"The engineer was hoist with his own petard," and Curll, the intended

victim, had the satisfaction of being the executioner. The poet plainly

considered him to be a scoundrel whom he had a right to damage by any

means, foul or fair. Walter Scott believed that his inveterate

persecutor administered the emetic to him, and extraordinary as it may

seem that a celebrated man of letters should adopt this method of

punishing an obnoxious bookseller, the language of Pope obliges us to

accept the conclusion[87]. The trick was puerile and degrading, but it

inflicted no injury. The prosecution in the House of Lords, and the

subsequent effort to fasten his own misdeeds upon his enemy was an

outrage of a different description. To lure him into purchasing a book,

and then to employ the influence conferred by genius in founding charges

upon the act which were absolutely groundless, and in branding him with

the disgrace which belonged to his accuser, was a baseness of which the

lowest Grub-street scribbler satirised in the Dunciad would probably not

have been capable. A spirit of unfairness, which, bad as it might be,

was less injurious, pervaded his commercial dealings with Curll. The

bookseller paid ten pounds in money, and twenty pounds in promissory

notes, for three hundred copies of the work. Two hundred and forty only

were delivered, and of these one hundred and ninety wanted the letters

to Jervas, Digby, Blount, and others[88]. P. T. and Smythe stated in

their advertisement of May 23 that Curll's notes "had proved not

negotiable," which they seem to have designed as an excuse for not

completing the imperfect books[89]. Curll maintained that the defence

added slander to treachery; for the notes were not due till the 12th of

June, and he indignantly declared that they would be honoured if the

terms of the bargain were fulfilled[90]. But these terms were never

intended to be performed. Smythe had contracted to reserve the whole

impression for Curll, and assured him on May 10 that no one else should

sell a single copy.[91] The pledge was violated as soon as made by

sending a parcel of the books to Lintot, and one of the artifices which

marked every part of the transaction was employed in public to

counteract the promises which had been given in private. As Curll was to

provide his own title-page and preface, and the copies seized by the

order of the House of Lords had a title-page and preface by P. T.,

Smythe wrote to Curll on the 13th of May to explain this departure from

the arrangement. A "wonderful caution" had suddenly seized P. T., who,

apprehending that an injunction might be obtained in Chancery against

Curll, had furnished a preface which "threw the publication entirely off

him," and a title-page, in which, substituting the entire trade for an

individual, it was said that the volume was "printed and sold by the

booksellers of London and Westminster."[92] This was pronounced by

Smythe to be "as lucky as could be," and it was certainly a curious

piece of fortune which caused P. T. to transmit the fifty early copies

without title or preface, and inspired him immediately afterwards to

attach both to the copies which were instantly to be pounced upon by a

messenger from the Lords. To deceive Curll by promises was the first end

to be attained, and he was led to believe that he would have a monopoly

of the work. To deprive him of the advantages he imagined he had secured

was a second, though a subordinate object of the conspiracy. The whole

corporation of booksellers were to be invited to encroach upon his

rights, and the preface and title-page affixed to the copies produced at

the bar of the House of Lords had been drawn up with the secret purpose

of contradicting any claim which might be set up by Curll. When Smythe

wrote his deceptive explanation of the motives of P. T., these

confederates were endeavouring to coax their dupe into owning that he

was the collector of the letters, and it was necessary that he should

still be humoured and beguiled. When the mask was thrown off, P. T. and

Smythe joined in the declaration that they had neither of them "given or

could pretend to give any title whatever to Mr. Pope's letters to

Curll," and they promised "that every bookseller should be indemnified

every way from any possible prosecution or molestation of the said

Curll."[93] This invitation to all the world to republish the

correspondence of Pope was advertised in the newspapers, and the poet

shortly afterwards reprinted it in his "Narrative" without a word of

direct remonstrance against the pretension to dispose of his property.

P. T. had always hitherto adopted the course which furthered the

projects of Pope, and Pope, in return, appeared to smile upon the

enormous prerogative to make a general grant of his correspondence which

had been assumed by P. T. Commercial honesty was not to be expected in a

plan which was based upon falsehood and calumny; but if an ordinary

tradesman had conducted his dealings in the same manner as Pope, his

custom and character would have been destroyed. The events which

followed the publication lead to the same conclusion with the incidents

which preceded and attended it. Pope stated in his "Narrative" that

there were so many omissions and interpolations in the surreptitious

volume, that it was impossible for him to own the contents in their

present condition.[94] In two distinct advertisements which he put forth

in May and July, 1735, he went further, and declared that some of the

letters were not his at all.[95] Nevertheless the bookseller, Cooper,

with whom he was now in alliance, reprinted the entire collection, and

brought it out on the 12th of June. He at the same time announced that

his edition had been entered at Stationers' Hall, according to the Act

of Queen Anne, and that "Edmund Curll or any other pirater of the book

should be prosecuted." Curll then served upon him a process, the purport

of which does not appear, and Pope wrote to his friend and counsel

Fortescue, who a few months later was raised to the bench, and informed

him that he had bid Cooper send him the document for his legal opinion,

begged to be acquainted with the steps which were necessary to be taken,

and acknowledged that he had connived at Cooper's publication. In a

subsequent note he asks for further directions in the conduct of the

case. The poet and the bookseller were therefore working in

conjunction, or to speak more correctly, the bookseller was the agent of

the poet. It must have been by Pope's authority that he appropriated the

copyright of the letters, and threatened proceedings against any one who

invaded it. When Curll took up the gauntlet Pope adopted the cause,

engaged Fortescue in the defence, and carried on with him the

correspondence respecting it. His sanction of the publication is

confirmed by the catalogue of surreptitious editions, since this

impression of Cooper is omitted from the list, notwithstanding the

insertion of a later impression by the same bookseller, containing some

slight additions that had not been ordered by Pope. Thus while the poet

pretended that he could not own the P. T. collection, with its

mutilated, interpolated, and forged letters, he had secretly authorised

a reprint which was identical with the collection he denounced. His

actions evince the insincerity of his words. He had the power to erase

the forgeries and interpolations with a stroke of his pen, and unless he

had approved of the book in its primitive state he would not have

entered into a league with Cooper to produce it unaltered. He afterwards

seemed to disclaim the republication he had espoused. In the preface to

his avowed edition in 1737, he spoke of the "piratical printers" of the

surreptitious editions, without making any exception, and said that

there was "not one of them to whom he had ever given the least title, or

any other encouragement than that of not prosecuting them." This was

either a direct untruth or, what was more in accordance with his

peculiar morality, a deceptive quibble. Though he knew that his readers

must infer that the epithet "piratical" was applied to all the printers

who had put forth an edition of the volume of 1735, he may yet have

justified to himself the assertion that he had never given the least

title to any of them, by the reflection that as he had given a title to

Cooper he was not a piratical printer.

While the inquiry was going on before the House of Lords in May, Smythe

impressed upon Curll that P. T. had his whole heart set upon the

publication of the letters, not so much on account of the volume which

had been seized, as because it was the precursor of a much more

important correspondence with Swift, the late Lord Oxford, the Bishop

of Rochester, and Lord Bolingbroke.[96] When P. T. disappeared from the

scene, Pope is found to have inherited his ideas and to be animated by

the desire to complete the schemes his enemy left unfulfilled. "Since I

saw you," he wrote to Lord Oxford, June 17, 1735, "I have learnt of an

excellent machine of Curll's, or rather his director's, to engraft a lie

upon, to make me seem more concerned than I was in the affair of the

letters. It is so artful an one that I longed to tell it you--not that I

will enter into any controversy with such a dog. But I believe it will

occasion a thing you will not be sorry for relating to the Bishop of

Rochester's letters and papers." There are no further particulars to

explain in what degree Pope had acknowledged to Lord Oxford that he was

"concerned in the affair of the letters,"[97] nor does any record remain

of the artful device of Curll, or of the new director who had succeeded

to P. T. and Smythe. The want of all foundation for the allegations

against the bookseller is probably the cause of the vagueness of the

allusions. The single palpable circumstance is that, in spite of his

lamentations at the publication of his letters, Pope was already

designing to send a fresh instalment of them to the press. Whatever may

have been the "excellent machine" to which he darkly referred, Curll had

furnished him with the pretence he sought. The bookseller put forth a

new edition of the printed copies he purchased from P. T., and called it

the first volume of "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence." Partly,

perhaps, to vex Pope, and partly to attract purchasers, he affixed the

same title to future volumes, which were principally a medley of trash

that had no relation to the poet. Among the promised contents of the

second volume were "Atterbury's Letters to Mr. Pope." Pope cited the

announcement as a reason for publishing his correspondence with the

bishop, which P. T. had enumerated among "the much more important

correspondence" that was intended to follow, and which, the poet, in

precise agreement with him, declared was "of a nature less

insignificant" than the printed collection.[98] The coincidence of

opinion between these bitter antagonists is especially remarkable,

because others have not been struck with the superiority of the letters

of Atterbury. Mr. Croker thought them, with one or two exceptions, dull,

pedantic, and common-place, and Warton complains that they are, many of

them, crowded to affectation with trite quotations from Horace and

Virgil. The excuse for making them public was weak in the extreme. On

the 12th of June Cooper replied to Curll's advertisement of his second

volume by a counter-advertisement, and offered him ten pounds for any

letter of Atterbury to Pope, or of Pope to Atterbury, of which he could

produce the original or a voucher. P. T.'s copy, if it existed, must

have been demanded when he made his confession, and it is among the

circumstances which show this confession to have been a fiction, that

the poet in his Narrative omitted to mention the surrender of the

important transcript, and never subsequently alluded to its existence.

