INTRODUCTION.

In his will, dated December 12, 1743, not quite six months before he died, Pope bequeathed his printed works to Warburton, on condition that he published them without "future alterations." Warburton states that the object of the proviso was to relieve him from the obloquy he might incur by reproducing offensive strokes of satire. A few slight alterations which had not the sanction of any prior edition were nevertheless introduced by Warburton into some of the poems, and he announced on the title-page and in the preface, that they were taken from a corrected copy delivered to him by Pope. Mr. Croker mistrusted the genuineness of the "alterations," and he intended to reject the text of Warburton, and adopt in the main the text of the last octavo edition which had appeared during the lifetime of the poet. The honour of Warburton is not above suspicion, but Mr. Croker was misled by erroneous inferences when he accused him of tampering with the text, and falsely pleading the authority of "a copy corrected by the author himself."

Fantastic in his conceptions, violent in his animosities, hasty and imperious in the expression of his opinions, Warburton sometimes repented his rashness, and cancelled numerous leaves in his Shakespeare and Pope after the volumes were printed off. Mr. Kilvert, who edited his Literary Remains, found among his papers a cancelled leaf of the Pope, containing the commencement of the Prologue to the Satires. On the first page Warburton had inserted among the "Variations" a couplet which he said was copied from the manuscript of Pope:

The allusion was to the ballad of William and Margaret, written by Mallet. He was the ally of Pope and Bolingbroke, and when Pope was dead he was employed by Bolingbroke to blast the memory of their former friend.[1] The mention of Margaret's ghost gave Warburton the opportunity of appending a bitter note upon Mallet, whom he accused of "arraigning his dead patron for a cheat," and the leaf was cancelled to get rid of both note and variation. Mr. Croker believed that Warburton "forged" the variation to gratify his spleen against Mallet, whom he detested, and that before the volume was published "either his own conscience, or some prudent friend, suggested that such manifest fraud would not be tolerated." The conjecture was unfounded. Pope presented several of his manuscripts to the son of Jonathan Richardson, the portrait-painter, for his trouble in collating them with the printed text. Richardson's interlined copy of the first quarto volume of Pope's poetry passed into the hands of Malone, and was ultimately bought by Mr. Croker. The manuscripts which Richardson possessed in the handwriting of Pope were purchased by Dr. Chauncey, and are still the property of his descendants. Among them is the Prologue to the Satires, and it contains the couplet Mr. Croker believed to have been forged. In every instance where the manuscripts exist the variations printed by Warburton are found to be authentic.

The inference of Mr. Croker from the variations must be reversed. They do not invalidate, but attest, the fidelity of Warburton, and the "alterations" in the text of the poems must pass unchallenged unless there is some direct proof of their inaccuracy. The arguments, on the contrary, are altogether in their favour. Four printed pages of the first Moral Essay, with the corrections in manuscript, were discovered by Mr. Kilvert among Warburton's papers. "Some of the words," says Mr. Croker, "are so neatly written as to leave a strong impression on my eye of their being Pope's; other portions of the manuscript are more like Warburton's looser hand." The faint doubt expressed by Mr. Croker would hardly have arisen if his suspicion had not been previously awakened, for the corrections are all indubitably in the handwriting of the poet. Nor was the manuscript in this instance the guide of Warburton. He followed a copy of the Moral Essays printed by Pope in his last illness, though never published. "Warburton has the propriety of it as you know," wrote Bolingbroke to Lord Marchmont, one of the executors; "alter it he cannot by the terms of the will."[2] This of itself is an answer to Mr. Croker. The executors had access to Pope's latest printed version of the Moral Essays, which was Warburton's avowed authority, and he could not alter a single word without certain detection, and the consequent forfeiture of his legacy. He was alive to the risk. A portion of Pope's revised edition of his poetical works was passing through the press at the time of his death, and Warburton directed the printer to give the sheets, when the executors inquired for them, to their colleague the celebrated Murray, who was afterwards Lord Mansfield, adding, "Pray preserve all the press copy to the least scrap."[3] The terms of the will bound the editor to be faithful to his trust, under a penalty of 4,000l., the estimated value of the bequest,[4] and he saw the necessity of having the voucher of the poet's handwriting for the minutest departure from the previous text in such of the proofs as had not received Pope's final imprimatur. A more ample guarantee could not be desired for the authenticity of the particulars in which Warburton's text differs from the printed copies superintended by Pope. All the displaced readings, which are not utterly insignificant, are preserved in the notes to the present edition, as well as numerous unpublished variations, which are taken from the manuscripts of Pope, or the transcripts of Richardson.

The text of Pope's poems is more easily settled than elucidated. No other poet so near to our own time presents equal difficulties. His satires abound in uncertain allusions, and controverted topics which require a large amount of illustration and discussion. His philosophy was not understood by himself, and it is a study to disentangle his confused arguments, and interpret his doubtful language. He often expressed his opinions with wilful ambiguity, took refuge in equivocations, or had recourse to falsehoods, and we are constantly forced upon perplexing investigations to recover the truth he endeavoured to conceal. Fortunately his best poems and choicest passages are least incumbered with puzzling questions, and his obscurities have not much interfered with his popularity because the mass of readers are content to enjoy the beauties and leave the enigmas unsolved.

The number and eminence of the commentators on Pope, the diversity of their attainments, and the extent of their annotations appear to promise all the help which knowledge, acuteness, and taste could supply. The result is far below what might reasonably have been anticipated. Warburton, Pope's first editor, had a vigorous understanding, and possessed the enormous advantage that he carried on the work in concert with the poet, and could ask the explanation of every difficulty. A diseased ambition rendered his talents and opportunities useless. Without originality he aspired to be original, and imagined that to fabricate hollow paradoxes, and torture language into undesigned meanings was the surest evidence of a fertile, penetrating genius. He employed his sagacity less to discover than to distort the ideas of his author, and seems to have thought that the more he deviated from the obvious sense the greater would be his fame for inventive power. He has left no worse specimen of his perverse propensity than the spurious fancies, and idle refinements he fathered upon Pope. They are among his baldest paradoxes, are conveyed in his heaviest style, and are supported by his feeblest sophistry. His lifeless and verbose conceits soon provoke by their falsity, and fatigue by their ponderousness. Lord Marchmont said laughingly to Pope that "he must be the vainest man alive, and must want to show posterity what a quantity of dulness he could carry down on his back without sinking under the load."[5] The exuberant self-sufficiency of Warburton deluded him into the belief that the text derived its principal lustre from the commentary. He selected for the frontispiece to his edition a monument on which were hung medallions of himself and the poet, and Blakey, the draughtsman, told Burke that "it was by Warburton's particular desire that he made him the principal figure, and Pope only secondary, and that the light, contrary to the rules of art, goes upwards from Warburton to Pope." A gentleman remarked, when Burke related the anecdote, that they were drawn looking in opposite directions.[6] The sarcasm summed up the opinion which has always prevailed. The clumsy inventions of Warburton had not the semblance of plausibility, and scarce anybody except his shadow, and fulsome echo, Bishop Hurd, ever doubted that the text and commentary looked different ways.[7]

Proud of his dreary paradoxes, Warburton scorned the humble office of furnishing useful information. Pope had said, in his Imitations of Horace, that because three ladies liked a luckless play, a spendthrift had taken the whole house upon the poet's night,[8] which drew from Warburton the following note:—"The common reader, I am sensible, will be always more solicitous about the names of these three ladies, the unlucky play, and every other circumstance that attended this piece of gallantry, than for the explanation of our author's sense, or the illustration of his poetry, even where he is most moral and sublime. But had it been in Mr. Pope's purpose to indulge so impertinent a curiosity, he had sought elsewhere for a commentator on his writings. Which defect in these notes, the periodical scribblers, however, have been stupid and shameless enough to object to them."[9] Warburton's reserve was praiseworthy when his motive was respect for private feelings. His general neglect to clear up the allusions in Pope's poems did not admit of this apology, and in default of a better defence he called his critics "stupid and shameless." His habit when reasons failed him was to supply their place with abuse.

The edition of Warburton was published in 1751, and no attempt was made to supersede it till Gilbert Wakefield commenced a new edition in 1794. He was "labouring," he says, "for a subsistence," and the cost of the work, which was printed at his own expense, obliged him to bring out a volume at a time. Before the first volume was quite through the press he learned that Joseph Warton was engaged on a similar undertaking. Warton had the support of the London booksellers, and the edition of Wakefield ended with his opening volume. The world did not lose the benefit of his annotations. He published in 1796 his Observations on Pope, which consist of notes on the remaining poems, and of supplemental notes to the poems he had previously edited. Wakefield said that an "inculpable perfection pervaded the whole body of Pope's compositions," and in the extravagance of his admiration he overlaid the volume of his unfinished edition with weak rhapsodies which masked the useful part of his labours. He restrained his eulogistic excesses in his Observations, and kept more closely to his main design of tracing Pope's "imitations of his predecessors." All persons tolerably read in poetry could perceive that the obligations Pope acknowledged in his notes were but a fraction of the whole, and in 1740, Bowyer, the printer, with the assistance of Mr. Clarke, a clergyman, commenced a collection of parallel passages. From the letters of Clarke to Bowyer it appears that Pope was annoyed. Bowyer profited by his irritation, and offered to treat with him. "I think," wrote Clarke in 1742, "you buy his friendship cheap with a whole hecatomb of notes, essays, illustrations, and the mob of commentators."[10] The progress of the negociation is not recorded. The result is revealed in the fact that Bowyer shortly afterwards became Pope's printer. The sensitiveness which was disturbed at the gleanings of Bowyer would have shuddered at the abundant harvest of Wakefield. He himself had no intention of depreciating the merits of Pope. He only wished to illustrate a favourite author. Many of the parallelisms are too slight to be applicable, or they are common phrases the property of every Englishman. A vast number remain which are a curious exhibition of Pope's patience and skill in the art of poetical mosaic, and of the large amount of borrowed beauties he intermixed with his undoubted originality. The interpretation of the text, though subordinate with Wakefield, was not neglected by him. He and a friend who assisted him, Dr. William Bennet, Bishop of Cloyne, have explained more allusions than all the other commentators, and the least known and appreciated of the editors of Pope is the man who has done the most for his author.

