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 allowthat 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 Athenæum. 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 haderroneously 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 thedonation 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 intervalby 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 ofthe 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 afterfinis. 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 25for 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 25l., and to give Pope a bond in which he undertook to pay a penalty of 100l.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 thepiracies 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 andquibbles. 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 wereletters 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 secondsarcasm 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 dayfor 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 byno 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 neitherasterisks 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 amuneasy 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 somedegree 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 Athenæum 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 tofall 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 ajeu 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 mereinnocent 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 letterswere 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 conferupon 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 anappendixlonger 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 datethat 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 areput 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, hementioned 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 supportsthe 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 beguiledhim 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. Swiftby 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 toGay, 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 fromsomeof 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 chieflyto 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 Swiftany 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 allowedhimself 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 followingletters 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 1737was 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.