Without copies or originals Curll could not violate the secrecy for

which Pope affected to be anxious. The poet, in fact, did not put forth

his pretence for printing the correspondence till he had received

practical evidence of the poverty of the bookseller's resources. Curll's

volume was published on the 14th of July,[99] and Pope's advertisement

did not come out till the following day. It was drawn up on the

13th,[100] when he had probably seen an early copy of the book, or he

would have waited till the next morning, when he could have read in

conjunction with the rest of the public the letters which Atterbury was

alleged to have written to him. They were three in number. The longest

was a statement printed by the bishop, and addressed to the entire

world, refuting a charge of having corrupted the manuscript of

Clarendon's History. The remaining two were pronounced by Pope to be

forgeries, and of these one had already appeared in a Biographical

Dictionary,[101] and the other consisted chiefly of poetical

quotations. Not a line had oozed out from his private papers, and the

argument for divulging them was gone. A man who was eager to drag them

into day might use the incident as a pretext, but anybody who did not

court publicity would have left them in their obscurity upon the

discovery that they continued safe from prying eyes and transcribing

fingers. Pope's practice and professions were as usual at variance. He

raised a cry of distress at the publication of his letters by P. T., and

laid hold of the first hollow excuse for completing the obnoxious

design, and spreading before the world that portion of his

correspondence which P. T. had been unable to smuggle into print, in

consequence of Curll's unexpected revelation of the plot.

Pope stated in his advertisement, that along with his correspondence

with the Bishop of Rochester he should publish such of the letters as

were genuine from the surreptitious volume, and added, that the work

would be printed "with all convenient speed."[102] But speed was not

convenient. The project slept till March 26, 1736, when he writes to

Fortescue, "Your too partial mention of the book of letters, with all

its faults and follies, which Curll printed and spared not (nor yet will

spare, for he has published a fourth sham volume yesterday), makes me

think it may not be amiss to send you--what I know you will be much more

pleased with than I can be--a proposal for a correct edition of them,

which at last I find must be offered, since people have misunderstood an

advertisement I printed some time ago, merely to put some stop to that

rascal's books, as a promise that I would publish such a book." His

excuse for the delay in redeeming his pledge of supplying an authentic

edition, is a curious instance of the absurdity to which a man of genius

may be reduced, when, unable to divulge his true reasons, he has

recourse to invention. "People" could not have "_misunderstood_" the

advertisement as "a promise that he would publish such a book," for the

promise was distinct, and there was no room left for misunderstanding in

the matter. But if we allow that an advertisement in the newspapers,

asserting that he was under a necessity of putting out a genuine

edition, which would be printed with all convenient speed, was only

designed to be read as a threat for the purpose of stopping Curll's

trade, it is plain that Curll must have become acquainted with an

interpretation which was apparent to the rest of the world, and would

have paid no attention to a menace that was not intended to be executed.

Unless Pope desired that the public should believe he was serious, the

whole proceeding was objectless. He was long in learning the

misconstruction which had been put upon his words. While the

announcement was fresh, and likely to have been a topic of conversation,

he remained completely passive, and it was not till after an interval of

more than eight months that he discovered he was supposed to have given

a pledge, and must immediately redeem it. He had forgotten that he had

betrayed to Fortescue that he was in earnest at the time the

advertisement appeared. On August 2, 1735, a fortnight after it was

issued, Pope wrote to him, and asked to have back his letters; "for,"

said he, "I find my collection, such as it is, must be hastened, or will

not be so effectual." It had not yet occurred to him to maintain that

his promised publication was a feint. The true cause of his

procrastination has been suggested by the critic in the Athenaeum. He had

distributed portions of his extensive correspondence with Caryll among

other groups, and addressed several of the letters to men of higher

position or greater fame. He must have rejected the fictitious compound

from his genuine edition, or waited till Caryll, who was sinking with

age and illness, was in his grave. The latter was the course which Pope

preferred. His friend was no doubt dying at the close of March, 1736,

and on the 6th of April he expired. With him disappeared the sole

difficulty which stood in the way of the new edition, and the poet from

that moment was active in its prosecution.

It is amusing to observe the indifference and distaste which Pope

feigned for an undertaking that was entirely within his own discretion.

He began by announcing that the work would be printed with speed. He

then protested he did not mean what he said, and only yielded because

others had erroneously inferred, that by advertising in the papers that

he would immediately print a book he intended to signify that a book

would be printed. He next resolved to publish by subscription, which was

a mode of levying forced contributions through the canvass of the author

and his friends. He hoped nevertheless that the subscription would fail,

in order that he might be excused from an act to which he had been

over-persuaded.[103] His hope that support would be withheld had grown

to a belief when he wrote to Allen, on the 30th of April, and Allen, who

had sought his acquaintance from admiration of the benevolence and

goodness of heart which pervaded his letters, offered to bear the cost

of the impression. The public by their backwardness afforded Pope the

opportunity he professed to desire of dropping the work, but the

patronage of an individual was sufficient encouragement. He at once

replied that he would "not serve his private fame entirely at another's

expense," but that he would "accept the assistance in any moderate

degree," which meant that he would allow Allen to defray the outlay

which was in excess of the amount subscribed.[104] Time wore on, the

letters were three-quarters printed, and the subscribers were few.[105]

In his first receipts the poet had stated that if he did not proceed

with the book the money should be returned on demand after

midsummer.[106] The unwilling public pleaded the uncertainty as a reason

for not putting down their names. He admitted that the doubt they

expressed was a pretence, and informed Allen that to deprive them of the

pretext he had substituted receipts in which he promised to deliver the

volume by Lady Day.[107] His object, he said, was to save Allen's purse.

The reluctance had ceased to be with the poet. He began by consenting to

print a book he would rather not have printed, that he might oblige the

world, and ended by compelling the world to subscribe to a book they

would rather not have purchased, that they might oblige Pope.

The subscription was a guinea for a quarto volume, and the donation of

Allen, which Pope acknowledged in his will, was probably paid in part on

this occasion. The copyright was purchased by Dodsley,[108] and from

these united sources of emolument the book produced, as Johnson had

heard, "sufficient profit."[109] It appeared on May 18, 1737, in folio

and quarto, and a little later in octavo, that the various sizes might

range with previous editions of the poet's works. In the preface he

enters into a history of the fate which had attended his letters, and of

the circumstances which compelled him to publish them, but with a

studious avoidance of every question which had been raised by the

collection of 1735. He says it is notorious what means have been taken

to procure his correspondence, and disposes of the single instance which

required explanation by enumerating among the methods "the transacting

with people who dealt without names in the dark." He says that several

letters have been ascribed to him which he did not write, and specifies

examples, none of which appeared in the book sold to Curll. He says that

the piratical editions contain various passages "which no man of common

sense would have printed himself," and this he could assert with truth,

because the greater part of the Cromwell series owed their publicity to

Mrs. Thomas alone. He declares that he had not authorised any of the

surreptitious impressions, but forbore to allege that the primitive

impression was surreptitious, and shunned all allusion to its birth and

parentage. He laments the need which exists for his own volume, and when

he proceeds "to state the case fairly in the present situation," none of

his reasons appertain to the work of P. T. He indulges in general

declamation upon the enormity of procuring letters by disreputable

contrivances, but carefully avoids affirming that any of those which

first saw the light in 1735 were obtained in the manner he deprecates.

He assures us, indeed, that his epistolary effusions are "emanations of

the heart, and not efforts of genius," and adds, "this alone may induce

any candid reader to believe their publication an act of necessity

rather than vanity," which honestly interpreted implies that he was not

the person who originally sent them to the press. The candid writer,

however, omitted to inform the candid reader of the pains he had taken

to render them worthy of his head as well as of his heart, and the

falsification of the premises destroys the credibility of the inference.

The silence of Pope upon the P. T. collection is, under the

circumstances, equivalent to a confession of guilt. He gives an account

of the surreptitious publication of his letters to Cromwell. He states

the reason of the publication of his letters to Wycherley. He reverts

once and again to what he justly called the sham volumes of Curll. He

records the minutest wrong he can detect in the execution of any of the

hostile schemes. But though the conduct of P. T. was the most flagrant

of all; though the poet was believed to be the contriver of the plot,

and his enemies taunted him with the fraud; though he professed to have

learnt the details of the mystery, and half a dozen sentences, if he was

innocent, would have set him right with both friends and foes; though

the collection of 1735 was in its nature and extent far more important

than the rest, and though it was the basis and primary cause of the

edition he was ushering into the world, he yet relates no particulars,

he offers no opinion, he ventures upon no denial. He endeavours instead

to mask his evasion of the subject, and tries to confound the main point

with subsidiary topics. There are wilful misrepresentations in his

preface, and he was not restrained in his language by his homage to

truth; but he had been baffled by the disclosures of Curll, and he was

afraid to risk specific assertions which had been already exposed.