The edition of Warton appeared in 1797. "His reason," he says in his preface, "for undertaking the work was the universal complaint that Dr. Warburton had disfigured and disgraced his edition with many forced and far-sought interpretations, totally unsupported by the passages which they were brought to elucidate." Warton had the stimulus of a second motive. He published in 1756 the first volume of his Essay on Pope, and his criticisms were roughly attacked in many passages of Ruffhead's Life of the poet, which was prompted and partly written by Warburton. While Warburton lived Warton did not venture to retaliate. The thirty years which intervened had not extinguished his resentment, and he seized the opportunity to revenge the ancient grudge. His consciousness of Warburton's defects did not keep Warton from repeating the error of filling page upon page with irrelevant matter. His Essay on Pope had been a receptacle for his store of miscellaneous reading, and in a separate work there was no objection to a medley of anecdote and criticism. He was seventy-five when he published his edition of Pope, and to save himself trouble he apportioned out the old farrago in notes. Profuse in digressions, he is sparing of needful explanations. His turn was for the lighter portions of criticism and biography, and most of his apposite remarks are critical opinions. They are often just, but never profound, for he had neither fervid feelings nor a robust understanding, and his highest qualities are a fair poetical taste, and a tolerable acquaintance with ancient and modern authors.

Bowles was a school-boy at Winchester when Warton was head-master, and he intimated that this early connection was the cause of his being employed to revise the next edition of Pope. It appeared in 1806. His poetic sensibility was exquisite, and he was well-read, shrewd, and candid. His failing was a hurry of mind which disqualified him for a painstaking commentator. He was content to jot down in a careless, colloquial style the off-hand thoughts of his quick and cultivated intellect, and he did not add much to the scanty explanations of Warton and Warburton. The chief merit of his edition is his excellent literary criticism, which is truer, deeper, and more refined than that of his old Winchester master. The estimate Bowles formed of the poetry and character of Pope was allowed to pass unchallenged for thirteen years, when some remarks of Campbell, in his Specimens of British Poets, commenced a controversy which lasted from 1819 to 1826. In the series of pamphlets he published to vindicate his opinions, Bowles exhibited his wonted acuteness, courage, and negligence. With all his slips in minor points the fresh facts which have come to light have more than confirmed his view of Pope's moral obliquities, and in the discussion on the principles of poetry he reduced the whole of his adversaries to silence. He and Hazlitt were the only persons among the disputants, eminent or obscure, who showed any real comprehension of the subject.

The next edition of Pope, justly considered by Mr. Croker to be the worst, came out in 1824, and was superintended by Roscoe, the author of the Life of Lorenzo de Medici, and Leo X. He barely contributed a single illustrative note, his criticisms are platitudes, and his vindications of Pope a tissue of blunders. He was misled by his credulous faith in his hero, by the rashness with which he imposed his own guesses for facts, and above all by his want of penetration and research. His half-knowledge was worse than ignorance. A few of his multitudinous errors were exposed by Bowles whom he had attacked. Roscoe replied in a feeble, disingenuous pamphlet, which drew from Bowles his taunting and crushing retort, Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe, Esq. This ended the Pope controversy.

The faults of plan and execution in the editions of Warburton, Warton, Bowles, and Roscoe stand out in strong relief, and Mr. Croker resolved, as far as possible, to correct the mistakes, retrench the superfluities, and supply the omissions. Warton and Bowles dismissed a large proportion of the barren, oppressive commentaries of Warburton. Roscoe put back the whole of the bulky excrescence. Most of it had been adopted by Pope, and to relieve the text, without excluding interpretations sanctioned by the poet, Mr. Croker determined to print the pedantic lumber in appendixes. The notes of the other editors rested upon their intrinsic merits, and he intended to sift out the surplusage, and only retain what was pertinent. To curtail is easy. The difficulty was to clear up the many obscurities which remained, and Mr. Croker was anxious to furnish his share of explanation, though he was convinced that numerous contemporary allusions would always baffle curiosity. His chief attention was directed to the satires, and he continued for many years to pursue his investigations, and accumulate materials. His busy life was succeeded by failing health, and he died before he had prepared his notes for the press. The results of his research have luckily all been preserved, for his habit was to write them out in full at the time. He was an acute and eager enquirer into political, personal, and social history, and no man could have been more competent to bring to the surface the under-current of forgotten circumstances.

I have kept to the plan sketched out by Mr. Croker. "A commentary," says Johnson, "must arise from the fortuitous discoveries of many men in devious walks of literature," and few poets have had more commentators than Pope. I have borrowed whatever I met with in previous writers that throw light upon his meaning, faults, and beauties, have cast aside what was plainly inapplicable and erroneous, and have done what I could to fill up deficiencies. My own notes will be recognised by the absence of any signature; all other notes throughout the work have the names of their authors attached, even when a note is by the same author as the text. The extracts from Warton are sometimes taken from his Essay, and both in his case and that of Bowles I have occasionally joined together scattered fragments which were connected in their subject. The rest of the arrangements will be understood at a glance.

The letters of Pope demand a more particular discussion. Estimated by their intrinsic merits they would call for little notice. "He laboured them," says Horace Walpole, "as much as the Essay on Man, and as they were written to everybody they do not look as if they had been written to anybody."[11] Their dry and frigid generalities could not be more happily exposed. The chief importance of the correspondence is in its relation to the morality of Pope, and the fame of men whose reputation is involved in the question of his uprightness. His real nature has always been hotly debated. "His detractors," says De Quincey, "fancy that in his character a basis of ignoble qualities was here and there slightly relieved by a few shining spots; we, on the contrary, believe that in Pope lay a disposition radically noble and generous, clouded and overshadowed by superficial foibles; or, to adopt the distinction of Shakespeare, they see nothing but 'dust a little gilt,' and we 'gold a little dusted.'"[12] Pope boasted loudly of his virtue, and his champions judge him by his own representations. His accusers hold that his professions were hypocritical, as when Lord Macaulay speaks of his "spite and envy, thinly disguised by sentiments as benevolent and noble as those which Sir Peter Teazle admired in Mr. Joseph Surface."[13] The charges brought against him are thickly scattered over his life, and either the guilty appearances are deceptive, or we must admit that his mind was essentially corrupt. His correspondence brings up the ever-recurring enquiry, and we have to decide whether his letters are not many of them fraudulent, and the circumstances attending their publication a series of ignominious plots, infamous false accusations, and impudent lies.

Every examination into the history of the letters was slight before Mr. Dilke engaged in the laborious task. His familiarity with the books, pamphlets, and periodicals of the time could not be exceeded, and his doubts once awakened he accepted nothing upon trust. With an immense amount of research and skill he proceeded to track Pope through his tortuous courses. He laid bare the ramifications of the plot against Curll, which was only known in a few of its prominent particulars. He detected, what none of the editors and biographers had perceived, the base manœuvres and deceit which accompanied the publication of the "Letters to and from Dr. Swift." He was originally put upon his investigations by the manuscript collection of Pope's letters to Caryll, and these revealed a new set of frauds in the evidence they supplied of letters converted into a fictitious correspondence. His inclination was to favour Pope whenever there was an opening for a liberal interpretation, and it was not from hostility that he exposed the net-work of fraud, and brought out the dark traits of a dishonourable disposition with new and terrible force. He printed his discoveries in the Athenæum[14], and after studying the facts afresh by the light of his essays, I am compelled to adopt his conclusions. The evidence upon which they rest is often circumstantial and intricate, and cannot be followed to the end without steady attention, and some trial of patience.

The letters of the poet which were first sent to the press were given by Cromwell to his mistress, Elizabeth Thomas, who sold them in her distress to Curll for ten guineas. She was a shameless woman, and boldly justified her conduct. "Everyone," she said, "knows that the person to whom a letter is addressed has the same right to dispose of it as he has of goods purchased with his money." The right which originally belonged to Cromwell, of publishing to the world whatever had been written to him in the confidence of friendship, he had, by his gift, transferred to herself; and thus it appeared that Cromwell had a right to be treacherous to Pope, and Mrs. Thomas a right to be treacherous to both Pope and Cromwell. With more reason she inferred that neither of them at heart would be vexed at the proceeding. Cromwell, she urged, could not be angry that the world should know "the professions of love, gratitude, and veneration made him by so celebrated an author," and Pope could not resent the exhibition of the "early pregnancy of his genius." "And yet," she continued, "had either of you been asked, common modesty would have obliged you to refuse what you would not be displeased with if done without your knowledge."[15] There can be little doubt, from his subsequent conduct, that this was the light in which the publication was viewed by the poet, notwithstanding his assertion in a note to the Dunciad, "that he was ashamed of the letters as very trivial things, full not only of levities, but of wrong judgments of men and books, and only excusable from the youth and inexperience of the writer." Mrs. Thomas did him an incalculable injury, not by revealing his secrets, but by flattering his vanity. The favourable reception of his correspondence originated the desire to give some further specimens to the world, and led him into the miserable series of falsehoods and frauds by which he endeavoured to accomplish his design without seeming to be privy to it.

