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:

And now vile poets rise before the light,

And walk, like Margaret's ghost, at dead of night.

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

4,000_l._, 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 manoeuvres 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 Athenaeum[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 5_s._"[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 manoeuvre 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 Athenaeum 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 Athenaeum, 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 manoeuvre 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.