His correspondence with Atterbury, and several other letters, were

printed for the first time in the avowed edition of Pope. He omitted as

well as added, and left out some of the letters to and from Wycherley,

some of the letters to and from Cromwell, some of the letters to ladies,

and a few scattered letters from the remaining groups. In the letters he

republished he here and there erased a sentence which had appeared in

the volume of 1735, or inserted a sentence which was new. The minuter

verbal alterations are numerous, but many of them are only corrections

of errors of the press. In all essential particulars the collection of

P. T., a little more sifted, is reproduced in the quarto of 1737. Pope

had profited in the interval by the criticisms of the public. He set

aside the portions of his correspondence which were condemned, he

endeavoured to rectify the inconsistencies into which he had been

betrayed in its reconstruction, and he sometimes altered a word or a

phrase in the final revision to which he subjected the work. The changes

leave it apparent that the Pope text and the P. T. text are identical in

their origin, and neither of them are the text of the actual letters of

the poet. His selection affords an imperfect test of the parts which he

disowned as being counterfeited. He said in his advertisement of July

15, 1735, that he would reprint whatever was genuine in the

surreptitious editions; but he relinquished this design, and wrote to

Allen that "he was determined to leave out every syllable that could

give the least ill example to an age apt to take it, or the least

offence to any good or serious man."[110] He accordingly stated in his

preface that he had not only omitted the letters which "were not his,"

but those which "were not approved of by him." Without committing

himself to an assertion which might be refuted, he probably wished to

obtain the benefit of the first alternative for letters which he had

rejected under the last. Nevertheless in his eagerness to particularise

any real forgery, he in effect accredited the entire collection of P. T.

He had far greater interest in showing that it was not authentic than in

damaging the trumpery volumes of Curll, and his forbearance to select a

single instance of imposition from its pages is a plain proof that none

existed for which he himself was not responsible. The charge of

interpolation, which he had twice put forth in his advertisements,[111]

and subsequently repeated to Allen,[112] was still more openly

abandoned; for he tells us in his preface that the passages he omitted

were "improper, or at least impertinent to be divulged to the public,"

and he no longer pretended that they were any of them spurious. He did

not, in short, disown in his genuine edition one sentence of the volume

of 1735, but practically receded from his previous allegations, which

were mis-statements intended to persuade Caryll that he was not

answerable for the garbling of the letters, and the world that he was

not a party to their publication.

His acts continued to confirm his guilt. A little while after the quarto

was published there appeared the 5th and 6th volume of the octavo

edition of Pope's works, which the title-page says "consists of Letters,

wherein to those of the author's own edition are added all that are

genuine from the former impressions, with some never before

printed."[113] This edition bears internal evidence of having been

printed concurrently with the quarto itself. A sheet signed *Dd, the

pages of which are numbered from 215 to 222, is interpolated in the

quarto between the two last leaves of Dd, and the numbers are of

necessity repeated on the succeeding eight pages. The interpolated

letters of the quarto are equally an interpolation in the octavo, where

they follow p. 116 of Vol. VI., on a duplicate half-sheet signed *I, and

the paging is repeated on the half-sheet which follows. Consequently the

octavo must have been struck off before the letters were interpolated in

the quarto, or they would not have been printed in the octavo on an

interpolated half-sheet. A second insertion tells the same tale. A few

letters are added at the end of the quarto with the announcement that

they had been published "since the foregoing sheets were printed off."

These letters appear in like manner at the end of the octavo after

_finis_. At the very moment, therefore, that Pope was compelling his

reluctant friends to subscribe to his expurgated quarto, he was

clandestinely printing an octavo edition in which he put back the whole

of the omitted letters he allowed to be genuine, and his imperfect

quarto was simply a fraud upon the purchasers for the purpose of

accrediting his feigned reprobation of the P. T. volume.

One Watson, who assumed for the occasion the name of T. Johnson, printed

a piratical edition of the new octavos. Dodsley filed a bill against him

in Chancery on November 25 for the invasion of the copyright of Pope's

edition in folio. On October 31, Dodsley had entered at Stationers'

Hall, "The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., Vol. V. and Vol. VI. The

second edition corrected. 8vo." He had omitted to enter the previous

edition of the octavos, and in a letter which Watson wrote on November

30 he objected that the folio was not the book he had pirated, and that

the octavo volumes were only entered at Stationers' Hall on October 31,

which he says "was at least a full month after the publication of the

edition complained of, and Pope's own first edition entirely sold before

the octavo was entered." His meaning was that since the first edition of

the octavo had not been entered, the entry of the second edition, which

was subsequent to the piracy, came too late to secure the copyright. The

greater part, however, of Watson's volumes were identical with the text

of the folio which had been entered on May 18, and Watson did not

persevere in his defence. He consented to deliver up the 1646 copies in

his possession on the receipt of 25_l._, and to give Pope a bond in

which he undertook to pay a penalty of 100_l._ if he ever again invaded

his rights by printing any of his works.[114]

Pope's prohibition of Watson's work, coupled with his own publication of

the octavos, is fresh evidence of the insincerity of his professed

dissatisfaction with the P. T. selection. His apology for replacing in

the octavos the letters he had rejected was that they were in process of

being reinstated in a piratical edition of the quarto.[115] Pope had the

power, which he used, to stop piratical publications, and at the same

time he absurdly made the piracy the plea for publishing himself the

condemned letters he had cast aside. His mode of relieving his disgust

at their appearance, and of giving effect to his eager desire for their

suppression was to lay hold of a hollow excuse for reprinting them.

While Pope proceeded against Watson he submitted to the piracies of

Curll. His conduct once more betrayed that he was the author of the P.

T. plot. Curll had all along persisted in printing the P. T. letters. He

immediately seized the new letters in the quarto, and inserted them in

his fifth volume of "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence." He was not

content with usurping Pope's property. He insulted, defied, and accused

him. Pope had the strongest motive in self-vindication to grapple with

the charges of Curll, and he shrunk from the contest. He resented the

infringement of his copyright by an indifferent person, and he could not

willingly have endured to be despoiled by his mocking antagonist, and

sit down quietly under the contumely and wrong. The bill filed against

Watson discovers the cause of his forbearance. There we find that Pope

in applying for an injunction was obliged to state that his quarto

edition was the first publication of his letters "with his consent,

direction, or approbation,"[116] and if he had filed a similar bill

against Curll, the bookseller would have proved that he had purchased

the P. T. edition, and that Pope had printed and sold it. Curll

announced in September, 1735, that he had filed a bill against Smythe to

compel the fulfilment of his contract, and he made Gilliver a party to

the suit in consequence of his confession that Pope had purchased of him

the old sheets of the Wycherley, and directed the rest of the P. T.

collection to be printed to match them.[117] Smythe was a shadow who

could not be reached. The facts remained, and Pope could not attempt to

convict Curll of piracy without being himself convicted of having sold

him the work. He had been worsted on this very point when he fought with

his best weapon, the pen, and he did not dare to renew the conflict in a

court of law where allegations could neither be passed over in silence,

nor be met by evasions and quibbles. Any doubt that the motive for his

toleration was fear was done away by his filing a bill against Curll the

instant he pirated the Swift Correspondence which was entirely distinct

from the P. T. transaction.

Pope had shown earlier that he was afraid to join issue with Curll

before a legal tribunal. Curll inserted an advertisement in "Fog's

Journal" of July 26, 1735, in which he accused Pope of having printed

the P. T. collection, and of telling falsehoods in self-defence. The

proprietor of "Fog's Journal" was induced by a threat of prosecution to

apologise for the insertion of the advertisement, and Curll immediately

reprinted it in the second volume of Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence,

accompanied by a scornful account of Pope's interference. Pope did not

venture to accept the taunting challenge. His vapouring ceased when he

was dared to fight. He menaced the publisher of a newspaper, who would

not brave a trial in a cause which was not his own, and tamely retreated

before the real offender in person.

The octavo edition of 1737 enables us to put the veracity of Pope in

repudiating the P. T. collection to yet another proof. In May and July,

1735, he published advertisements protesting that several letters

ascribed to him in the P. T. volume were not his.[118] He prefixed to

the octavo of 1737 a catalogue of surreptitious editions, in which he

repeated that the P. T. publication "contained several letters not

genuine."[119] He had hitherto been loud in exclaiming against the P. T.

forgeries without being imprudent enough to name them. His caution

relaxed as time wore on, and he had the courage to state on the

title-page of the first octavo edition of 1737 that he had "added to the

letters of the author's own edition all that are genuine from the former

impressions." The spurious letters in the P. T. collection were thus

declared to be the letters which were excluded from the octavo edition

of 1737. They were seven in number. Three were letters, or extracts of

letters, from Wycherley, two belonged to the section headed "Letters to

Several Ladies," and two were letters to Gay. Unless they were really

forgeries, Pope told and retold emphatic lies to discredit the P. T.

collection, and establish his innocence, and the deceit would leave no

doubt of his criminality.

Four letters out of the seven we know to have been genuine. The three

letters of Wycherley were on the sheets transferred from the edition of

his posthumous works which was published by Pope, and copies of two of

them are among the Oxford papers. One of the suppressed letters to

ladies exists in duplicate, and was sent by Pope to Miss Blount, and to

Miss Marriot, the friend and neighbour of his coadjutor Broome. The

letters are both originals in the handwriting of Pope. There are no

means of verifying the remaining three letters, nor is it necessary to

test them, when more than half the pretended forgeries are found to be

authentic. Once again we have absolute evidence that his accusation of

forgery was an acted clamour to screen himself. He finally adopted all

the letters but seven, and his assertion that these seven were

fabrications was a falsehood.

Besides the necessity Pope was under of rejecting some of the P. T.

letters to bear out his mendacious charge of forgery, he had particular

reasons for disclaiming three at least of the four letters which

proceeded from his own pen. The letter he addressed to Miss Blount and

Miss Marriot was a disquisition on a human monstrosity exhibiting in

London. He had said in his Essay on Criticism that "vile obscenity

should find no pardon." He was among the offenders he pronounced

unpardonable, and often revelled in dull and studied indecorums which he

mistook for wit. The laboured letter he esteemed so highly that he sent

it to two of his female correspondents was more than ordinarily gross

and stupid. The fancied humour appeared to the public revolting

coarseness, and he cast out the letter because it excited disgust and

contempt.

