The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1
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Title: The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1
Author: Alexander Pope
Contributor: Whitwell Elwin
Release date: May 2, 2010 [eBook #32190]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32190
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF ALEXANDER POPE, VOLUME 1 ***
Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
THE WORKS
OF
ALEXANDER POPE.
NEW EDITION.
INCLUDING
SEVERAL HUNDRED UNPUBLISHED LETTERS, AND OTHER NEW MATERIALS.
COLLECTED IN PART BY THE LATE
R'T. HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER.
WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES.
BY REV. WHITWELL ELWIN.
VOL. I.
POETRY.--VOL. I.
WITH PORTRAITS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS.
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1871.
[_The right of Translation is reserved._]
LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME OF POETRY.
PAGE
CATALOGUE OF POPE'S COLLECTED EDITIONS OF HIS WORKS vii
POPE'S MEMORIAL LIST OF RELATIONS AND FRIENDS ix
ADVERTISEMENT OF WARBURTON TO HIS EDITION OF POPE'S WORKS xi
INTRODUCTION xv
THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE 1
RECOMMENDATORY POEMS 17
TRANSLATIONS 37
THE FIRST BOOK OF STATIUS'S THEBAIS 41
SAPPHO TO PHAON FROM OVID 87
THE FABLE OF DRYOPE FROM OVID 104
VERTUMNUS AND POMONA FROM OVID 108
JANUARY AND MAY, FROM CHAUCER 113
THE WIFE OF BATH, FROM CHAUCER 155
THE TEMPLE OF FAME 185
PASTORALS 231
DISCOURSE OF PASTORAL POETRY 257
1. SPRING, TO SIR WILLIAM TRUMBULL 265
2. SUMMER TO DR. GARTH 276
3. AUTUMN TO MR. WYCHERLEY 285
4. WINTER, TO THE MEMORY OF MRS. TEMPEST 292
MESSIAH, A SACRED ECLOGUE 301
WINDSOR FOREST 319
CATALOGUE
OF POPE'S COLLECTED EDITIONS OF HIS WORKS.
The Works of Mr. ALEXANDER POPE. London: Printed by W.
BOWYER for BERNARD LINTOT, between the Temple Gates, 1717.
4to and folio.
This volume consists of all the acknowledged poems which Pope had
hitherto published, with the addition of some new pieces.
The Works of Mr. ALEXANDER POPE. Volume ii. London: Printed
by J. WRIGHT, for LAWTON GILLIVER, at Homer's Head in Fleet
Street, 1735. 4to and folio.
The volume of 1735 contains, with a few exceptions, the poems which Pope
had printed since 1717. The pages of each group of pieces--Epistles,
Satires, Epitaphs, etc.--are numbered separately, and there are other
irregularities in the numbers, arising from a change in the order of the
Moral Essays after the sheets were struck off.
Letters of Mr. ALEXANDER POPE, and Several of his friends.
London: Printed by J. WRIGHT for J. KNAPTON in Ludgate
Street, L. GILLIVER in Fleet Street, J. BRINDLEY in New Bond
Street, and R. DODSLEY in Pall-Mall, 1737. 4to and folio.
This is Pope's first avowed edition of his letters. A half-title, "The
Works of Mr. Alexander Pope in Prose," precedes the title-page.
The Works of Mr. ALEXANDER POPE, in Prose. Vol. ii. London:
Printed for J. and P. KNAPTON, C. BATHURST, and R. DODSLEY,
1741. 4to and folio.
The half-title is more precise: "The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, in
Prose. Vol. ii. Containing the rest of his Letters, with the Memoirs of
Scriblerus, never before printed; and other Tracts written either
singly, or in conjunction with his friends. Now first collected
together." The letters are the Swift correspondence, and they are in a
different type from the rest of the book. The numbers of the pages are
very irregular, and show that the contents and arrangement of the volume
had been greatly altered from some previous impression. The folio copies
of the two volumes of poetry, and the two of prose, are merely the
quarto text portioned out into longer pages, without a single leaf being
reprinted. The trifling variations from the quartos were introduced when
the matter was put into the folio size.