The letters to Cromwell were published in Curll's "Miscellanea," of which the title-page says "Printed in the year 1727;" but the dedication to the letters themselves is dated June, 1726, and it was in 1726 that they appeared. The incidental and scanty notices of them at the time are sufficient to indicate the impression they produced. Thompson, writing in October to Aaron Hill, says that "though careless and uncorrected, they are full of wit and gaiety." There may have been many who thought that they did as much credit to the heart as to the head of the poet. "I have read the collection of letters you mention," Fenton wrote to Broome in September, 1726, "and was delighted with nothing more than that air of sincerity, those professions of esteem and respect, and that deference paid to his friend's judgment in poetry which I have sometimes seen expressed to others, and I doubt not with the same cordial affection. If they are read in that light, they will be very entertaining and useful in the present age; but in the next, Cicero, Pliny, and Voiture may regain their reputation." The comments on Pope's sincerity were plainly ironical. Fenton considered him to be extremely hypocritical, and some person concerned in the publication of 1726 must have formed the same opinion of his character, if the ludicrous tail-piece is intended to be typical of the letters. A little man whose diminutive stature did not permit him to clasp the taller figure in his arms while they stood upon a level, is represented as having jumped off the ground and seized his companion round the waist, who, with his hands thrown into the air at the painful vehemence of the embrace, is struggling to get loose. Undiscerning persons, who judged the poet by his words, would form a different estimate, and would perceive only proofs of his excellence where Fenton saw examples of his habitual insincerity. "His correspondence," says Johnson, of the later collection of 1735, "filled the nation with praises of his candour, tenderness, and benevolence, the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship."[16]

The letters to Cromwell had more than an ephemeral success. Curll, in his reply in 1729 to the attack on him in the Dunciad, after noticing Pope's affected depreciation of them, says, "However, they sell very well; price 5s."[17] The poet had already devised an excuse for following them up by a second set. Theobald, who had earned his lasting enmity by pointing out the errors in his edition of Shakespeare, was employed by some booksellers to edit the posthumous papers of Wycherley, which had been purchased from his heir. The work appeared in 1728. Pope saw in this circumstance a pretence for dragging his own letters before the world, and an opportunity of gratifying his spleen against Theobald. He said that the poems were disreputable to the memory of his early friend, and that the correspondence was published because it showed that it was his last resolution to have suppressed them.[18] It showed the reverse. The last printed letter of Wycherley exhibits him as intent as ever upon preparing his poems for the press, and if we are to believe that he subsequently abandoned the design, we must accept the fact upon the bare assertion of Pope, which derives no support from any part of the correspondence. But though it failed to answer the purpose avowed by its editor, it answered purposes not avowed which were much nearer to his heart. It shows that the verses of Wycherley were rugged, feeble, and full of repetitions, and that whatever they possessed of strength and harmony was due to the revision of Pope. It shows that he furnished entire passages, and where the text is not explicit on the point he is careful to reclaim his contributions in the notes. It displays on the one hand the "first sprightly runnings" of the precocious young poet, and on the other the "last dull droppings" of the veteran author, who was verging upon his dotage. "If we were to judge," says Warburton, "of this set of letters by the manner of thinking and turn of expression, we should conclude that they were all mistitled, and that those given to the boy of sixteen were written by the man of seventy, and the contrary,—such sober sense, such gravity of manners, and so much judgment and knowledge of composition, enlivened with manly wit, distinguish those of Mr. Pope, while a childish jealousy, a puerile affectation, a lying at catch for points, together with a total contempt of method, make up the character of those of Mr. Wycherley." Warton transcribes the judgment of Warburton, and adds his testimony to the superiority of the letters of Pope. He says that he "has excelled Wycherley in his own way of striving to be always witty," and that "the perpetual attempt of the vain old man to be brilliant, the accumulation of simile upon simile, the antithesis, the cant of satire, the severity on authors, critics, and women, are sufficiently disgusting." In short, the whole effect of the correspondence was to display the infirmities of Wycherley and the merits of Pope; and his mode of relieving his departed friend from the reproach of the posthumous poems was to reveal the secret that the only portions of them which might have done him credit were not his own, but the work of this zealous vindicator of his fame.

With such a futile excuse for printing the letters, Pope was anxious to throw the responsibility upon some other person. He was the intimate friend of Edward, the second Earl of Oxford, who, without being possessed of much ability, courted the society of eminent men, and who, with no great tincture of literature, had inherited from his father a passion for collecting books and manuscripts. His correspondence with the poet descended, with the rest of his personal papers, to his only child, who married the Duke of Portland in 1734. From the Duchess the papers passed to her eldest daughter, Lady Elizabeth, wife to the third Viscount Weymouth, who subsequently became the first Marquess of Bath. The Oxford manuscripts were consequently removed to Longleat, where they have remained ever since among the treasures of a library which is worthy of the regal edifice it adorns.[19] In Pope's letters to his friend we have his own record of the device he adopted. He wrote to Lord Oxford in September, 1729, and complained that the publication of Wycherley's posthumous poems was derogatory to their author, as well as to the critic who had advised him to re-cast them. "Something," he said, "will be necessary to be done to clear both his and my reputation, which the letters under his hand will abundantly do; for which particular reason I would desire to have them lodged in your lordship's hands." He had been slow in discovering that something was necessary to be done to clear the reputation of his deceased friend; for Theobald's book had come forth in 1728, and it was now the autumn of 1729. His tardy zeal appears to have been entirely begotten by the idea that it could be made the pretext for producing the correspondence; but having once conceived the scheme, he did not allow it to languish. On the 6th of October he advanced a step further, and began to shadow forth the real object of the request. He informed Lord Oxford that some of the letters were to be printed, and asked permission to state that they were already in his library, "which," says he, "they shall be as soon as you will give orders to any one to receive them." "I would not," he went on, "appear myself as publisher of them, but any one else may, or even the bookseller be supposed to have procured copies of them,—formerly or now, it is equal. Certain it is that no other way can justice be rendered to the memory of a man to whom I had the first obligations of friendship, almost in my childhood." Lord Oxford merely replied that if the documents were left in a box with the porter, the man had orders to place it in the library, and that any mention of that library would be agreeable to its owner;[20] but he took no notice of the intimation that the poet designed to ascribe the publication to an imaginary agent. Pope now considered him to be sufficiently prepared, and his next letter disclosed the whole of the scheme, and at the same time announced its execution. It then appeared that his noble dupe, who, as he was both weak and amiable, was expected to prove a submissive tool, had been asked to become the keeper of the manuscripts, that he might be held up to the world as their publisher. "I am extremely obliged to you," Pope wrote to him, "for your kind permission to quote your library, and to mention it in what manner I pleased. I consulted Mr. Lewis upon the turn of the preface, and have exceeded perhaps my commission on one point, though we both judged it the right way; for I have made the publishers say that your lordship permitted them a copy of some of the papers from the library, where the originals remain as testimonies of the truth. It is indeed no more than a justice due to the dead and to the living author."[21] In other words, his lordship was asserted to have permitted the bookseller to print the papers in his library, when they were not even sent to his house till after they were printed, and this fiction was fathered upon him without so much as his leave being asked, or his having been suffered to read a single line of the work he was stated to have authorised. When Pope alleged that the proceeding was "no more than a justice due to the dead and the living author," he must have hoped that the outrage to Lord Oxford of which he had been guilty in committing the act, would appear to be diminished by the assurance with which he communicated it. His deceptions were not confined to the preface. He shortly afterwards wrote to Swift, and contrived to mention that he had contracted a friendship at sixteen with a man of seventy. "I speak," he said, "of old Mr. Wycherley, some letters of whom, by-the-bye, and of mine, the booksellers have got and printed, not without the concurrence of a noble friend of mine and yours. I do not much approve of it, though there is nothing in it for me to be ashamed of, because I will not be ashamed of anything I do not do myself, or of anything that is not immoral, but merely dull."[22] The booksellers had printed the letters with the concurrence of a noble friend, and the noble friend had never heard a word on the subject till the printing was completed. Pope did not much approve of it, and he had protested to Lord Oxford that in no other way could justice be rendered to the memory of a man to whom he had the first obligations of friendship. He would not be ashamed of what he did not do himself, and he alone had edited the work and sent it to the press. The value of his asseverations may be measured by the triple falsehood he volunteered to Swift. He was aware that the arguments by which he hoped to persuade Lord Oxford to become his dupe would not impose upon the penetrating understanding of the Dean, and he therefore openly repudiated what he was unable to excuse. If the publication had vindicated Wycherley, it would have been its own justification; but as it was put forth to do honour to Pope, he sacrificed his veracity to avoid the imputation of vanity. He cruelly sneered, in his "Prologue to the Satires" at the poor garretteer, who urged the plea for printing his compositions that he was "obliged by hunger and request of friends." The poet had not the excuse of hunger, and he improved upon the model he satirised when he pretended that his friends had taken his papers, and printed them against his will.

The deception which Pope practised was never suspected till it was revealed by his correspondence with Lord Oxford, which has hitherto remained in manuscript. The repetition of the attempt on a more elaborate scale was less successful, and it has always been believed by the immense majority of inquirers that the promulgation of the collection of 1735, which the poet vehemently denounced as an act of intolerable treachery, was from first to last his own deed. "It seems," says Johnson, "that Pope being desirous of printing his letters, and not knowing how to do, without imputation of vanity, what has in this country been done very rarely, contrived an appearance of compulsion, that when he could complain that his letters were surreptitiously published, he might decently and defensively publish them himself."[23] Fresh facts have rendered the evidence against him stronger than ever, and the whole derives increased force from the information we now possess that he had previously had recourse to a kindred falsehood. In the first case he made a tool of a friend; in the second, he varied his plan, and made a tool of an enemy.