The next letter Pope rejected consisted of a satirical and false

description of Blenheim. He represented a fraction of the house to be

the whole, and founded upon his mis-statement the reflection, "I think

the architect built it entirely in complaisance to the taste of its

owners; for it is the most inhospitable thing imaginable, and the most

selfish." A second sarcasm on the Duchess in the P. T. volume was

obliterated in the octavo of 1737. "Cleland," Pope writes to Gay, "is at

Tunbridge. He plays now with the old Duchess of M----, nay, dines with

her after she has won all his money." In the octavo of 1737 he erased

the name, and left the passage to be applied to any old duchess who was

then alive. He had obviously some inducement to renounce his abuse of

the Duchess of Marlborough, and the probable cause was that a friendly

intercourse had grown up in the interval. He speaks of her to Swift in

1739 as paying "great court to him."[120]

His desire to disavow an ebullition of enmity which had been succeeded

by renewed cordiality, was his apparent motive for cancelling a letter

addressed to Gay. Fielding relates that no person during "the reign of

King Alexander" would read a work which had not his license, and "this

license he granted to only four authors--Swift, Young, Arbuthnot, and

Gay--his principal courtiers and favourites."[121] It chanced that one

of the courtiers was in disgrace when the P. T. volume appeared, and

Pope introduced a sneer at his egotism and pomposity. "In a word," he

says to Gay, "Y----g himself has not acquired more tragic majesty in his

aspect by reading his own verses than I by Homer's." The offence of

Young was a species of remonstrance he sent to the monarch under the

guise of advice. Pope completed his Essay on Man in 1734, and Young

urged him in "a pressing letter to write something on the side of

revelation in order to take off the impression of those doctrines which

the Essay seemed to convey." Harte, a minor courtier of king Alexander,

told Warton that the sensitive monarch "took the letter amiss."[122] He

was annoyed at the censure implied in the exhortation, and retaliated by

ridiculing the self-importance of his monitor. When Pope was taxed with

personalities he could not defend, he never scrupled, where it was

possible, to deny that he alluded to the person who remonstrated. When

evasion was impracticable, and the work had not been avowed, the easiest

course was to repudiate the authorship.

These were the circumstances which chiefly governed Pope's selection of

the P. T. forgeries. Had there been a single fabricated letter he would

have hastened to name it, just as he specified in his preface to the

quarto some fictitious letters which were not in the P. T. publication.

The P. T. letters being authentic, he was afraid to disclaim in print

particular letters which surviving persons might know to be his, and he

could not venture to advance beyond the indirect statement that the

octavo of 1737 "contained all the letters that were genuine from former

impressions." Trusting that no one who could convict him would be at the

trouble to collate the editions, he thought himself safe from exposure,

and he could privately appeal, with little risk of detection, to the

disclaimer on his title-page when he had merely to disown a letter in

his individual intercourse with the Duchess of Marlborough or Young. He

did not care to increase the hazard of discovery by repeating his

title-page. He dropped it in the second edition of the octavo, and the

assertion that he had printed "all the letters that are genuine from the

former impressions" dwindled down to the assurance that "there is not

one but is genuine."[123]

The controversies on Pope's character have naturally drawn forth

uncompromising language both from defenders and accusers. Those who

believed him incapable of the acts imputed to him could but conclude

that he was bitterly calumniated. Those who believed that the charges

were true could but brand him with reprobation. The offences were not of

a nature to be softened by apologies. De Quincey was in a lenient mood

when he wrote his sketch of Pope's Life, and his more favourable

impressions necessarily carried with them the conviction that the

"disgraceful imputation" against Pope of having made Curll his tool and

victim was "most assuredly unfounded."[124] Speaking, on another

occasion, of Pope's attack on Hill and the Duke of Chandos, he says,

"Evil is the day for a conscientious man when his sole resource for

self-defence lies in a falsehood."[125] De Quincey was ignorant of the

history of the letters, and he would have altered his opinion if he had

known that Pope in self-defence had been prodigal of the falsehoods

which are the last refuge of guilt.

There still remains the small episode of the six letters unconnected

with the P. T. volume, which were declared by Pope to be spurious in his

preface to the quarto. Four of them purported to be from Pope to Miss

Blount, and two to be letters of Atterbury to Pope. Those to Miss Blount

were forwarded to Curll by a correspondent who signed himself S. E. The

bookseller published them in the third volume of "Mr. Pope's Literary

Correspondence," and announced that he had discovered them to be

translations from Voiture. S. E. only professed to send copies, which

are now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Mr. Carruthers states

correctly that the size and quality of the paper is precisely the same

as in the genuine letters of the poet, and that the handwriting appears

to be his "a little disguised." The letters bear on their face the marks

of their origin, and Pope acted according to usage in endeavouring to

delude Curll that he might afterwards build a charge upon his own

deceptions. There is, however, a second claimant for the honour of

having devised the cheat. In an edition of Pope's works, which belonged

to Douce the antiquary, some one has copied an extract from a letter of

Mr. J. Plumptre, dated May 1, 1744, in which he informs his wife that

their son Charles, who was afterwards Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth,

London, and Archdeacon of Ely, was the author of the trick.[126] The

incident was nine years old when Mr. Plumptre proudly acquainted Mrs.

Plumptre with the secret. He mentioned that the letters were sent to

Curll by the penny post, and the original cover in the Bodleian Library

shows that they were not sent by post at all. He said that his son

translated them, and Pope had proclaimed that they were borrowed from a

published translation. The account is false, and the pretended extract

from the letter may be itself apocryphal, for its authenticity is

guaranteed by no external testimony. The similarity of paper and

handwriting, coupled with the pressing necessity Pope was under to

supply himself with examples of fabrication, strongly indicate that the

person who profited by the imposition contrived it.

Pope affirmed in his preface that the two letters ascribed to Atterbury

had never been seen by the bishop or himself, and to show the absurdity

of the fraud he adds that "they were advertised even after that period

when it was made felony to correspond with him." At length, in 1739, one

of the letters was adopted in a reprint of Cooper's octavos, and

undoubtedly by the order of the poet himself, since it was included in

the collection he delivered to Warburton. "We have ventured," says a

note in the Cooper edition, "to insert this letter, which was plainly

intended for Mr. Pope, though we are informed that on second thoughts it

was not judged proper to send it him. A copy was preserved and published

soon after in the English additions to Bayle's Dictionary, under the

article of Atterbury." Pope's assertion, in the preface to the quarto,

that the letter was fabricated, was either a reckless charge or a

falsehood, and there are strong grounds for believing that he was all

along aware that the letter was genuine. In the catalogue of

surreptitious editions we are told of Curll's second volume that it has

no letters to Mr. Pope, "but one said to be Bishop Atterbury's, and

another in that bishop's name, certainly not his." The distinction drawn

between the two amounts to an admission that the former might be

authentic; and this is confirmed in the conclusion of the catalogue,

where a reprint of the P.T. collection is described as containing the

"forged letter," not letters, "from the Bishop of Rochester," though

this very reprint contained them both. They were introduced into all the

reprints themselves in a manner which showed that they were not

considered of equal authority. In Curll's work, they are represented to

be alike by Atterbury, and to be addressed alike to Pope. In the

reprints of the P. T. collection, the letter which Pope ultimately

accepted is alone given as written by Atterbury, or addressed to the

poet. Its fellow has asterisks to represent the person to whom it was

sent, and neither asterisks nor name to represent the sender. Pope's

ally, Cooper, is supposed to have been concerned in the volume to which

the Atterbury epistles were first transferred from the publication of

Curll, and it is obvious that no bookseller would have originated the

alteration, and that no other person would have prompted it who had not

a peculiar interest in the correspondence of the poet, and who was not

aware that these stray productions would be at once appended to a

current P. T. impression. The distinction between the letters was made

in the reprints of the P. T. collection before Pope published the

preface to the quarto, in which he affirmed that both were

counterfeited. He made the distinction in the catalogue almost

immediately after the quarto appeared. He did not the less preserve the

passage in his preface unchanged in every edition of his correspondence,

and never uttered a single word of recantation. He allowed the charge of

forgery to be circulated till it had served his purpose; and then,

without an allusion to his former language, imported the letter into his

works with the complacent announcement "that it was plainly intended for

Mr. Pope."

The reason assigned by Pope why a letter must be forged which he

afterwards admitted to be genuine, was one of his usual deceptions. By

the Bill of pains and penalties against Atterbury it was declared to be

felony to correspond with him in his exile after June 25, 1723. Pope

disregarded the enactment with little risk of discovery, and perhaps

without much danger of punishment if his harmless intercourse was

detected. He condoled with the bishop on the death of his daughter, Mrs.

Morice; and the bishop thus commenced his reply, which is dated

Montpelier, November 20, 1729: "Yes, dear sir, I have had all you

designed for me, and have read all, as I read whatever you write, with

esteem and pleasure. But your last letter, full of friendship and

goodness, gave me such impressions of concern and tenderness, as neither

I can express, nor you, perhaps, with all the force of your imagination,

fully conceive." This again must have drawn forth a response from the

poet, for Atterbury says in an answer without date, "I venture to thank

you for your kind and friendly letter, because I think myself very sure

of a safe conveyance, and I am uneasy till I have told you what

impressions it made upon me. I will do it with the same simplicity with

which I wrote to you from Montpelier upon a very melancholy occasion."