The Works of ALEXANDER POPE, ESQ.; vol. i. with explanatory
Notes and Additions never before printed. London: Printed
for B. LINTOT, 1736. Small 8vo.
This is the first volume of an edition which extended to nine volumes,
and which from the want of uniformity in the title-pages, the dates, and
names of the publishers appears to consist of odd volumes. The copyright
of Pope's works belonged to different proprietors, and they at last
agreed to print their respective shares in small octavo, that the
several parts united might form a complete set. Each proprietor
commenced printing his particular section of the octavos when the
previous sizes he had on hand were sold, and thus it happened that the
second volume of the edition came out in 1735 before the first, which
was published in 1736. The series was not finished till 1742, when the
fourth book of the Dunciad was added to the Poems, and the Swift
Correspondence to the Letters. Some of the volumes were reprinted, and
the later editions occasionally differ slightly from their predecessors.
The Poems and Letters of Pope are more complete in the octavos than in
the quartos, but the octavos, on the other hand, omit all the prose
works except the Letters, and the Memoirs of Scriblerus, and octavos and
quartos combined are imperfect in comparison with the editions which
have been published since Pope's death.
A MEMORIAL LIST
OF
DEPARTED RELATIONS AND FRIENDS.
WRITTEN BY POPE IN AN ELZEVIR VIRGIL, NOW IN THE LIBRARY OF THE EARL OF
MANSFIELD.[1]
NATUS MAJI 21, 1688, HORA POST MERID. 6-3/4.
Quo desiderio veteres revocamus amores
Atque olim amissas flemus amicitias.
_Catullus._
Anno 1700, Maji primo, obit, semper venerandus, poetarum princeps,
Joannes Dryden, æt. 70.[2]
Anno 1708, mens. Aprili, obiit Gulielmus Walsh, criticus sagax, amicus
et vir bonus, æt. 49.
Anno 1710, Jan. 24, Avita mea piissimæ mem., Eliz. Turner, migravit in
coelum, annum agens 74.
Anno 1710, mens. Aprili, Tho. Betterton, Roscius sui temporis, exit
omnium cum plausu bonorum, æt. 74.
Anno 1712, mens. Januario, decessit vir facetissimus, juventutis meæ
deliciæ, Antonius Englefleld, æt. 75.
Anno 1718, obit Tho. Parnell, poetica laude, et moribus suavissimis
insignis.
Anno 1715, mens. Martio, decessit Gul. Wycherley, poeta morum scientia
clarus, ille meos primus qui habebat amores, æt. 75.
Anno 1716, mens. Decemb. obit Gulielmus Trumbull, olim Regi Gul. a
secretis, annum agens 75. Amicus meus humanissimus a juvenilibus annis.
Pater meus, Alex. Pope, omnibus bonis moribus præditus obit, an. 1717.
Simon Harcourt, filius, obit, mens. Junio 1720, Lutet. Parisior. Quem
sequitur Pater, olim M. Britann. Cancellar., mense Julio 1727.
Jacobus Craggs R.M.B. a secretis, natura generosus et ingenuus, amicus
animosus, charissim. memor., e vita exc. Feb. 1720/1.
Robertus Oxoniæ Comes, mihi perfamiliaris et jucundus, fortiter obit,
1724.
Jo. Sheffield, Buckinghamiæ Dux, mihi lenis et amicissimus, fato functus
est Feb. 1720/1 æt. 73.
Nutrix mea fidelissima M. Beech, obiit 5 Novem. 1725, æt. 77.
Robertus Digby, ex Patre antiquis præditus moribus, e vita migravit,
Apr. 1726.
Edwardus Blunt, vir amicissimus obit, Aug. 1726.
Anno 1728/9, Jan. 20, æt. 57, mortuus est Gulielmus Congreve, poeta,
eximius, vir comis, urbanus, et mihi perquam familiaris.
