false air of manly independence to his youthful character, and does it at the expense of his friend.

The extract from the letter to Caryll of January 25, 1711, which forms the second portion of the made-up letter to Wycherley of June 23, 1705, is a comment on the eulogy lavished by Caryll on some verses of the poet. The change of name and date flattered in a double manner the vanity of Pope,--the applause appeared to proceed from a celebrated wit instead of from a country squire, and to be bestowed upon a lad of seventeen instead of upon a man who was nearly twenty-three. He always aspired to the credit of precocity, and some of his falsifications seem to have had no other purpose than to exaggerate his juvenile fame.

Wycherley wrote to him on February 19, 1708-9, and spoke of the genius which promised him immortality, of his great, vigorous and active mind.

In a postscript it is mentioned that the "Miscellany," which contained Pope's Pastorals, would not be out for three weeks.[170] Pope suppressed, amongst other pa.s.sages, the allusion which fixed the period at which the panegyric was penned, and altered the year to 1706-7, for no perceptible reason except that he wished to antedate the praise.

There can be little doubt that his opening letter to Wycherley was manufactured or misplaced with a similar object. It is printed in the edition of 1735 on an interpolated half sheet, marked *B, the pages of which are correctly numbered from 1 to 4. As the first page of sheet B which follows is numbered 3, it is evident that it was originally preceded by only two pages, which must have been cancelled, and the present letter put in their place.[171] This new letter is dated December 26, 1704, and contains his reflections on a compliment which he alleges had been paid to him by Wycherley--that his compositions were above the attacks of envious critics. "It is pleasant to remark," says Dr. Johnson, "how soon Pope learned the cant of an author, and began to treat critics with contempt, though he had yet suffered nothing from them."[172] He did not in fact publish a single line till more than four years later, and with our present evidence that the letter was an interpolated after-thought, we cannot but suspect that Wycherley's premature compliment, and Pope's premature cant both belonged to a subsequent period, or perhaps were fabricated for the press. "The author's age then sixteen," says the poet in a note, and in this ostentatious announcement we have the motive to the act. The opinion of Warburton, that the letters of the boy displayed all the characteristics of the man, is an argument the more that they were the productions of the man and not of the boy.

"I have received," writes Wycherley, in an unpublished letter, dated December 6, 1707, "yours of the 29th of November, which has so much overpaid mine in kindness that, as Voiture says, I doubt whether the best effects of those fine expressions of your friends.h.i.+p to me can be more obliging than they themselves; and for my humility you talk of, you have lessened while you magnify it, as by commending my good nature with so much more of yours you have made me almost incapable of being grateful to you; for you have said so many kind things of me you have hardly left me anything of the same kind to return you, and the best actions are not capable of making you amends for so many good words you have given me, by which you justly magnify them and yourself by saying they are sincere, so that you have obliged me to be vain rather than not think you a Plain Dealer. Thus, even against your own opinion, your freedom with me proves not you a fool, but me so, especially if I could think half the good you say of me my due. As for the good book you sent me I took it as kindly as the reprimand from the good man, which I think you heard, and was that I should not stand in my own light."[173] Pope printed his letter of November 29, to which this letter was a reply, and it touches upon none of the topics to which Wycherley refers. There are none of the fine expressions of friends.h.i.+p, none of the many honied words, none of the encomiums on his correspondent's good nature and humility. He reproves him, on the contrary, in rather a lofty tone for his excessive acknowledgments for trifling services, tells him he will continue the revision of the poems the old dramatist had submitted to him, insists that he must be permitted to alter and add as well as omit, and in answer to an observation of Wycherley, that "the sprightliness of wit despises method," a.s.sures him that if method is neglected his verses had better be converted into separate maxims in prose. As Pope's letter does not contain one syllable upon the subjects to which Wycherley alludes in his reply, so the reply takes no notice of the subjects which monopolise the epistle of Pope. Though he had discoursed exclusively upon the remodelling of Wycherley's poems, Wycherley himself disdains to offer in return a single word of thanks, of encouragement, of acquiescence, or dissent. The omission cannot be explained by the supposition that the copy was abridged. Whatever pa.s.sages might have been left out, those would certainly have been retained which confirmed under Wycherley's own hand the particulars which were Pope's professed justification for printing the letters, and his excuse for depositing them in the library of Lord Oxford.