These extracts testify that the letter which Curll published of November

23, 1731, was not a solitary instance, and that other letters had passed

between the poet and Atterbury "even after that period when it was made

felony to correspond with him." The proof which Pope urged with

triumphant scorn to demonstrate that the letter of November 23 must be

counterfeited was therefore an absolute fraud. His disingenuousness did

not end here. He printed Atterbury's letter of November 20, 1729, at the

same time that he reproduced the letter published by Curll, and said in

a note,--"This also seems genuine, though whether written to Mr. P. or

some learned friend in France, is uncertain; but we doubt not it will be

acceptable to the reader." To support the alleged uncertainty he omitted

the passages which showed that it was addressed to a sickly poet in

England. The complete letter was inserted by Mr. Nichols in the

"Epistolary Correspondence of Atterbury," and his version is confirmed

by a copy among the Oxford papers at Longleat. The bishop died in

February, 1732; and if in 1739 Pope thought it unsafe to admit that he

had held communication with him in his banishment upon literary and

domestic topics, he might have left the letter to be published by

Warburton, and not have violated truth for the sake of hurrying it

before the world.

Such was the series of stratagems which ushered in and accompanied the

collection of 1735, from its first appearance in the volume of P. T. to

its final shape in the volumes of Cooper. Pope's skill in deception was

not equal to his passion for it. Audacity was the chief characteristic

of his contrivances, and equivocation and lying his weapons of defence.

When a trick or a subterfuge was detected, and could no longer be

denied, he yet remained unabashed, and dropping all allusion to the

points which had been proved against him, he continued to rely upon the

falsehoods or fallacies which had been less completely exposed. His

pertinacity in reiterating that he was sinned against when he was

sinning, derived support from his literary fame, which gave currency to

his representations, and in some degree gained credit to them. But his

duplicity and his artifices were known to many, and it would be

difficult to say whether his effrontery or his hypocrisy was most

conspicuous when he affixed to the preface to the quarto of 1737 the

punning motto, _Vellem nescire literas_, bewailed in the preface itself

the necessity for the publication, hoped that no honest man might be

reduced to a similar dilemma, talked with injured indignation of thefts,

forgeries, and piracies, and exhorted the legislature to provide a

remedy against the evil. His tone was not moderated by the suspicions he

had roused, and the humiliations he had undergone. They had just as

little effect in abating his love of treachery, or blunting his appetite

for epistolary fame, and he was no sooner clear of one plot than he

engaged in another of the same description, and for the same ends.

His correspondence with Swift appeared in 1741. The English edition was

a sequel to the quarto of 1737, and formed part of what was called on

the title-page, "The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, in Prose, Vol. II." In

a prefatory notice to the reader, the letters are stated to have been

"copied from an impression sent from Dublin, and said to have been

printed by the Dean's direction," an impression, it is added, "which was

begun without our author's knowledge, and continued without his

consent." Pope held the same language in private to Allen and Warburton,

and professed to be extremely annoyed at the step. His account has been

almost uniformly accepted as true till the critic in the Athenaeum showed

that the publication of the correspondence with Swift was no exception

to the previous proceedings of the poet, and that, as in the case of the

Wycherley letters of 1729, and the miscellaneous collection of 1735, he

himself had sent the manuscripts to the press, and charged the act upon

others.

On November 28, 1729, Pope protested to Swift that it was many years

since he endeavoured to play the wit in his familiar correspondence. He

assured the Dean that as he had a greater love and esteem for him than

for others, so he wrote to him with even more than ordinary negligence.

"I smile to think," he continues, "how Curll would be bit were our

epistles to fall into his hands, and how gloriously they would fall

short of every ingenious reader's expectations." Warburton tells us that

Pope valued himself upon this abstinence from all effort to be

brilliant;[127] but his pretence of sinking the author in the friend

gained no credit from Swift, who took care to show his incredulity. "I

find," he replied on February 26, 1730, "you have been a writer of

letters almost from your infancy; and, by your own confession, had

schemes even then of epistolary fame. Montaigne says that if he could

have excelled in any kind of writing it would have been in letters; but

I doubt they would not have been natural, for it is plain that all

Pliny's letters were written with a view of publishing, and I accuse

Voiture of the same crime, although he be an author I am fond of. They

cease to be letters when they become a _jeu d'esprit_." Pope seems to

have suspected that this half-direct, half-oblique criticism was

suggested by his recent collection and arrangement of his

correspondence, and he denied, in his answer of April 9, that he was

open to the censure. "I am pleased," he observed, "to see your

partiality, and it is for that reason I have kept some of your letters,

and some of those of my other friends. These if I put together in a

volume for my own secret satisfaction in reviewing a life passed in

innocent amusements and studies, not without the good will of worthy and

ingenious men, do not therefore say I aim at epistolary fame. I never

had any fame less in my head; but the fame I most covet, indeed, is that

which must be derived to me from my friendships." The poet as usual

adapted his assertions to the exigencies of the moment; for it was not

for "his own secret satisfaction in reviewing a life passed in innocent

amusements and studies," that he had deposited a duplicate of the volume

with Lord Oxford, or kept it in readiness "against the revival of

slanders, and the publication of surreptitious letters." This

suppression of facts and motives could have had no effect in deluding

Swift. Once on September 3, 1735, when his faculties were waning, and

his powers rose and fell with his malady, he echoed back Pope's former

language. "Neither," he said, "did our letters contain any turns of wit,

or fancy, or politics, or satire, but mere innocent friendship. I

believe we neither of us ever leaned our head upon our hand to study

what we should write next." But by the 21st of October he had already

returned to his old conviction, and after mentioning the publication of

the poet's correspondence by Curll, he added, "I believe my letters have

escaped being published because I writ nothing but nature and

friendship, and particular incidents which could make no figure in

writing,"--a plain intimation that the opposite qualities had, in his

opinion, caused the letters of Pope to be communicated to the world.

The poet made the volume of 1735 the plea for pressing Swift to return

him his letters. He had ceased to smile at the thought how Curll would

be bit by getting hold of them, and earnestly demanded that the Dean

should "secure him against that rascal printer."[128] If it is admitted

that Pope was the publisher of the P. T. collection, his accusations

against the rascal printer were groundless, and his fears were feigned.

He was endeavouring, under cover of a false pretence, to obtain

possession of his letters to Swift, and it was easy to foresee that when

he had succeeded in his object the secret store would soon be laid open

to the public. He had previously forced his other friends to surrender

his correspondence by the clamorous apprehensions he expressed of Curll.

The letters which were safe in their guardianship had not been long

committed to his keeping when they came forth from the shop of this very

individual, and Pope was now urging the fact as a reason why fresh

letters should be transferred from a custody which had been effectual to

a custody which had proved to be insecure. Swift, perhaps, by this time,

had begun to penetrate the designs of his friend, and he declined to

comply with his request. "You need not fear any consequence," he wrote

September 3, 1735, "in the commerce that hath so long passed between us,

although I never destroyed one of your letters. But my executors are men

of honour and virtue, who have strict orders in my will to burn every

letter left behind me. Yet I am loth that any letters from you and a

very few friends should die before me." No answer could have been less

pleasing to Pope than to be told that his letters were doomed to

destruction. His eagerness to rescue them must have been increased by

the announcement, and he offered, if Swift would let him have them at

once, to send him copies. The poet's excuse for a proposal which

defeated his professed purpose, was "merely that the originals might not

fall into the hands of Curll, and thereby a hundred particulars be at

his mercy."[129] The particulars would have been as much at Curll's

mercy in the copies as in the originals they replaced, unless Pope

intended to disavow the transcripts he had himself furnished, which

shows how much value is to be attached to his assertion that parts of

the collection of 1735 were forged. His remonstrances induced Swift to

promise that the letters should not be committed to the flames; but he

persevered in refusing to surrender them while he lived. "As to what you

say of your letters," he wrote April 22, 1736, "my resolution is to

direct my executors to send you all your letters well sealed and

pacquetted, and leave them entirely to your disposal. These things are

all tied up, endorsed and locked in a cabinet, and I have not one

servant who can properly be said to write or read. No mortal shall copy

them, but you shall surely have them when I am no more." Since Swift

persisted in believing that he could protect private papers from Curll

quite as efficiently as the poet, who had signally failed in the

attempt, Pope reversed his petition, and disclosing his real intention,

begged that he might have them to print. "I told him," he says, in his

account to Lord Orrery, "as soon as I found myself obliged to publish an

edition of my letters to my great sorrow, that I wished to make use of

some of these, nor did I think any part of my correspondence would do me

a greater honour, and be really a greater pleasure to me, than what

might preserve the memory how well we loved one another. I find the Dean

was not quite of the same opinion, or he would not, I think, have denied

this." When Pope affected in 1729 to depreciate his correspondence with

Swift, that he might mask his design in gathering together his other

letters, he had even smiled to reflect "how gloriously our epistles

would fall short of every ingenious reader's expectations." He now

maintained that "our epistles" would confer upon him a vast deal of

honour, which he could not suppose would be obtained by balking

expectation. But though none of these inconsistencies are immaterial,

the most important circumstance, and one which bears upon the whole of

the subsequent evidence, is that Pope was pining for the publication of

the letters, and Swift would not consent to it.

An event happened opportunely to assist the solicitations of the poet.