Pope tells us, in the preface to the authorised edition of his correspondence, which he brought out in quarto in 1737, that his disgust at the publication of his letters to Cromwell, and "the apprehension of more treatment of the same kind, put him upon recalling as many as he could from those who he imagined had kept any."[24] He applied to his friend Caryll, in December, 1726, to surrender his collection; and, on renewing the request a few days later, he added, "I have desired the same thing of Mrs. Blount, with whose late worthy husband I entertained so long a correspondence, and of all others." It was more than two years before Caryll could be induced to comply with the demand, and it would seem that Mrs. Blount was little less backward; for, on November 28, 1729, Pope wrote to Swift, "I lately received from the widow of one dead correspondent, and the father of another,[25] several of my own letters of about fifteen and twenty years old." When the poet had gleaned together all the letters he could extort, "he immediately," he says, "lessened the number by burning three parts in four of them: the rest he spared, not in any preference of their style or writing, but merely as they preserved the memory of some friendships which will ever be dear to him, or set in a true light some matters of fact from which the scribblers of the time had taken occasion to asperse either his friends or himself." He was not more anxious to destroy the three parts than to secure the fourth from destruction. "He laid by the originals together with those of his correspondents, and caused a copy to be taken to deposit in the library of a noble friend, that in case either of the revival of slanders, or the publication of surreptitious letters during his life or after, a proper use might be made of them."[26] The noble friend was Lord Oxford, and the request to be allowed to place the letters in his library was made by Pope in September, 1729, when he stated that "he had had it at heart for half a year and more." Upon obtaining Lord Oxford's consent, he had the correspondence transcribed under his own inspection; and on October 16 he says, "I am causing the manuscripts to be fairly written, and hope at your lordship's return to be the presenter of them in person." By his own avowal he had carefully culled his letters, had prepared the selected portions for some public purpose, and had taken the unusual precaution of preserving them in duplicate. The end which he declared they were intended to serve was a palpable pretence. He never specified any slanders they refuted, and he could have had little idea of employing them to test the truth of surreptitious letters when he began by burning three parts of the collection, and only retained a fourth. The manifest fact was, that, while he was desirous of consigning to oblivion those portions of his correspondence which would not add to his reputation, he was eager to circulate the picked specimens which he imagined would promote his fame.

No advance seems to have been made towards the accomplishment of his design till 1733, when Curll advertised a life of Pope. An unknown person who wrote a feigned hand, and who signed his letters with the initials P. T., then opened a correspondence with the bookseller, and furnished some information upon the genealogy of the poet. He vindicated him from the charge of plebeian descent, and affirmed that he sprung from the same stock as Lord Downe.[27] This assertion was repeated by Pope in one of the notes to his "Prologue to the Satires," though Mr. Pottinger, his cousin, ridiculed the "fine pedigree," which had never been heard of in the family, and which there is nothing to confirm.[28] There is thus at starting a curious identity between the apocryphal statements of P. T. and the apocryphal statements of Pope. But as P. T. must have had access to the manuscripts in the keeping of Lord Oxford, he might be supposed to have found the account among the memoranda of the poet, and no great stress could be laid upon the coincidence to prove that P. T. was Pope in disguise, if the general tenor of the correspondence did not indicate its origin.

There was a feud between Pope and Curll. The bookseller believed that the poet had drugged him with an emetic, he had been subsequently satirised in the Dunciad, and he had lost no opportunity of retaliating. An uncompromising panegyric upon his antagonist would have run counter to his prejudices, and while P. T. is careful to tell nothing which is not for the honour of Pope, he has the precaution to consult the antipathies of Curll. He pretends that the poet, with whom he was formerly well acquainted, has treated him like a stranger, and that he cannot give so good an account of his manners as of his parentage. He promises, if he receives encouragement, to make these moral deficiencies the subject of a future letter, "without entering into anything in anywise libellous." He omitted, however, in his next communication, to keep this part of his engagement, and never reverted to it. He had spoken of Pope's family in the same flattering and perhaps fictitious terms as Pope himself; but, in spite of his pledge, and his animosity, he forbore to relate the minutest particular to the discredit of the poet. The inconsistency between the assumed character and the actual conduct of P. T. is much too glaring. An enemy would have been far less partial and considerate.

The first communication of P. T. was dated October 1733. He directed Curll to signify the acceptance of his offer by inserting in the Daily Advertiser the notice, "E. C. hath received a letter, and will comply with P. T." This Curll did, and on the 15th of November got an answer from P. T., in which the true purpose of the manœuvre transpires. Instead of sending traits of the defects in Pope's manners, he announces that he has "a large collection of his letters from the former part of his days till the year 1727, which will alone make the most authentic memoirs of him that could be." He adds that they will form a four or five shilling volume, and "yet I expect no more," he says, "than what will barely pay a transcriber, that the originals may be preserved in mine or your hands to vouch for the truth of them." He appealed to the hatred as well as to the avarice of the bookseller. He again asserted that he had experienced bad treatment from Pope and that his sole motive was "to bestow upon him" the same "care" which Curll had done already.[29] Again his thirst for retaliation ended in homage, for the collection consisted of the identical letters which the poet had prepared for the press, and which were intended to raise instead of to lower his reputation. The conduct of P. T., who, having abjured profit and only feigned revenge, was to get nothing by his roguery, is altogether incomprehensible, if we are to suppose that he was what he professed; but his conduct ceases to be a mystery if P. T. was Pope, who, having finished editing his letters, may be presumed to have had the same desire to find a pretext for printing them as he had exhibited in the instance of the correspondence with Wycherley.

The point upon which the bargain went off for a time is equally significant. P. T. enclosed an advertisement of the letters, and required as a preliminary that it should be put forth by Curll, "for I shall not," he said, "be justified to some people on whom I have dependence, unless it seem to the public eye as no entire act of mine; but I may be justified and excused if, after they see such a collection is made by you, I acknowledge I sent some letters to contribute thereto."[30] This reasoning carries its own refutation. If his patrons could believe that Curll, without his aid, had got at the bulk of the correspondence, they would quite as readily have credited that he had not assisted the bookseller to the remainder. Nor is it likely that the men who would have renounced P. T. if he had been a principal in the business, would have connived at his becoming an accomplice. His plea was as fanciful as his desire for revenge; but assume that Pope was the real negotiator and his motive is transparent. The advertisement would have threatened that very surreptitious publication of his letters, against which he affirmed that he kept his own version in readiness. He would have repudiated the impending piracy, and hastened in self-defence to commit the genuine edition to the press. The promise contained in the advertisement, that "the originals would be shown at Curll's when the book was published," would have empowered him to give an air of imposture to the transaction, and to damage his foe, who when challenged would not have been able to produce the documents. According to the language which Pope uttered in the name of P. T. he did expect to be justified in his proceedings by means of the advertisement, but not at all in the manner which he wished the bookseller to believe.

All the conditions required by Pope seemed met together in Curll. He was an enemy, and could be denounced when he had been deceived. He had printed the letters to Cromwell without the consent of the poet, and it would readily be credited that he had repeated the act. He was not nice in his notions of honour, and he might be expected to catch at an offer, however discreditable, which promised both profit and revenge. But whatever might be his greediness and his malice, they had not swallowed up his caution, and notwithstanding that P. T. wrote again to express his dissatisfaction that no advertisement appeared, Curll forbore to announce letters he did not possess, at the bidding of a conspirator whose name and person he did not know. The subject in consequence slept from November 1733 till March 1735, when the poet was meditating some fresh proceeding respecting his correspondence, for on the third of that month, he requested Lord Oxford to send him by the hearer "the bound book of copies of letters," which, he wanted, he said, "to inspect for a day or two." There are transcripts among the Oxford papers of some of the letters of Wycherley to Pope, which appeared in 1729. There are transcripts of Pope's correspondence with Atterbury, which appeared in 1737. There are transcripts of a large part of the Swift correspondence, which appeared in 1741. But while the earlier and later letters are preserved on loose sheets the bound book has vanished, and there is not a single transcript of any letter which was first given to the world in the collection of 1735. The probability is that the book which Pope professed to require for a day or two was never returned. The circumstance is the more suspicious because he had the originals at home, which would have served him for reference, whereas if his object was to commit the letters clandestinely to the press he would use the copy which had been specially prepared for the purpose,—which had been expurgated, altered, and sometimes remodelled. Accordingly we find that P. T. reappears at this crisis with the correspondence in print. He had failed to lure Curll by a promise of letters which he would not produce. He now changed his tactics, and offered him an entire impression of the book.