Elijah Fenton, vir probus, et poeta haud mediocris, decessit men. Julio
1730, æt. 48.
Francisc. Atterbury, Roffens Episcopus, vir omni scientia clarus,
animosus, ex Anglia exilio pulsus, an. 1723. Obiit Parisiis, mense Febr.
1732, æt. 70.
Joan. Gay, probitate morum et simplicitate insignis, socius peramabilis,
sub oculis meis mortuus est, Dec. 4, 1723, æt. 44.
Mater mea charissima, pientissima et optima, Editha Pope, obiit septima
die Junii 1733, annum implens nonagesimum tertium.
G. Garth, MD. homo candidus et poeta urbanus, obiit 1719.
Joan. Arbuthnot, MD. vir doctiss., probitate ac pietate insignis, obiit
Febr. 27, 1734/5, æt. 68.
Carolus Mordaunt. Com. Peterbor., vir insigniss. bellica virtute, ac
morum comitate, obiit Ulyssipont. anno ætatis 78, 1735, mense Octobris.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: The Virgil was probably bought by William Murray at some
sale of Pope's books, for on the fly-leaf is written "E. Libris A.
Popei, Pr. 5_s._"]
[Footnote 2: Pope who had only once set eyes on Dryden, and had no
acquaintance with him, marks his admiration by including him in this
memorial of relations and friends.]
ADVERTISEMENT OF WARBURTON TO HIS EDITION OF POPE'S WORKS, 1751.
Mr. Pope, in his last illness, amused himself, amidst the care of his
higher concerns, in preparing a corrected and complete edition of his
writings;[1] and, with his usual delicacy, was even solicitous to
prevent any share of the offence they might occasion, from falling on
the friend whom he had engaged to give them to the public.[2] In
discharge of this trust, the public has here a complete edition of his
works, executed in such a manner, as, I am persuaded, would have been to
his satisfaction. The editor hath not, for the sake of profit, suffered
the author's name to be made cheap by a subscription;[3] nor his works
to be defrauded of their due honours by a vulgar or inelegant
impression; nor his memory to be disgraced by any pieces unworthy of his
talents or virtue. On the contrary, he hath, at a very great expense,
ornamented this edition with all the advantages which the best artists
in paper, printing, and sculpture could bestow upon it.[4]
If the public hath waited longer than the deference due to its generous
impatience for the author's writings should have suffered, it was owing
to a reason which the editor need not be ashamed to tell. It was his
regard to the family interests of his deceased friend. Mr. Pope, at his
death, had left large impressions of several parts of his works, unsold,
the property of which was adjudged to belong to his executors; and the
editor was willing they should have time to dispose of them to the best
advantage, before the publication of this edition (which hath been long
prepared) should put a stop to the sale. But it may be proper to be a
little more particular concerning the superiority of this edition above
all the preceding, so far as Mr. Pope himself was concerned. What the
editor hath done, the reader must collect for himself.
The first volume, and the original poems in the second, are here first
printed from a copy corrected throughout by the author himself, even to
the very preface,[5] which, with several additional notes in his own
hand, he delivered to the editor a little before his death. The juvenile
translations, in the other part of the second volume, it was never his
intention to bring into this edition of his works, on account of the
levity of some, the freedom of others, and the little importance of all.
But these being the property of other men, the editor had it not in his
power to follow the author's intention.
The third volume (all but the Essay on Man, which together with the
Essay on Criticism, the author, a little before his death, had corrected
and published in quarto, as a specimen of his projected edition,) was
printed by him in his last illness, but never published, in the manner
it is now given. The disposition of the Epistle on the Characters of Men
is quite altered; that on the Characters of Women much enlarged; and the
Epistles on Riches and Taste corrected and improved. To these advantages
of the third volume must be added a great number of fine verses, taken
from the author's manuscript copies of these poems, communicated by him
for this purpose to the editor. These, the author, when he first
published the poems to which they belong, thought proper, for various
reasons, to omit. Some, from the manuscript copy of the Essay on Man,
which tended to discredit fate, and to recommend the moral government of
God, had, by the editor's advice, been restored to their places in the
last edition of that poem.[6] The rest, together with others of the like
sort, from his manuscript copy of the other Ethic Epistles, are here
inserted at the bottom of the page, under the title of Variations.