Towards the close of 1736 Curll printed a couple of letters to Swift, of

which the first was written by Pope, and the second by Bolingbroke. The

bookseller announced that they were transmitted to him from Ireland,

together with several other valuable originals, and Pope on the 30th of

December employed this practical proof to convince the Dean that the

correspondence was not safe in his custody. The two letters, as they

were called, were in fact a joint epistle; for not only does the portion

of Bolingbroke purport to be a continuation of the portion of the poet,

but Swift, who had been absent, says in the reply, which on his return

home he addressed to Pope, "I found a letter from you with an _appendix_

longer than yours from Bolingbroke." The letter and its appendix were

printed by Curll at the period when Pope had exhausted his arguments to

induce Swift to resign the correspondence, and the occurrence was so

well timed for the purposes of the poet, and the device so much in

accordance with his practices, that it is impossible not to suspect that

he contrived the injury as a means of extorting the redress. The

original of his share of the epistle still exists,[130] and shows that

the published version has been edited in his usual fashion. The

variations, in the aggregate, could not have arisen from carelessness,

and they are not of a kind which an independent person could have had

any motive to introduce from design. The appendix of Bolingbroke had

been in the power of Pope, who might have transcribed it, together with

his own contribution, before it was sent; but he declared that he never

possessed a copy of either,[131] and small as is the credit due to his

protestations, he may have spoken the truth in this particular, and been

guilty not the less. The Dean was accustomed to lend his acquaintances a

volume in which he had stitched specimens of the letters of his eminent

friends.[132] The joint letter of August, 1723, was preserved,[133] when

the letters of Pope to Swift for a considerable period before and after

were lost or destroyed, and it is likely that it escaped the common fate

by its insertion in the volume of selections. There it was easily

accessible, and as Worsdale, the reputed mock-clergyman, who had

personated Smythe, was sometimes resident in Dublin, his old employer

had a trusty, or at any rate a trusted agent, ready to his hand. Curll

did not print any more of his boasted originals, and he probably only

spoke on the faith of promises which had been made him with a view to

compel compliance from the Dean, by persuading him that traitors had

admission to his cabinet.

The announcement of the publication by Curll of the joint letter of

August 23 had not the desired effect upon Swift. In his reply he took no

notice of the circumstance, and Pope, finding that nothing he could urge

would shake his resolution, addressed, in the beginning of March, 1737,

a statement of the case to Lord Orrery, who was then in Ireland, and

engaged him to second his entreaties. Lord Orrery obtained a promise

from Swift that the correspondence should be returned, and offered to be

the bearer of it. The Dean accordingly acquaints Pope, July 23, 1737,

that "when his lordship goes over, which will be, as he hopes, in about

ten days, he will take with him all the letters I preserved of yours."

"I cannot," said Swift, in making the communication, "trust my memory

half an hour," and this passage was a proof that he did not exaggerate

his infirmity. Lord Orrery had set sail in the middle of June, and under

the same date that Swift wrote from Ireland that his lordship would go

over in about ten days, his lordship wrote to Swift from England, "Your

commands are obeyed long ago. Dr. King has his cargo, Mrs. Barber her

Conversation, and Mr. Pope his letters." Mrs. Barber's Conversation was

the manuscript of the "Polite Conversation" of Swift, which she had

asked permission to print for her own advantage, and the cargo for Dr.

King was the manuscript of the "History of the Four Last Years of Queen

Anne," which the Dean was anxious to print for his own credit. But much

as it was in his thoughts at this time, he only remembered his settled

intention to send the papers--whether history, conversation, or

letters--by Lord Orrery, and the act by which the intention was

fulfilled had already faded from his mind. The understanding of Swift

was rapidly yielding to his mournful malady, and the first faculty to

suffer was his memory.

The letters of Pope were therefore in his own keeping, and out of the

power of Swift, before July 23, 1737. The Dean, however, informed him

that "by reading the dates he found a chasm of six years," and that he

had searched for the missing correspondence in vain. Pope did not

abandon the hope of recovering it, and Swift, apparently in reply to his

applications, wrote on August 8, 1738, to acquaint him that every letter

received from him for twenty years and upwards had been sealed up in

bundles, and consigned to the custody of Mrs. Whiteway, whom he

describes as "a very worthy, rational, and judicious cousin of mine."

Mrs. Whiteway, who had none of the papers, had a short time before kept

Swift from sending a similar fictitious account, but the idea had taken

deep root in his mind, and rightly conjecturing that he would reiterate

it, she engaged Lord Orrery to inform Pope that she had neither got any

of the correspondence herself, nor had the slightest knowledge where it

was.[134] On the present, as on the former occasion, Swift showed her

what he had written, and on the 24th of August he subjoined a postscript

in which, after saying that he would correct, if it were possible, the

blunders committed in his letter, he simply added that his cousin had

assured him that "a great collection of your/my letters to me/you are

put up and scaled, and in some very safe hand." The counter-assurance of

Mrs. Whiteway to Lord Orrery that she had no knowledge of the

collection, shows that the corrected version was as fanciful as the

original statement. Swift's language in 1738 would imply that the chasm

in the correspondence no longer existed, and that no part of the series

had yet been transmitted to England; but it was the language of a man

labouring under the misapprehension and obliviousness produced by

disease, and could have little weight in opposition to the testimony

that Pope had received back a packet of his letters in the previous

year. Any doubt which could have existed on the point is done away by

the admission of Pope himself. Mrs. Whiteway had refused in 1740 to send

back some of his letters by the mother of the Mr. Nugent, who afterwards

became Lord Clare, because the poet had authorised her to entrust them

to a Mr. M'Aulay. "I believe," Pope wrote to Mr. Nugent, "they had

entertained a jealousy of you, as the same persons did before of my Lord

Orrery. They then prevented the Dean from complying to any purpose with

my request. They then sent a few just to save appearances, and possibly

to serve as a sort of plea to excuse them of being taxed with this

proceeding, which is now thrown upon the Dean himself."[135] The

"proceeding" was the committing the correspondence to the press, and

Pope, on his own part, to avoid being taxed with it, was privately

putting forth the plea that the bulk of his letters had not been

returned to him. The confession that he had received a few is a complete

answer to the delusion of Swift, and they must have been more than a

very few, or they would not have been sufficient "to save appearances."

Setting aside the representations of the poet, upon which no dependence

can be placed, except when he bears witness against himself, there is

nothing to oppose, and much to confirm the idea that they were the

identical "few" which were published in the quarto of 1741.

When Swift first collected the letters in May, 1737, he mentioned that

they were not much above sixty, and in July, when they had been sent

away, and he described his past act in the language of intention, he

said they were not above twenty-five. His account in July, when the

correspondence was no longer under his eye, and when his failing memory

made him forget the departure of Lord Orrery, is far less reliable than

his account in May when he was fresh from the task of sorting the

letters. A smaller number than he specified appeared in the quarto

which, exclusive of the answers of the Dean, contains only forty. This

upon an average does not amount to two a year, and the poet, when he had

an end to serve, would not have scrupled to call even sixty "few" in

comparison with the many that had been written. Swift imagined that the

missing letters might have been lost on some of those occasions when he

had been compelled to entrust his papers to friends, and Pope may

honestly have believed that they were detained by designing persons; but

they were never published, while those which were printed have a chasm

of seven years, from June, 1716, to August, 1723, or only one year more

than the Dean detected in the series he got ready to despatch to

Twickenham. The new correspondence, like Pope's previous volumes, was

merely a selection, and there is but a single letter of the poet to

Swift in 1714, none whatever in 1715, and again but a single letter in

1716. The suppression of the letters in 1717, as in 1715, or even a slip

of memory or a slip of the pen with the Dean, both of which had become a

frequent occurrence, will account for the slight discrepancy between the

chasm in the printed volume, and the chasm which Swift announced. The

letter of August, 1723, is the joint letter of Pope and Bolingbroke,

which was sent corrected to Curll, and this is followed by a second gap

from August, 1723, to September 14, 1725. The extensive hiatus in the

correspondence of which Pope was forewarned by Swift, must in all reason

be supposed to be the chief deficiency of which Pope complained, though

in language coloured to suit his purpose; and when a similar blank

exists in the quarto, there is a strong presumption that the letters

which he acknowledged had been sent to save appearances, were the same

letters of which the book was composed. A kindred circumstance supports

the conclusion. The last letter of Pope in the quarto is dated March 23,

1737, which falls in with the fact that the collection was gathered

together in May and transmitted to him in June; but if the volume of

1741 had proceeded from Swift, it would be a curious coincidence, that

not a single line written by the poet since the time when his

correspondence was returned to him should have found its way into the

work.

It is against the innocence of Pope that in his public statements he

kept out of sight the fact that he had received back a certain portion

of the correspondence, and designedly conveyed the impression that the

whole of it remained with Swift. In the advertisement to the quarto it

is said that Pope could not be prevailed upon to revise the volume

printed in Dublin; but that he had furnished the London booksellers with

a few more of the letters of the Dean a little to clear up the history

of their publication. The reader is informed that he will see this

history in one view if he observes the passages marked by inverted

commas. The story they reveal is that Swift ultimately promised to send

the correspondence, that he collected it for the purpose, and ended by

sending none of it. The Dean's communication of August 8 is produced as

exhibiting the final result, and Pope marked with inverted commas the

declaration, "I can faithfully assure you that every letter you have

favoured me with, these twenty years and more, are sealed up in bundles

and delivered to Mrs. Whiteway." The sense in which the poet wished the

passage to be understood is defined in the table of contents. "The

entire collection of his and Mr. Pope's letters for twenty years and

upwards found, and in the hands of a lady, a worthy and judicious

relation of the Dean's.--This a mistake, not in hers, but in some other

safe hands." A note was added by Pope to the letter for the purpose of

strengthening the case against Swift; but not one syllable did he let

drop to indicate that the Dean was deceived in supposing that the series

remained unbroken, and that no part of it had been sent back. The

testimony of another witness, which had the appearance of corroborating

the error, was produced by the poet. The assertion in the postscript

that Mrs. Whiteway vouched for "a great collection being in some very

safe hand," seems to have beguiled him into the belief that the missing

letters had turned up, and Lord Orrery having lately come from Ireland

he applied to him on the subject. Lord Orrery answered, that Mrs.