The Wycherley correspondence concludes with a letter from Pope dated May 2, 1710. A coldness then ensued of which Dr. Johnson gives this account: "The fondness of Wycherley was too violent to last. His esteem of Pope was such that he submitted some poems to his revision, and when Pope, perhaps proud of such confidence, was sufficiently bold in his criticisms and liberal in his alterations, the old scribbler was angry to see his pages defaced, and felt more pain from the detection than content from the amendment of his faults. They parted, but Pope always considered him with kindness, and visited him a little time before he died."[174] The statement is incomplete. Pope engaged in the revision as early as April, 1706, when he describes to Wycherley the nature of the emendations he has made: "Some parts I have contracted as we do sun-beams to improve their energy and force; some I have taken quite away, as we take branches from a tree to add to the fruit; others I have entirely new expressed, and turned more into poetry." In November, 1707, he informs his friend that he has subjected the poem on "Dullness" to the same process, that he has condensed the piece one half, suppressed deficiencies, heightened the language, and smoothed the versification.

Far from being angry at these "bold criticisms and liberal alterations,"

the old scribbler was profuse in his thanks, and replied to Pope's request, that he would keep the a.s.sistance a secret, by declaring that he always does, and always will own to whose genius and judgment he is indebted for the improvement of his unmusical numbers and harsher sense.

Between three and four years afterwards he submitted a fresh set of poems to Pope's castigation, and in two successive letters of April 1 and April 11, 1710, entreats him to show no mercy in his corrections; "for I had rather," he says, "be condemned by my friend in private, than exposed to my foes in public." Pope answered that the repet.i.tions were more numerous than he antic.i.p.ated, and that crossing them out defaced the copy to a degree that he feared would be displeasing. "Let me know,"

he added, "if I am to go on at this rate, or if you would prescribe any other method." Wycherley rejoined that tautology was the last fault of which he would be guilty, that he thought with care he could remove the blemish, and that he would not occupy Pope in a task which might "prevent his writing on new subjects of his own." "All," he continues, "that I desire of you is to mark in the margin, without defacing the copy at all, any repet.i.tion of words, matter, or sense, which if you will be so kind as to do for me, you will supply my want of memory with your good one, and my deficiencies of sense with the infallibilities of yours,--which if you do you will most infinitely oblige me, who almost repent the trouble I have given you, since so much." The comment on Pope's strong criticism is equally cordial: "As to what you call freedom with me, which you desire me to forgive, you may be a.s.sured I would not forgive you unless you did use it; for I am so far from thinking your plainness a fault or an offence to me that I think it a charity and an obligation, which I shall always acknowledge with all sort of grat.i.tude to you for it, who am therefore, dear Mr. Pope, your most obliged humble servant." Dr. Johnson overlooked the rude ordeal to which Wycherley's vanity had been exposed in April, 1706, and the proof he then gave that he had not in his character the slightest tincture of irritable impatience at the wholesale correction of his works. He implored a renewal of the rigour when he invoked, with full experience of the treatment he was to expect, the same good offices in April, 1710, and the anger which Johnson imputes to him on that occasion at the detection of his faults is not only in singular contradiction to the whole of his previous conduct, but is belied, as we have seen, by his letter to Pope.

The notion that he was offended at the freedom of his friend's remarks was an inference drawn from the tone of Pope's reply, and not from the language of Wycherley himself.