This second act of the plot was opened by a communication of Curll to Pope on the 22nd of March, three weeks after the letters had been withdrawn from the library of Lord Oxford. He invited the poet to close their differences, and, as a proof of his readiness to oblige him, sent him the old advertisement of P. T. Curll asserted that he took the step "by direction."[31] When he republished this statement he volunteered another, which seems to be inconsistent with it, and says that the discovery of the advertisement, when arranging his papers, determined him to propose a cessation of hostilities.[32] As he was unconscious, however, of any contradiction in the double account, it is probable that he may have been influenced by some concurring advice. It strengthens this view that Pope, in an anonymous "Narrative," which he subsequently put forth, reports what Curll told a few days later, "to persons who sifted him in the affair,"[33] which shows that the bookseller had people about him in the interest of the poet, and these sifters, as the critic in the Athenæum remarks, might, when needful, become prompters. The progress of events proved that the letter of Curll was at least singularly opportune, and if not written "by direction," was one of those fortunate chances which often contribute to the success of the best laid schemes. Pope replied to it by inserting an advertisement in the "Grub Street Journal," the "Daily Journal," and "The Daily Post Boy." He stated in this manifesto, that Curll "pretended that P. T. had offered him to print a large collection of Pope's letters," that he would have no correspondence with Curll, that he knew no such person as P. T., that he believed the letters to be a forgery, and that he should not trouble himself in the matter.[34] The poet might not choose to have any intercourse with a former enemy of no good fame, but it was a strange return for his peace-offering that he should advertise an insult on him, and equally singular when he was incredulous, and had resolved not to trouble himself about the matter, that he should parade in the newspapers the contents of a private note. Yet extraordinary as was his conduct, if he had not any covert design, it was consistent enough if he was the agent in the plot for bringing his letters before the world. His advertisement would convey the impression that he could not have connived at the publication he was contriving; it would afford an opening for P. T. to come again upon the stage; and by infuriating Curll it would induce him to close at once with the proposal which was ready to be made to him. In conformity with this supposition P. T., who had not communicated with the bookseller for upwards of two years, saw the advertisement directly it appeared, and he lost not an instant in informing Curll that since their last negotiation he had printed the letters.[35] It was true that Curll had betrayed him to Pope, but P. T. was generous and would still give him the preference. The game required that Pope should be incapable of being conciliated, and P. T. of taking offence.

P. T. demanded that Curll should show he was in earnest by putting forth the old advertisement. Curll complied, and the negotiation went forward. An agent was sent to him who assumed the name of Smythe and professed to be a clergyman, but who was so little conversant with the character he personated that he wore a clerical gown and lawyer's bands. On the 7th of May he went to Curll's house at night; and, to bring the bargain to a conclusion, exhibited to him most of the sheets of the volume, and a dozen original letters.[36] Before Curll had published this statement Pope, for the purpose of discrediting the promise which had been made in the advertisement, that the originals should be produced when the book appeared, had committed himself to the assertion that they all remained in their proper place.[37] They must nevertheless, observes the critic in the Athenæum, have been out of his possession, and doing service on the evening when Smythe trafficed with Curll. The bookseller was not likely to be deceived, for he had the Cromwell correspondence in his keeping, and knew the poet's handwriting well.[38] He was as little likely to deceive, for he told the fact in the course of a straight-forward story, without perceiving, or at least without pointing out, its force in attesting the connivance of Pope.

Fifty copies of the letters were in the possession of Curll by the 12th of May, and were speedily sold. Smythe sent for him at one o'clock to a tavern in Leicester Fields, and half an hour afterwards one hundred and ninety additional copies were brought by a couple of porters, who were directed to carry them to the shop of the bookseller. There they were immediately seized by an order from the House of Lords, and Curll was commanded to attend next day.[39] The peers in 1722 had voted it a breach of privilege to publish the writings of any member of their body without his consent. Curll, in an advertisement which appeared for the first time that morning, had given a list of the persons to whom Pope's letters were addressed, and among the names were those of the Earl of Halifax and the Earl of Burlington. To print letters to lords was no offence. It was necessary that there should be letters from them, and of this there was no other indication than that the list of names was followed by the words,—"with the respective answers of each correspondent."[40] Curll asserted that the advertisement came to him through Smythe,[41] and the proceedings founded upon it in the hour that it issued wet from the press were, as Johnson states, instigated by Pope, "who attended to stimulate the resentment of his friends."[42] If he had never set eyes upon the book before it was published, curiosity would still have prompted him to turn over the leaves, and he must immediately have discovered that it did not contain a single letter from a peer. The wording of the advertisement may, therefore, be suspected to have been devised by him to afford a colour for what he must have known was a groundless prosecution. A committee was appointed to investigate the complaint. It met on the 14th of May, and the case would have ended as soon as it was begun, if Pope's spokesman, Lord Hay, who resided at Twickenham, and was one of his associates, had not adduced from a letter to Jervas a passage which he alleged to be a reflection on Lord Burlington. But the person who furnished the work to Curll had, by an elaborate device, provided against a charge which no one except its contriver could have foreseen. The fifty copies, which were sold on the morning of the 12th, before the power of the House of Lords was put in motion, contained the letter. Those which were furnished in the middle of the day, as if to meet the messenger sent to seize them, were all defective, and in every case the letter to Jervas was among the omissions.[43] Nor had the leaves which contained it been simply kept back, but every trace of it had been obliterated by an alteration at the printing-press. In the complete work the missing letter commenced on p. 115 of vol. ii.[44] and ended on p. 117. In the imperfect books a note on Trumbull, which began at p. 114, is carried on to the top of p. 115, and Pope's epitaph upon him, which appears in no other copies of the correspondence, is added to cover a little of the vacant space. The word "Finis" follows the note, though, in spite of this indication that the whole is concluded, the work recommences on p. 117 with the letters to Gay, which continue to p. 154.[45] The coincidence was far too extraordinary to be undesigned. Pope, who had incited the prosecution the very hour the book was published, and who had been in such haste to instruct Lord Hay that the debate in the House of Lords was concluded, and the sheets seized by two o'clock, could alone have adapted one batch to afford a pretext for the proceeding, and another batch to render the proceeding abortive,—he alone could have arranged the delivery of the respective parcels, and sent the fifty copies which contained the obnoxious passage, in time to be sold in the morning, and the one hundred and ninety copies in which it was wanting, just in time to be captured by the messenger from the House of Lords. His object was not to procure the confiscation of the correspondence, and stop the sale. He wished to simulate indignation, and divert suspicion from himself without interfering with the success of the work, and he conducted the prosecution with so much care to ensure defeat that we may readily credit the assertion of Curll, "that the lords declared they had been made Pope's tools."[46]

While the copies seized by the messenger had not the letter to Jervas, they contained in compensation an address "to the reader," which was not in the first fifty copies sent to Curll. This preface betrays throughout the hand of Pope. The original proposition was that it should be furnished by Curll; and, notwithstanding the revenge by which he professed to be actuated, P. T. maintained that the poet ought to be mentioned with praise. "We must by no means," he said, "seem to use him with disregard, but rather commend, lest by any circumstances I writ to you the publisher be detected."[47] I This was seven years after the appearance of the Dunciad, and Pope was not so universally beloved as that the intimation that the correspondence was put forth by an enemy could direct suspicion to the culprit. The pretence was too palpable to impose upon any one, and P. T., who, among other motives for his procedure, probably mistrusted Curll's cordiality or skill in a panegyric, determined upon consideration to supply it himself. He was not sparing in his tribute. "Mr. Pope," he wrote, "has not any great cause to think the publication much offence to his modesty, or reflection on his judgment, when we take care to inform the public that there are few letters of his in this collection which were not written under twenty years of age. On the other hand, we doubt not the reader will be much more surprised to find at that early period so much variety of style, affecting sentiment, and justness of criticism in pieces which must have been writ in haste, very few perhaps ever re-viewed, and none intended for the eye of the public."[48] This was the very language of the poet. He coveted the distinction of precocity of talent, and was perpetually directing attention to the early age at which he affirmed, and sometimes falsely, that many of his letters and poems were penned. He asserted that his most finished epistles were thrown off in haste, which, as they were always held to bear the marks of labour in every sentence, is the last topic of praise that would have been selected by anybody else. He was anxious to persuade the world that they were not revised before they were published, and he prevaricated to foster the deception.[49] He protested that they were never meant for the press, which no one believed, and which could least of all be credited by the assumed traitor who transcribed them from the copy that had been deposited in the library of Lord Oxford to ensure their preservation. The vindictive P. T. was both so fortunate and so hearty in his commendations that he proved the mere echo of Pope in his self-applauding moods.

The other topics in the address "to the reader" were the same topics which were subsequently reiterated by the poet. In his narrative of the P. T. plot, and in the preface to the authorised edition of his correspondence, he relates the method by which the Cromwell letters were obtained as affording a vindication of his own collection.[50] P. T. was beforehand with him in citing the precedent to explain the means by which his piratical volume was formed, and to justify its publication.[51] The similarity of language and ideas in the mention of the Wycherley letters was much more peculiar. Lord Oxford appears to have refused to father the volume of 1729, for Pope never again alleged that he sent it to the press. But neither did the poet avow that he himself was responsible for its appearance. On the contrary, he renewed the false statement that the letters were not printed till after they were deposited in Lord Oxford's library, and spoke indefinitely of the agency through which they were given to the world. "It happened soon after," he says in his Narrative, "that the posthumous works of Mr. Wycherley were published in such a manner as could no way increase the reputation of that gentleman, who had been Mr. Pope's first correspondent and friend; and several of these letters so fully showed the state of that case that it was thought but justice to Mr. Wycherley's memory to print a few to discredit that imposition."[52] "The next year," he says, in the preface to the quarto of 1737, "the posthumous works of Mr. Wycherley were printed in a way disreputable enough to his memory. It was thought a justice due to him, to show the world his better judgment, and that it was his last resolution to have suppressed those poems. As some of the letters which had passed between him and our author cleared that point, they were published in 1729, with a few marginal notes added by a friend."[53] "The letters to Mr. Wycherley," says P. T.'s address to the reader, "were procured some years since on account of a surreptitious edition of his posthumous works. As those letters showed the true state of that case, the publication of them was doing the best justice to the memory of Mr. Wycherley."[54] Pope misrepresented the tenor of the letters as an excuse for divulging them; but how came the vindictive P. T. to be the first to hit upon an untruth in which he had no sort of interest, and to serve the cause of his antagonist by promulgating the fanciful description? Pope ascribed the publication to an indefinite agency, to avoid acknowledging that he was the sole originator of the work; but how came his enemy P. T. to anticipate his wishes, and the ambiguous phraseology in which he conveyed them? The identity of thought and expression was the more singular that P. T., in a private communication to Curll, had confirmed the original story of the poet, and asserted that "a noble lord had handed to the press the letters of Wycherley."[55] To the world he varied the tale, and the variation was the same which was adopted a week or two afterwards by Pope.