Whiteway knew nothing of the letters, that he was satisfied they were

neither lost nor burnt, and that his attempts to discover where they

were deposited had been fruitless. To us, who are aware that Lord Orrery

had been the bearer of an instalment of the correspondence, it is plain

that he is referring to that portion of it which could not be found when

he carried over the remainder. To those who had only before them the

version contained in the quarto, and who merely read of an intention to

send letters by him in July, 1737, which had not been forwarded in

August, 1738, his general expressions in answer to Pope would appear to

apply to the whole of the correspondence, and seem a confirmation of the

delusion of Swift. The poet made himself responsible for the

misconceptions of the Dean by marking them with inverted commas, by

supporting them with specious subsidiary evidence, and attesting that

they embodied the history of the publication; and since they leave an

impression which he knew to be false upon the precise particular which

implicates himself, his disingenuous sanction of the error must be

considered to be the act of conscious guilt.

"I should think with you, madam," Lord Orrery wrote to Mrs. Whiteway,

"that some of Mr. Pope's servants had stolen the letters, did not many

appear from various people to the Dean, of which Mr. Pope cannot be

supposed either to have seen the copies or originals." With our present

information, the letters in the collection which are not from the pen of

Pope tell the other way, and contribute in a powerful degree to fix the

publication on him. The replies of Swift, together with much of Swift's

correspondence with Gay, are included in the volume, and it will be

found upon examination that all these materials were likely to have been

furnished by the poet, and that part of them could have been furnished

by nobody else. He has twice touched upon the subject in the annotations

to the quarto. The first note is attached to the heading, "Letters of

Dr. Swift to Mr. Gray," and states that they were "found among Mr. Gay's

papers, and returned to Dr. Swift by the Duke of Queensberry and Mr.

Pope." The second note is appended to that portion of the postscript of

August 24, 1738, in which the Dean mentions "a great collection of

your/my letters to me/you." "It is written," subjoins the poet, "just

thus in the original. The book that is now printed seems to be part of

the collection here spoken of, as it contains not only the letters of

Mr. Pope, but of Dr. Swift, both to him and Mr. Gay, which were returned

him after Mr. Gay's death, though any mention made by Mr. P. of the

return or exchange of letters has been industriously suppressed in the

publication, and only appears by some of the answers."

The case of Gay is first to be considered. There is not an allusion in

any of the "answers," either to the exchange of the letters which passed

between Gay and Swift, or the return of the letters which Swift

addressed to Gay. An exchange, at all events, had not taken place. The

letters of Gay were retained by Swift, and after the death of the Dean

they were printed from the originals. Three only are contained in the

quarto of 1741, and these are joint productions of Gay and Pope,[136]

which would naturally have been made over to the latter when he

reclaimed the whole of his correspondence with Swift. If the Dean was

the culprit we must believe that while publishing, or permitting others

to publish, his own letters to Gay, he deliberately excluded every one

of Gay's replies, with the exception of the three in which Pope had a

share. If Pope was the culprit the peculiarity is explained. He

published the three letters which, being in part his own writing, had

been sent back to him in 1737, and he published no others because the

rest of the letters of Gay were not in his possession.

As the Duke of Queensberry was living, the introduction of his name is a

species of guarantee that Swift had received back his letters to Gay;

but the conclusion does not follow, which Pope intended to be drawn,

that the Dean must therefore have supplied them to the printer. "One

thing," says Swift to Gay, Nov. 20, 1729, "you are to consider, because

it is an old compact, that when I write to you, or Mr. Pope, I write to

both." On the death of Gay the correspondence passed a second time

through Pope's hands, and with his habit at that period of getting the

letters of his intimates, as well as his own letters, transcribed for

future use, it may readily be imagined that he would not miss the

opportunity of securing a valuable collection, in which he may be said

to have had a common property with his departed friend[137]. Hence it

happens that copies of all Swift's letters to Gay, together with one

that was not printed, are preserved among the Oxford manuscripts, and

with this evidence that the entire series was not less in the power of

Pope than of Swift, suspicion must incline to the one who had made

elaborate preparations for publication, and who had shown himself eager

for it. The suppression too of Gay's replies, contrary to the general

rule observed in the work, would here again favour the opinion that the

letters of Swift were sent to the press by the person to whom the

replies were inaccessible, and not by the person who had the

correspondence on both sides at his command.

The assertion that the letters were returned which Swift addressed to

Pope, is next to be examined. According to the poet his surrender of

them appears from _some_ of the answers of Swift; but the single passage

by which it is implied, is that in which the Dean speaks of "a great

collection of [your/my] letters to [me/you]." The very letter in which

the sentence occurs commences with a lament by Swift that he has

"entirely lost his memory," and the strange double form in which he

describes the correspondence seems chiefly to indicate a consciousness

that his recollection of its nature was uncertain and confused. On one

half of the subject he had manifested his misconceptions a few days

before. He had forgotten the chasm in the series of Pope's letters, had

forgotten that any of them had been restored to their author, had

forgotten Mrs. Whiteway's denial that she possessed them, and when she

again corrected him, continued to fancy they were deposited with some

person he knew not whom, in some place he knew not where. His notions

respecting his letters to Pope were not likely to be better founded than

his notions respecting the letters of Pope to him. But more than this,

he only professed to make the statement upon the authority of his

cousin, and his cousin disavowed all knowledge of the collection. Far

from being aware that the Dean had received back his letters to Pope,

she expressed her conviction that the materials for the printed volume

could not have been drawn from Ireland, just because those letters

formed part of it.[138] The literal interpretation of a single phrase of

Swift, in a letter which bears internal evidence of the grievous extent

of his malady, being negatived by the authority upon which it claims to

be based, there still exists the ambiguous assurance of Pope that he

returned the correspondence after the death of Gay, which happened in

December, 1732. The replies, however, of Swift in the quarto, instead of

stopping at this date, extend to August, 1738, and those of the last

half-dozen years must have remained with the poet. The Dean had said in

1717, that he kept no copies of letters. Mrs. Whiteway testified that he

had never taken a copy during the twelve years she had been at his

elbow, "excepting of a letter to a lord-lieutenant or a bishop, whom he

feared might make an ill use of it;" and as for the letters to Pope she

had seen him write them, and send them off immediately. Letters of which

Pope had the originals, and Swift no copies, must plainly have owed

their publicity to Pope.

There is another inconsistency which makes it very doubtful whether the

poet could have sent back the earlier letters of Swift any more than

the later. After informing the Dean, on December 30, 1736, that the

joint letter of August, 1723, had been recently printed by Curll, Pope

went on to say, "Your answer to that letter, he has not got; it has

never been out of my custody; for whatever is lent is lost, wit as well

as money, to these needy poetical readers." Here we have Pope avowing

that he retained in 1736 an answer of the Dean, which belonged to the

year 1723. There is no indication that it was an exception to the rest

of the correspondence, and the presumption therefore is that none of the

letters which Pope received from Swift had been restored upon the death

of Gay in 1732. The poet's assertion is rendered more suspicious by the

absence of all allusion to the circumstance in the arguments which he

addressed through Lord Orrery to Swift, in March, 1737, with a view to

convince him that his refusal to return Pope's own letters was unjust.

No plea could have had greater force than the statement that Pope had

already sent back the letters of Swift, and was only asking the Dean to

deal by him as he had dealt by the Dean.

Although we were to suppose, against the evidence, that the poet had

given up the whole of the originals, he must still have retained copies.

He avowedly inserted six letters of the Dean in the quarto to clear up

the history of the publication, and four of the number belong to the

years 1732 and 1733, which shows that Pope continued to have the command

of the correspondence at the period of its appearance in 1741. Indeed

copies of five of the published letters of Swift to Pope, with eight

that are unpublished, are in the Oxford papers, and since none of the

six, which the poet contributed to the quarto, are among them, more must

have existed, unless he had kept the originals. That he had never parted

with them is the just conclusion from the facts,[139] and his note is

one of those instances in which he had recourse to the licence he

allowed himself of "equivocating genteelly." The letters of Swift to

Gay may be presumed to have been returned to Swift, when the Duke of

Queensberry examined Gay's papers after his death. The expressions in

the Dean's child-like postscript of August 24 gave a colour to the

notion that he had also got back his letters to Pope. The admission

suggested to the poet to draw up a note which, read by the ordinary

rules of language, affirms that the letters to himself were returned, as

well as the letters to Gay, but in which the return of the letters, by a

forced construction, might be made to apply to Gay alone, who is the

immediate antecedent. This accounts for the death of Gay having been

fixed upon for the era of the alleged restoration to the Dean of his

correspondence with Pope, though there was no connection between the

events, and though the choice of so early a date left unexplained the

appearance in the quarto of the subsequent letters of Swift. That "any

mention made by Mr. P. of the return or exchange of letters should be

industriously suppressed" by Mr. P. "in the publication," was a

necessary consequence, or it would have been manifest that the only

letters which had been returned were those of Gay. By evasions like

these the poet satisfied a conscience that held a lie to be justifiable,

provided it was couched in language which could be wrested by the

deceiver into a different sense from what it bore to the deceived.