"I am sorry," Pope commences, "you persist to take ill my not accepting your invitation, and to find, if I mistake not, your exception not unmixed with some suspicion." The letter of Wycherley is dated April 27, 1710, and if the contents of the letter of Pope, which is dated May 2, did not show that it was the answer, all doubt would be removed by the fact that it was headed "The Answer" by the poet, both in the octavo of 1735, and the quarto of 1737. This led to the conclusion that Wycherley, while professing to receive the strictures on his verses with kindness, had at the same time manifested in his letter some displeasure which his friend thought proper to omit, and which connected their quarrel with the secret soreness of the author at the candour of the critic.[175] Pope did indeed suppress the beginning and the end of Wycherley's communication; but the pa.s.sages he kept back betray the falsity of his own insinuation. "I answered," the letter begins, "yours of the 15th, which I think was the last I had from you, about three days after my receiving it; but having not yet received any answer to it from you, I doubt your old pain of the head-ache has prevented it, which gives me a great deal of concern for you, insomuch that I have had thoughts of making you a visit before my journey into Shrops.h.i.+re, which has been delayed by delays and disappointments to me out of the country." The end is as follows: "My most humble service pray to Sir William Trumbull, and your good father and mother, whilst I can a.s.sure you from hence all the world here are your servants and friends. I know not but I may see you very suddenly at Binfield after all my broken promises."[176] Instead, therefore, of Wycherley being annoyed at Pope's refusal to accept his invitation, it was Wycherley who was designing to visit Pope; and instead of his persisting to take ill any part of his friend's conduct, his language was throughout expressive of cordiality and kindness.

The first intimation of a rupture is in a letter of Pope to Cromwell, on August 21, 1710, in which he says, "Since Mr. Wycherley left London, I have not heard a word from him, though just before, and once since, I writ to him, and though I know myself guilty of no offence but of doing sincerely just what he bid me." On October 28, he reverts to the subject, and protests by everything that is holy that he is not acquainted with the cause of the estrangement. He goes on, however, to state that he did not suppose any man could have been so suspicious as not to credit his own experience of a friend, and avers that he had done nothing which deserved to be concealed--a defence which seems to indicate a consciousness that Wycherley had heard some disparaging report. It was subsequently a.s.serted by Pope's enemies, and never contradicted by Pope, that the alienation was produced by a copy of satirical verses he had written on the man he affected to caress. His offensive reply of May 2, to the genial letter of April 27, might alone explain the resentment of Wycherley, if the ungracious answer in its printed shape could be received as authentic. But I have shown that the opening sentence, in which Pope regrets that his correspondent persisted in taking ill his not accepting an invitation, is altogether fict.i.tious, and with the evidence before us in the critical epistle of November 29, 1707, that he replaced his complimentary effusions by unvarnished truths, we may suspect that the uncompromising tone of his final letter was softened in the original, and that the published version is merely another instance of his anxiety to conceal the deference he had shown to Wycherley before the celebrity of the old dramatist had been eclipsed by the fame of the youthful poet. The almost eastern style which Pope adopted towards him a year and a half after the close of their correspondence, may be seen in one of his genuine epistles to Cromwell, which was printed by Curll. "I am highly pleased," the poet writes, November 12, 1711, "with the knowledge you give me of Mr. Wycherley's present temper, which seems so favourable to me. I shall ever have such a fund of affection for him, as to be agreeable to myself when I am so to him, and cannot but be gay when he is in good humour, as the surface of the earth, if you will pardon a poetical similitude, is clearer or gloomier, just as the sun is brighter or more overcast." Whatever may have caused the sun to be overcast, there could have been little ground of complaint against Wycherley, or Pope would not have fabricated the pretence that he had provoked his anger by declining an invitation.

On the appearance of Theobald's edition of the Posthumous Works of Wycherley, the poet poured out his indignation to Lord Oxford. "I foresaw," he said, October 6, 1729, "some dirty trick in connection with my friend Wycherley's papers which they were publis.h.i.+ng, and nothing can at once do justice so well to him and to me, who was by him employed in them, as the divulging of some parts of his and my letters." At the moment that he was penning this denunciation against "dirty tricks in relation to Wycherley's papers," though no trick had been practised, he was busily engaged in aspersing his friend by garbling the papers he professed to divulge out of justice to his memory. His motives were not malignant. He was simply desirous to do credit to himself, but to effect this end he did not scruple to falsify their private correspondence, and under the plea of justifying a man who was in his grave, took advantage of his death to libel him in safety. When with our scanty means of testing the fidelity of the letters, we find that part of them were misplaced, distorted, and invented, the rest of the series must be received with distrust, and some which cannot be proved to be fabricated are among the most suspicious of the whole.