A coincidence remains which more than all the rest proclaims Pope to be the author of the address "to the reader." Nothing would have served better his purpose in the prosecution than to prevail upon Curll to confess that the letters were of his own procuring and printing. Upon the seizure of the books Smythe wrote to him in the name of P. T., promising that he should have the work upon easier terms, and holding out the prospect of a second and more important volume of correspondence if he would keep secret the whole transaction, would assert that he had the letters from different hands, and avow that he had printed them, as he did Cromwell's before.[56] The preface, which had never been seen by Curll, and which was appended, as if in anticipation of the event, to all the copies carried off to the House of Lords, contained the same tale he was instructed to tell. "The collection," it said, "hath been owing to several cabinets, some drawn from thence by accidents, and others, even of those to ladies, voluntarily given. It is to one of that sex we are beholden for the whole correspondence with H. C[romwell] Esq., which letters being lent her by that gentleman she took the liberty to print." On the 12th of May, the day the work was published, Pope gave a similar account to Caryll of the mode by which the contents were procured. "What," he said, "makes me sick of writing is the shameless industry of such fellows as Curll, and the idle ostentation, or weak partiality of many of my correspondents, who have shown about my letters (which I never writ but in haste, and generally against the grain, in mere civility; for almost all letters are impertinent further than Si vales, bene est; ego valeo) to such a degree that a volume of two hundred or more are printed by that rascal. But he could never have injured me this way, had not my friends furnished him with the occasion, by keeping such wretched papers as they ought to have burned." The whole of this passage is an egregious specimen of misrepresentation and hypocrisy. A glance at the work must have revealed to Pope that the new letters it contained were those which had been returned to him,—the letters to Gay, Digby, Blount, and Caryll; that it comprised letters to as well as from him,[57]—letters of which he was the sole depositary; that the text was not taken from the originals, but from the copy he had amended and re-cast; and that it was, therefore, impossible that his acquaintances should have furnished materials which could only have been derived from one source,—the bound book in the Oxford library. His pretence that his letters were hasty and insignificant expressions of civility, when he had spared no pains in collecting and editing them; his affected indignation at his friends "for keeping such wretched papers as they ought to have burned," when he himself had preserved them in duplicate, and designed them for publication; his transparent fiction that almost the entire circle of his correspondents,—Addison, Steele, Congreve, Gay, Walsh, Trumbull, Craggs, Digby, Blount, and others,—had been guilty of "idle ostentation or weak partiality," in showing these "wretched papers" to somebody who transcribed them for the press,—are all so many additional arguments to show the conscious guilt of Pope, and the gross and clumsy inventions by which he endeavoured to divert suspicion. The fable he concocted is, in its essential circumstance, identical with the fabulous story of P. T. While P. T. on his part is telling a falsehood to the public in the preface, and begging the bookseller to tell it in the House of Lords, Pope on his own behalf is telling the same falsehood in private to Caryll. This concurrence of misrepresentation between the letter of the poet, and P. T.'s address "to the reader" and instructions to Curll, could not have proceeded from independent and hostile persons.

Curll did not choose, when he was before the Committee of the House of Lords, to father the lie which had been suggested to him. The proceedings were adjourned from the 14th to the 15th, that the clerk might search through some more copies of the book for the missing letter to Jervas, and P. T. employed the interval in again pressing Curll to assume the entire responsibility of the work. He gently rebuked him for owning that the books were sent by an unknown hand which might, he said, "be thought shuffling, and induce inquiry and suspicion of some dark transaction;" and he assured him that the lords would consider him more sincere if he professed that he had the letters from different hands, and had printed them himself.[58] Curll repudiated the notion of evidencing his sincerity by deposing to a falsehood, and of silencing inquiry and suspicion by pretending that he had procured a quantity of manuscripts from a variety of persons whom he must have refused to name. "My defence," he replied, "is right; I only told the Lords I did not know from whence the books came. This was strict truth and prevented all further inquiry."[59] The pertinacity of P. T. in endeavouring to persuade the bookseller to commit himself to a lie was as gratuitous as it was shameless, for he had no interest in the deception he urged. Curll had several weeks before announced to Pope that this mysterious agent was the collector of the letters, and Pope in communicating the intelligence to the public declared that he knew no such person. The renewed mention of a couple of fanciful initials could not increase P. T.'s risk of detection, any more than it could signify whether he had sold the correspondence to Curll to be printed, or had printed it first and sold it afterwards. But what would have been purposeless in P. T. was important to Pope. The friends who had returned him the letters which appeared in the volume must have joined with the public in ascribing the work to him, and it was of the utmost moment that Curll should absolve him from the imputation. Having entrapped his victim into a false confession, he would have loudly appealed to it to prove that he was not only innocent but injured. He would have complained to the world, as he had done to Caryll, of the "idle ostentation and weak partiality" which had caused his hasty and artless letters to be printed, and his vanity would have been doubly gratified by the appearance that his choicest compositions were the careless scratchings of his pen, and that the personal and literary merits they displayed had been forced into day to the grievous annoyance of his reluctant modesty.

Every incident which arose in the progress of the controversy strengthened the case against Pope. At the same time that Smythe, on the behalf of P. T., exhorted Curll to give false evidence before the House of Lords, he informed the bookseller of the method by which a portion of the correspondence had been acquired. P. T. had been engaged with a noble friend of Mr. Pope in preparing for the press the letters of Wycherley, and had caused some extra copies to be struck off. These, he said, "put into his head the thought of collecting more," and when he printed the materials he had since accumulated he imitated as closely as possible the type and paper of the stored up sheets.[60] P. T. made a merit of the revelation, and wished that Curll should see in it a proof of the openness and confidence with which he was treated. In reality it was an endeavour to explain the awkward circumstance that the prose part of Pope's Wycherley had been done up with the letters of 1735. The publication of 1729 was entitled the second volume of Wycherley's "Posthumous Works," and contained a couple of notes referring to poems which were inserted or omitted in what was called "the present edition." But as Pope's letters were not an edition of Wycherley's Works, the absurdity of the reference might have led at any moment to the exposure of the fact that the sheets of the old book had been transferred to the new, and it was better at once, by an air of candid confession, to account for the importation than to run the risk of discovery. Curll had soon a rival version to give of the manner in which these sheets were procured. He announced that Gilliver, who published the Wycherley volume of 1729, had declared that Pope bought of him the remainder of the impression, consisting of six hundred copies, and directed the other letters comprised in the volume of 1735 to be printed to match them.[61] There can be no difficulty in deciding between these opposite statements. The assertion of P. T. we know to be a falsehood, for Pope himself, and not the noble friend, prepared the letters of Wycherley for the press. None of the inferior agents could have carried off any large number of books, without detection, nor could have stowed them away from 1729 to 1735. The motive to thieve what was already published could only have been lucre, and yet thirty pounds were taken for three hundred octavos of 470[62] pages each, when but 50 of these pages were derived from the sheets that cost nothing. If, too, there was any truth in P. T.'s story, he was encumbered with the pile of stolen goods when he opened the correspondence with Curll in 1733, whereas it is clear from his communications at that time that the idea of supplying printed books had not then occurred to him. The trick which had been practised was known to Pope when he put forth his "Narrative," and he might have obtained a clue to the culprit by an investigation at the printing-office. He nevertheless made no comments on the subject, nor, loudly as he exclaimed against the abstraction of his letters, did he breathe a whisper against the abstraction of the sheets of the Wycherley. Not a single specimen, again, of the work of 1729 is now known to exist, which is in some degree explained by its absorption into the volume of 1735; but, on the supposition that the sheets transferred to that volume were merely extra copies, struck off secretly for P. T., there is no reason why the Wycherley of 1729 should have disappeared. The conflicting statement of Curll is not embarrassed by any of these difficulties, and was never denied by either Gilliver or Pope, which is of itself sufficient to establish its truth, when we bear in mind that, instead of confronting calumny with silence, the poet denounced every charge he could repel.

The letter urging Curll anew to make a false statement of the means by which he obtained the correspondence, was received by him on the morning of May 15. "I am," he said, in his reply, "just again going to the Lords to finish Pope."[63] He verified his boast. In place of adopting the advice of P. T., he showed the letter which contained it.[64] Pope's double dealing had been strongly suspected on the previous day, when it was discovered that the copies seized had been altered in anticipation of the charge he preferred. There was now a second coincidence to connect him with the plot. The letter produced by Curll revealed that the correspondence had been taken from the archives of Lord Oxford, and that the story Pope had volunteered to Caryll, and which he undoubtedly reiterated to his friends among the Lords, was not only an invention to conceal the truth, but the same invention which P. T. exhorted the bookseller to adopt. Some step was necessary to save the poet from discomfiture. He therefore put forth an advertisement in the "Daily Post-boy," acknowledging, what he was no longer able to deny, that "some of the letters could only be procured from his own library, or that of a noble Lord," and promising twenty guineas to either Smythe or P. T. if they would "discover the whole affair," and forty guineas if they "could prove that they had acted by the direction of any other person."[65] This was an old device of the poet. To escape from the obloquy he incurred by an impious and indecent parody of the First Psalm, he inserted an advertisement in the "Postman," offering a reward of three guineas for the discovery of the person who sent it to the press. The publisher, Mrs. Burleigh, declared that she possessed the manuscript in his own handwriting, and expressed her readiness to produce it, but he never ventured to accept the challenge or to contradict her assertion.[66] Pope did not acknowledge that the essence of a falsehood was in the deceit. "If you have seen a late advertisement," he wrote to Miss Blount, August 7, 1716, alluding probably to this transaction, "you will know that I have not told a lie, which we both abominate, but equivocated pretty genteelly." Without in strict language disclaiming the authorship, he intended that the reader should understand it as a disclaimer. His advertisement respecting the letters was a kindred case. He meant it to be received as a denial of all connivance at the publication of his correspondence, and in strict language he denied nothing. He said that the book was printed by P. T., in combination with Smythe, which was equally true, if P. T. was Pope. He could use the phrase "some of the letters," when driven to confess that they were procured from the library of Lord Oxford, because the volume contained the Cromwell and Wycherley letters, which had been printed before. He could hold out the bait of rewards to himself without any risk of betrayal, and the manœuvre must have been adopted in concert with his accomplice Smythe, upon whose secresy and fidelity he was already dependent.