The correspondence between Swift and Bolingbroke completed the series,

which Pope complained was printed without his consent. Of the eight

letters from Bolingbroke, seven were written in conjunction with the

poet. These joint compositions, like the partnership letters of Gay, are

exactly those which would have been returned to Pope. One of the number

furnishes evidence, which almost amounts to a demonstration, that the

collection of 1741 proceeded from himself. When he brought out the

avowed edition of his letters in 1737, he inserted at the end of the

volume a letter of Swift, a letter of his own, and the joint letter from

himself and Bolingbroke, of which Curll had obtained a copy. This little

supplement was ushered in by a notice which says, "Since the foregoing

sheets were printed off, the following letters having been published

without the consent of their writers, we have added them, though not in

the order of time." Whatever the motive the announcement was deceptive.

The letter of Swift was his reply to the joint letter of Pope and

Bolingbroke--that very reply which the poet boasted a month or two

before could not be produced surreptitiously, because it had never been

out of his custody. Nobody else, by his own showing, had the power to

make it public, no earlier impression of it is known to exist, and, as

will be seen by comparing it with the copy from the Oxford papers, it

was printed with omissions and variations, which must have been the act

of the poet, or he would have restored the genuine readings when he

included it in his appendix. In juxtaposition with it is a letter from

Pope to Swift, dated December 10, 1725, which in like manner has never

been found in any prior publication, and which of all his letters to the

Dean is the single one we are certain was in his power when the quarto

of 1737 was in the press. He transcribed the original at the time it was

written, and sent a copy to Lord Oxford, ostensibly to let him see the

way in which he was mentioned in it, but partly, perhaps, because the

poet thought well of the production.[140] This letter of December, 1725,

reappears in tho quarto of 1741, with the addition for the first time of

a postscript by Bolingbroke. A copy of the entire performance is among

the Oxford papers, and reveals the fact that the Pope portion, and the

Bolingbroke portion, are both abridged in the published version. Yet

although the persons who brought out the collection of 1741, had the

manuscript before them, or they could not have given Bolingbroke's share

of the letter, they nevertheless, by a marvellous coincidence, print

Pope's share precisely as it had been printed by Pope himself in 1737.

The conclusion is irresistible that the editor of the quarto of 1737,

was the editor of the collection of 1741. The postscript of Bolingbroke

was not written when he was in the house with Pope, but was added

subsequently when he got back to Dawley,[141] and its omission from the

volume of 1737 was due to the circumstance, that the poet had not then

received back his correspondence from Swift, and only possessed a copy

of his own carefully composed essay.

The letter of Bolingbroke to Swift, in which the poet had no share, was

commenced at Aix-la-Chapelle on August 30, 1729, and completed at Dawley

on October 5. Pope appears not to have seen it before it was sent; for

four days later, on October 9, he says to Swift, "Lord Bolingbroke has

told me ten times over, he was going to write to you. Has he or not?"

The elaborate epistle of Bolingbroke was a reply to a letter which Swift

had addressed to Pope, and the consequent interest that Pope would have

had in the answer, may have induced the author, proud of his production,

to provide him with a copy; but however he came by it, a copy was

deposited by him in Lord Oxford's library, where, as in the quarto of

1741, it is the single example of an epistle by Bolingbroke alone. Swift

had by him a quantity of Bolingbroke's correspondence, some of which

would have been full as appropriate as the specimen that is given, and

it is a weighty fact in the question whether the Dean or the poet

furnished the materials to the printer, that the one letter selected was

the one letter that Pope possessed. The three letters which are inserted

from Swift to Bolingbroke incline the scale to the same side. The first

relates in part to Pope, the conclusion of the second is addressed to

him, and the third is the answer to the letter of August 30, 1729. It

was never pretended that the Dean received back his letters to

Bolingbroke, and it was not his habit to make copies; but with our

knowledge that the poet and Bolingbroke had much of their correspondence

with Swift in common, we may be sure that these three letters, at least,

had been in the hands of Pope, and if he did not retain the originals,

it would in 1729, the year to which they all belong, have been in

accordance with his common practice to transcribe them.

Thus what was printed of the correspondence, and what was not printed,

concur to show that Pope must have been the source from which it was

derived. The history of the circumstances under which the publication

took place will confirm this inference. Pope asserted that the quarto

was "copied from an impression sent from Dublin." There is now proof in

abundance that the Dublin edition, which came out as the seventh volume

of Swift's works, was copied from an impression sent from England. Mr.

Deane Swift, a cousin of his famous namesake, and the son-in-law of Mrs.

Whiteway, informed Mr. Nichols, in 1778, that "he was the only person

then living who could give a full account how Faulkner's seventh volume,

that is, how Swift's and Pope's correspondence came to be, not _first

printed_, but first published in Ireland."[142] The italics are Mr.

Swift's own, and the fact on which he laid such especial emphasis is at

once attested and explained by the statement of Faulkner himself to Dr.

Birch in August, 1749. "Mr. Pope," he said, "sent to Ireland to Dr.

Swift, by Mr. Gerrard, an Irish gentleman, then at Bath, a printed copy

of their letters, with an anonymous letter, which occasioned Dr. Swift

to give Mr. Faulkner leave to reprint them at Dublin, though Mr. Pope's

edition was published first."[143] Faulkner also solicited the sanction

of Pope, and we have the poet's summary of the application, in the

letter he wrote to Mr. Nugent on August 14, 1740: "Last week I received

an account from Faulkner, the Dublin bookseller, that the Dean himself

has given him a collection of letters of his own and mine, and others,

to be printed, and he civilly asks my consent, assuring me the Dean

declares them genuine, and that Mr. Swift, Mrs. Whiteway's son-in-law,

will correct the press, out of his great respect to the Dean and myself.

He says they were collected by some unknown persons, and the copy sent

with a letter importing that it was criminal to suppress such an amiable

picture of the Dean, and his private character appearing in those

letters, and that if he would not publish them in his lifetime others

would after his death." It is manifest from these particulars that

Faulkner was not then aware that Pope himself had sent the

correspondence to Swift, and the conviction was only forced upon his

mind by subsequent events. But the bookseller could not be mistaken on

the point that the letters were handed to him in print. As he later told

Dr. Birch that the Dean had given him leave to reprint them because they

were printed already, so he proclaimed that his volume was a reprint at

the time. He inserted at the end of his _first_ edition the few new

letters which were added in the quarto of 1741, and says that he found

them in the London impression "after he had _reprinted_ the foregoing

sheets." Faulkner had no sort of motive to deceive. Whether the letters

were in type or in manuscript he had equally received them from Swift,

and obtained his authority to publish them.

If further testimony is required it is supplied by Pope. To the mention

of Mrs. Whiteway in Lord Orrery's letter of 1738 the poet appended a

note in which he says, "This lady since gave Mr. Pope the strongest

assurances that she had used her utmost endeavours to prevent the

publication--nay, went so far as to secrete the book, till it was

commanded from her, and delivered to the Dublin printer, whereupon her

son-in-law, D. Swift, Esq., insisted upon writing a preface to justify

Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it, and to lay it upon the corrupt

practices of the printers in London; but this he would not agree to, as

not knowing the truth of the fact." It was therefore a book, and a

_printed_ book, which was delivered to Faulkner, since if the collection

transmitted to the Dean had been in manuscript, Mrs. Whiteway and her

son-in-law would not have laid it upon the corrupt practices of the

printers, and it must have been transmitted from England, or they would

neither have laid it upon the printers of London, nor have proposed "to

justify Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it." The story was told him

while it could be refuted if it was false; but he did not venture to

question the existence of the printed volume, and had nothing more to

say than that he did not personally know that it was due to the corrupt

practices of the London booksellers. He might have gone further, and

stated that he knew the booksellers to be innocent.

The assertion of Faulkner, that it was Pope who sent this volume to

Swift, is equally supported by unexceptionable evidence. The collection

of 1735 was secretly printed and sold to Curll, and when a secretly

printed work turns out to be the origin of the collection of 1741, the

nature of the device proclaims its author. But the circumstance which

most implicates Pope is his anxiety that it should not transpire that a

printed volume had been sent to Swift at all. He informed his friend

Allen that he had endeavoured to put a stop to the work, and that this

had drawn forth replies from the "Dean's people--the women and the

bookseller." With their statements before him, he kept back from Allen

the main fact that the Dublin volume was taken entirely from a printed

copy, and speaks instead as if it was taken from the originals. He adds

that it is too manifest to admit of any doubt how many tricks have been

played with the Dean's papers, and accused his "people" of secreting

them as long as they feared he would not permit them to be published.

This dishonest substitution of "originals" and "papers" for the printed

book is a convincing proof that Pope had some motive, incompatible with

innocence, for his studious perversion of the truth. The desire to

obliterate the traces of his delinquency reappears in the preface to the

quarto. He writes with implied censure of Swift for his sanction of the

Dublin edition, and has the disingenuousness to conceal that he had

merely allowed Faulkner to reproduce in Ireland a volume which had been

printed in England--a volume over which the Dean had no control, and

which being printed, he knew would inevitably be published.