Where the originals of Pope's letters were in hostile hands, as was the case with his letters to Cromwell and to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he was compelled to be sparing in his operations. He omitted sentences and altered phrases, but could not venture upon wholesale perversions of the truth. Of the bulk of the letters he published we have neither the originals nor reliable copies; but when we chance to light upon the materials from which he worked, we find, as might be expected, that he was not more conscientious in his use of them than in his reckless falsification of his correspondence with Wycherley and Caryll. The volume of 1735 concludes with a letter from Arbuthnot, dated July 17, 1734, and in the quarto of 1737 we have the pretended reply of the poet.

Among the Arbuthnot papers in the possession of Mr. Baillie, is the actual answer sent by Pope, and it turns out that the printed subst.i.tute is an elaborate composition that has hardly any resemblance to the genuine text. He must have revised the letter of Arbuthnot as well as remodelled his own. "I am almost displeased," he remarks in the real, not in the counterfeit reply, "at your expression '_scarcely_ any of those suspicions or jealousies which affect the truest friends.h.i.+ps;' for I know of _not one_ on my part." He accordingly erased from Arbuthnot's letter the expression he disapproved, and fathered upon him the unqualified a.s.sertion, "I think since our first acquaintance there has not been any of those little suspicions or jealousies that often affect the sincerest friends.h.i.+ps." To what extent he may have carried this principle of altering the opinions of his correspondents to fit his personal views cannot be discovered. A single instance of the artifice in a man so unscrupulous destroys all confidence in the doc.u.ments which rest on his unsupported authority, and there is often reason to suspect that he gives us not what others said, but what he thought it advantageous to himself that they should say.

In comparison with this perversion of facts, the attempt of Pope to improve his letters, regarded as literary productions, would be of trifling moment, if it did not present another example of the audacious falsehoods he imposed upon the world. Speaking in the preface to the quarto of 1737 of the correspondence he reprinted from what he calls the surrept.i.tious editions, he says "for the chasms in it, we had not the means to supply them, the author having destroyed too many letters to preserve a series." He intends us to infer that the selection was not his own, though the pa.s.sage is virtually an admission that the collection of P. T. was the collection deposited with Lord Oxford, or there could not have been such an ident.i.ty between them as that none of the gaps in the P. T. volume could be filled up from the bound book in the Oxford library. "Nor," he continues, "would he go about to amend them, except by the omission of some pa.s.sages improper, or at least impertinent to be divulged to the public, or of such entire letters as were either not his, or not approved of by him." He would have us believe that they had been dragged before the world in their first crude state, without a single subsequent touch from his pen, though he had previously amended them with studious care--had culled the best pa.s.sages, blended extracts from two or three letters into one, and constantly corrected composition which had been originally laboured.

Some of his ambitious epistles, like his letter to Arbuthnot of July 26, 1734, were no doubt mere essays, which were only written when they were committed to the press. In the quarto of 1741, he repeated the device he had employed in the quarto of 1737. He pretended in both cases that the correspondence he printed himself had been printed by others without his knowledge, and in defiance of his wish. He next adopted and republished the letters he affected to repudiate, and having already revised them to the uttermost, a.s.serted that he could not be induced to revise them at all. So completely had truth with him been swallowed up in vanity. "Had he," he tells us in the preface to the quarto of 1737, "sat down with a design to draw his own picture, he could not have done it so truly, for whoever sits for it, whether to himself or another, will inevitably find his features more composed than his appear in these letters; but if an author's hand, like a painter's, be more distinguishable in a slight sketch than a finished picture, this very carelessness will make them the better known from such counterfeits as have been, and may be, imputed to him." He did everything he professed to have left undone. The careless sketch was a studied portrait got up for exhibition, and the minutest details had been disposed with a view to flatter the likeness and increase the effect.

In the conduct of Pope to Bolingbroke there are points of resemblance to his conduct in the case of the correspondence, which render the evidence a material supplement to the present inquiry. Bolingbroke allowed him to get put into type the political letters on "The Spirit of Patriotism,"

on "The Idea of a Patriot King," and on "The State of Parties," under the promise that the pamphlet should be confined to five or six persons, who were named by the author. Pope fulfilled his pledge by causing a separate edition of 15