The Committee of the Lords reported that there was not a letter from any peer in the work, and since no law had been infringed, they recommended that the seized copies should be restored.[67] Motte, the bookseller, writing to Swift in July 31, 1735, says, that when Curll was before the House, "he was ruffled for the publication in a manner as, to a man of less impudence than his own, would have been very uneasy." With whatever virulence he may have been attacked by the partisans of the poet, he was invulnerable from his want of character as well as from his want of shame, and he had the gratification of inflicting wounds he could not receive. "Pope," he said to the Lords, "has a knack of versifying, but in prose I think myself a match for him."[68] He afterwards boasted that he had not only vindicated his assertion, but that he might affirm "with regard to all the attacks made upon him by the petulant little gentleman,—veni, vidi, vici."[69] His ally, P. T., derived no satisfaction from this victory over their common antagonist. Curll had proved a less ready dupe than had been anticipated, and his insidious prompter reproached him for his adherence to the truth. Smythe informed him that P. T. was out of humour with him for not "owning the printing" at his final attendance before the Committee of the House of Lords; that he had probably by his wilfulness lost a future copyright of immense value, and that his imperfect sheets would not be completed, nor additional books supplied, unless he paid twenty pounds in advance.[70] The reply of Curll was lofty and defiant. He said he cared nothing for any man's ill-humour; that he would never stoop to own a fact of which he was innocent; that he had acted justly, which was what he should always think wisely; that he despised the future copyright of which hopes were held out to him; that he would have no more dealings with such dark suspicious characters, and that unless he was frankly and fairly treated, he would print all the letters he had received from them.[71] P. T. had previously stipulated that his letters should be given up to him,[72] but Curll had the precaution to take copies before he returned the originals, and, to avoid cavil, he stated that he would make an affidavit of their accuracy. The effect of the threat showed the alarm it excited. Smythe completely changed his tone. He no longer prefers complaints against Curll, nor exacts conditions. He is his friend and servant, and will bring him the remainder of the impression on Thursday. He professes to be tired with the caprice of P. T. and has hardly written the words when he announces that he has been sent for by him, and hears from the messenger that he is in good humour.[73] Though P. T. was awed, Curll no longer trusted him, and before Thursday came the bookseller had advertised what he called, from the signature of the chief conspirator, the "Initial Correspondence."[74]

P. T. and Smythe put forth a counter-advertisement on the 23rd of May, in which they declared that they would retaliate by committing to the press the letters of Curll.[75] The ostensible motive of the mock clergyman and his employer was to cover the bookseller with infamy. The effect, they said, will be, "to open a scene of baseness and foul-dealing that will sufficiently show to mankind his character and conduct." The correspondence does not bear out this description. The documents show that the lying and trickery rested with P. T., while the bookseller was veracious in his assertions and straight-forward in his proceedings. "That Curll," says Johnson, "gave a true account of the transaction it is reasonable to believe, because no falsehood was ever detected."[76] It was his boast that falsehood had been his abhorrence throughout the discussion, and he drew vaunting comparisons between Pope's addiction to the vice, and his own detestation of it.[77] His very failings in one direction had helped to sustain his virtue in another. He had too much effrontery to care to descend to duplicity, and it is impossible to read his many controversial manifestoes without perceiving that he was in general as truthful as he was impudent. In the instance of Pope's letters, there is the original blot, that he saw no discredit in publishing papers which he supposed to be purloined; but he had already avowed the fact before the House of Lords, and the crime was more than shared by P. T. In everything else the acts and language of the bookseller contrast favourably with the meanness and falsehoods of his correspondent, who would not have assisted to disseminate the record of his own misdeeds. But it was different with the poet. He must have seen that the inevitable tendency of the "Initial Correspondence" would be to convict him of the offences he had tried to fasten upon Curll. His single chance of diminishing its disastrous effect was to promulgate it as evidence upon his own side, and not to allow it to come forth solely as the hostile statement of an opponent. The proceeding in P. T. would have been to aid in propagating the proofs of P. T.'s "baseness and foul-dealing." In Pope it was an effort to throw upon the initials the stigma which would otherwise have fallen upon Pope himself.

The resolution of P. T. to proclaim his own disgrace was less extraordinary than his manner of doing it. It was announced on the 24th of May, that "the clergyman concerned with P. T. and Edmund Curll to publish Mr. Pope's letters hath discovered the whole transaction, and a narrative of the same will be speedily printed."[78] Hence it appears that Smythe had made a full confession to the author of the "Narrative," and P. T. must be presumed to have been a party to it, since he transmitted the originals of the communications he had addressed to Curll, together with Curll's replies. This "Narrative" was the work of Pope. He alone could have furnished several of the particulars, together with the letter which Curll wrote to him in March, 1735; and the statements, the misrepresentations,[79] the reflections, and sometimes the words, are the same which he employed in the preface to the quarto of 1737. Hitherto, P. T. had been so fearful of detection by the poet, that in the language of Smythe, he suspected his own shadow. He now unmasked himself without a motive, and without reserve, to the man he had injured. He had nothing to tell of Curll but what Curll had insisted upon relating before the House of Lords, and the only novel information he could give was the details of his own thefts and frauds. This, indeed, was what Pope would chiefly have cared to learn. He would have been eager to ascertain who the person could be that had got access to his letters, and the means by which they were copied and printed; and he certainly would not have called anything "a discovery of the whole transaction," which contained no revelation upon the only points of the least importance. But it is extremely improbable that the wary P. T. should have wantonly turned self-accuser. To the last this fabulous personage continued to act in the manner which was most convenient to Pope, and the true explanation of the pretended confession is, that it was a fiction of the poet to account for his possession of the correspondence with Curll.

More inexplicable than all was the forbearance of Pope to produce the facts in his "Narrative." He might feel bound to suppress the names of culprits who had volunteered a confession of their crime; but he might have told the manner of the theft, and specified the printer employed by P. T. He refrained, on the contrary, from revealing the particulars which would have absolved him from an odious imputation. He kept back every tittle of evidence which would have acquitted him if he was innocent, and have implicated him if he was guilty. His story has none of the circumstantiality of an actual occurrence; his statements are as indefinite as the agents were shadowy. He disclosed the dealings of P. T. with Curll, which Curll had noised abroad, and was about to publish, but he does not bestow a thought upon the far more essential question of the mode in which the correspondence was purloined, and seems to be satisfied himself, and wishes that the world should be satisfied likewise, with learning that a person, whose only designation was a couple of initials, sent the letters ready printed to the bookseller. Obliged to abandon his original story of the means by which they found their way to the press, Pope had now some powerful reason for diverting attention from the subject, and leaving the mystery unexplained.

He speedily manifested his desire to consign P. T. to oblivion, and reverted to his former scheme of imputing the publication to Curll. In the very "Narrative" which showed that the bookseller had no share in gathering together the correspondence, Pope inculcated the idea that he had been active in the task. He charged him with having put forth an advertisement of the letters to Cromwell, in which "he promised encouragement to all persons who should send him more," and adds, a little lower down, "By these honest means Mr. Curll went on increasing his collection."[80] The accused challenged him to produce the advertisement, and the accuser was silent. He persevered nevertheless in misrepresenting to his acquaintances Curll's part in the business. Writing to Fortescue, on March 26, 1736, of the volume of 1735, he calls it "the book of letters which Curll printed and spared not," though the poet's own witnesses, P. T. and Smythe, had demonstrated, even in their anger against Curll, that he had nothing to do with procuring or printing the letters, and was merely the vendor of the copies he had bought. In Pope's complaints to his other friends, Curll is the single culprit to whom he ascribed the injury he had suffered, and on no one occasion did he go through the form of keeping up his P. T. fiction. His misrepresentations to the world at large were more covertly expressed. He spoke in his authorised edition of the "publisher's own accounts in his prefaces," and, as his first example, quotes P. T.'s address "to the reader," which he knew from the letters of Smythe had never been seen by the publisher till it was shown him at the bar of the House of Lords. To help out the mis-statement in the text his reference in a note is made to Curll's reprint of the collection of 1735, instead of to the volume in which the address "to the reader" was originally produced.[81] Nor was it, perhaps, without design that in the catalogue of surreptitious editions, prefixed to an octavo impression of his letters which appeared in 1737, he put first in the list, as if it had been the parent of the rest, an edition of Curll, which was taken from the volume of P. T., and allotted the second place to the primitive text. He never revived the clumsy fabrication he had been compelled to promulgate in his "Narrative." In private he transferred the crimes of P. T. to Curll; in public he insinuated what he dared not assert for fear of retaliation; but neither in public nor private was anything heard of the phantom who had purloined, printed, and sold the correspondence. Had his existence been real, or the invention been credited, Pope would not have persisted in calumniating the bookseller for want of a culprit upon whom to lay the offence.

Faulkner, the Dublin printer, told Dr. Birch, in 1749, that James Worsdale was the person who went to Curll, by Pope's direction, in the habit of a clergyman.[82] Before the entry in Birch's diary was published, Dr. Johnson had given the same account in his "Lives of the Poets."[83] Worsdale was a painter, dramatist, and actor, and, as if his triple calling was insufficient for his versatile disposition, he followed a fourth, and was hired, Johnson says, to conduct clandestine negotiations. When an attempt was made to extort money from the second son of Sir Robert Walpole, he was engaged to mix with the conspirators, to win their confidence, and to betray it. They were convicted of the fraud, and Worsdale, in giving his evidence, "acted with so much life and spirit the several parts he had performed during the time of sifting out the mystery as gave no small diversion to the court."[84] According to Horace Walpole, the poet had employed this personator and detector of rogues in his more reputable capacity, to make several copies of a portrait of Atterbury.[85] He seemed formed to carry on the traffic with Curll, and since it was his profession to aid in plots, he might be expected to be a secret as well as a willing assistant. Johnson, who attached some weight to his evidence, says he was of doubtful veracity,—an objection which would have applied to the disclosures of any representative of Smythe; for no upright man would have played a part in a scheme of deception. His assertion would have been worthless, if it had stood alone; but it at least falls in with the numerous circumstances which all conjoin to criminate Pope.

If his impatience to print the Wycherley correspondence renders it probable that he would be anxious to print the more important collection which he had sedulously prepared for the press; if the deception he practised in 1729, to avoid being taxed with the proceeding, and to throw it upon somebody else, favours the belief that he repeated the deception in 1735 with the same intention; and if the various facts connected with the publication unite to prove with accumulative force that he was the sole contriver of it, there is the further argument that no other person had the slightest interest in perpetrating the act. "The numbers," says Dr. Johnson, "offered to sale by the private messengers, showed that the hope of gain could not have been the motive to the impression." Money was so little the object that a parcel of the books was sent to Lintot, "for which no price was ever demanded, as he had made known his resolution not to pay a porter, and consequently not to deal with a nameless agent."[86] Any person in the employment of Lord Oxford, who had access to the papers, and was competent to transcribe them, would not have undergone the toil, and risked detection, disgrace, and ruin for the sake of a few pounds which he must have shared with his accomplice Smythe. The vaunted revenge of P. T. could not have been the motive; for beyond the empty profession, it was belied alike by his words and deeds. The poet in truth loved himself too well to be able to counterfeit speciously the part of a hater. P. T. published the letters which Pope meant to be published; he lauded Pope in Pope's own strain; he took the measures which were most to Pope's advantage; he reflected Pope's vanities, weaknesses, and falsehoods, and behaved throughout in a manner as identical with Pope's position as it was remote from his own. Lucre and revenge were propensities to which P. T. was a stranger, though he aspired to a reputation for the latter, and the only passion apparent in his conduct is his mania to gratify by dishonesty and deceit the literary ambition of Pope.

"The engineer was hoist with his own petard," and Curll, the intended victim, had the satisfaction of being the executioner. The poet plainly considered him to be a scoundrel whom he had a right to damage by any means, foul or fair. Walter Scott believed that his inveterate persecutor administered the emetic to him, and extraordinary as it may seem that a celebrated man of letters should adopt this method of punishing an obnoxious bookseller, the language of Pope obliges us to accept the conclusion[87]. The trick was puerile and degrading, but it inflicted no injury. The prosecution in the House of Lords, and the subsequent effort to fasten his own misdeeds upon his enemy was an outrage of a different description. To lure him into purchasing a book, and then to employ the influence conferred by genius in founding charges upon the act which were absolutely groundless, and in branding him with the disgrace which belonged to his accuser, was a baseness of which the lowest Grub-street scribbler satirised in the Dunciad would probably not have been capable. A spirit of unfairness, which, bad as it might be, was less injurious, pervaded his commercial dealings with Curll. The bookseller paid ten pounds in money, and twenty pounds in promissory notes, for three hundred copies of the work. Two hundred and forty only were delivered, and of these one hundred and ninety wanted the letters to Jervas, Digby, Blount, and others[88]. P. T. and Smythe stated in their advertisement of May 23 that Curll's notes "had proved not negotiable," which they seem to have designed as an excuse for not completing the imperfect books[89]. Curll maintained that the defence added slander to treachery; for the notes were not due till the 12th of June, and he indignantly declared that they would be honoured if the terms of the bargain were fulfilled[90]. But these terms were never intended to be performed. Smythe had contracted to reserve the whole impression for Curll, and assured him on May 10 that no one else should sell a single copy.[91] The pledge was violated as soon as made by sending a parcel of the books to Lintot, and one of the artifices which marked every part of the transaction was employed in public to counteract the promises which had been given in private. As Curll was to provide his own title-page and preface, and the copies seized by the order of the House of Lords had a title-page and preface by P. T., Smythe wrote to Curll on the 13th of May to explain this departure from the arrangement. A "wonderful caution" had suddenly seized P. T., who, apprehending that an injunction might be obtained in Chancery against Curll, had furnished a preface which "threw the publication entirely off him," and a title-page, in which, substituting the entire trade for an individual, it was said that the volume was "printed and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster."[92] This was pronounced by Smythe to be "as lucky as could be," and it was certainly a curious piece of fortune which caused P. T. to transmit the fifty early copies without title or preface, and inspired him immediately afterwards to attach both to the copies which were instantly to be pounced upon by a messenger from the Lords. To deceive Curll by promises was the first end to be attained, and he was led to believe that he would have a monopoly of the work. To deprive him of the advantages he imagined he had secured was a second, though a subordinate object of the conspiracy. The whole corporation of booksellers were to be invited to encroach upon his rights, and the preface and title-page affixed to the copies produced at the bar of the House of Lords had been drawn up with the secret purpose of contradicting any claim which might be set up by Curll. When Smythe wrote his deceptive explanation of the motives of P. T., these confederates were endeavouring to coax their dupe into owning that he was the collector of the letters, and it was necessary that he should still be humoured and beguiled. When the mask was thrown off, P. T. and Smythe joined in the declaration that they had neither of them "given or could pretend to give any title whatever to Mr. Pope's letters to Curll," and they promised "that every bookseller should be indemnified every way from any possible prosecution or molestation of the said Curll."[93] This invitation to all the world to republish the correspondence of Pope was advertised in the newspapers, and the poet shortly afterwards reprinted it in his "Narrative" without a word of direct remonstrance against the pretension to dispose of his property. P. T. had always hitherto adopted the course which furthered the projects of Pope, and Pope, in return, appeared to smile upon the enormous prerogative to make a general grant of his correspondence which had been assumed by P. T. Commercial honesty was not to be expected in a plan which was based upon falsehood and calumny; but if an ordinary tradesman had conducted his dealings in the same manner as Pope, his custom and character would have been destroyed. The events which followed the publication lead to the same conclusion with the incidents which preceded and attended it. Pope stated in his "Narrative" that there were so many omissions and interpolations in the surreptitious volume, that it was impossible for him to own the contents in their present condition.[94] In two distinct advertisements which he put forth in May and July, 1735, he went further, and declared that some of the letters were not his at all.[95] Nevertheless the bookseller, Cooper, with whom he was now in alliance, reprinted the entire collection, and brought it out on the 12th of June. He at the same time announced that his edition had been entered at Stationers' Hall, according to the Act of Queen Anne, and that "Edmund Curll or any other pirater of the book should be prosecuted." Curll then served upon him a process, the purport of which does not appear, and Pope wrote to his friend and counsel Fortescue, who a few months later was raised to the bench, and informed him that he had bid Cooper send him the document for his legal opinion, begged to be acquainted with the steps which were necessary to be taken, and acknowledged that he had connived at Cooper's publication. In a subsequent note he asks for further directions in the conduct of the case. The poet and the bookseller were therefore working in conjunction, or to speak more correctly, the bookseller was the agent of the poet. It must have been by Pope's authority that he appropriated the copyright of the letters, and threatened proceedings against any one who invaded it. When Curll took up the gauntlet Pope adopted the cause, engaged Fortescue in the defence, and carried on with him the correspondence respecting it. His sanction of the publication is confirmed by the catalogue of surreptitious editions, since this impression of Cooper is omitted from the list, notwithstanding the insertion of a later impression by the same bookseller, containing some slight additions that had not been ordered by Pope. Thus while the poet pretended that he could not own the P. T. collection, with its mutilated, interpolated, and forged letters, he had secretly authorised a reprint which was identical with the collection he denounced. His actions evince the insincerity of his words. He had the power to erase the forgeries and interpolations with a stroke of his pen, and unless he had approved of the book in its primitive state he would not have entered into a league with Cooper to produce it unaltered. He afterwards seemed to disclaim the republication he had espoused. In the preface to his avowed edition in 1737, he spoke of the "piratical printers" of the surreptitious editions, without making any exception, and said that there was "not one of them to whom he had ever given the least title, or any other encouragement than that of not prosecuting them." This was either a direct untruth or, what was more in accordance with his peculiar morality, a deceptive quibble. Though he knew that his readers must infer that the epithet "piratical" was applied to all the printers who had put forth an edition of the volume of 1735, he may yet have justified to himself the assertion that he had never given the least title to any of them, by the reflection that as he had given a title to Cooper he was not a piratical printer.