The fourth volume contains the Satires, with their Prologue,--the
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot; and Epilogue,--the two poems intitled
MDCCXXXVIII. The Prologue and Epilogue are here given with the like
advantages as the Ethic Epistles in the foregoing volume, that is to
say, with the Variations, or additional verses from the author's
manuscripts. The Epilogue to the Satires is likewise inriched with many
and large notes, now first printed from the author's own manuscript.
The fifth volume contains a correcter and completer edition of the
Dunciad than hath been hitherto published, of which, at present, I have
only this further to add, that it was at my request he laid the plan of
a fourth book. I often told him, it was pity so fine a poem should
remain disgraced by the meanness of its subject, the most insignificant
of all dunces,--bad rhymers and malevolent cavillers; that he ought to
raise and ennoble it by pointing his satire against the most pernicious
of all,--minute philosophers and free-thinkers. I imagined, too, it was
for the interests of religion to have it known, that so great a genius
had a due abhorrence of these pests of virtue and society. He came
readily into my opinion; but, at the same time, told me it would create
him many enemies. He was not mistaken, for though the terror of his pen
kept them for some time in respect, yet on his death they rose with
unrestrained fury in numerous coffee-house tales, and Grub Street
libels. The plan of this admirable satire was artfully contrived to
show, that the follies and defects of a fashionable education naturally
led to, and necessarily ended in, freethinking, with design to point out
the only remedy adequate to so destructive an evil. It was to advance
the same ends of virtue and religion, that the editor prevailed on him
to alter everything in his moral writings that might be suspected of
having the least glance towards fate or naturalism, and to add what was
proper to convince the world that he was warmly on the side of moral
government and a revealed will. And it would be great injustice to his
memory not to declare that he embraced these occasions with the most
unfeigned pleasure.
The sixth volume consists of Mr. Pope's miscellaneous pieces in verse
and prose. Amongst the verse several fine poems make now their first
appearance in his works. And of the prose, all that is good, and nothing
but what is exquisitely so, will be found in this edition.
The seventh, eighth, and ninth volumes consist entirely of his letters,
the more valuable, as they are the only true models which we, or perhaps
any of our neighbours, have of familiar epistles.[7] This collection is
now made more complete by the addition of several new pieces. Yet,
excepting a short explanatory letter to Col. M[oyser], and the letters
to Mr. A[llen] and Mr. W[arburton] (the latter of which are given to
show the editor's inducements, and the engagements he was under, to
intend the care of this edition) excepting these, I say, the rest are
all here published from the author's own printed, though not published
copies delivered to the editor.[8]
On the whole, the advantages of this edition, above the preceding, are
these,--that it is the first complete collection which has ever been
made of his original writings; that all his principal poems, of early or
later date, are here given to the public with his last corrections and
improvements; that a great number of his verses are here first printed
from the manuscript copies of his principal poems of later date; that
many new notes of the author are here added to his poems; and lastly,
that several pieces, both in prose and verse make now their first
appearance before the public.
The author's life deserves a just volume, and the editor intends to give
it. For to have been one of the first poets in the world is but his
second praise. He was in a higher class. He was one of the "noblest
works of God." He was an "honest man,"[9]--a man who alone possessed
more real virtue than, in very corrupt times, needing a satirist like
him, will sometimes fall to the share of multitudes. In this history of
his life,[10] will be contained a large account of his writings, a
critique on the nature, force, and extent of his genius, exemplified
from these writings; and a vindication of his moral character,
exemplified by his more distinguished virtues,--his filial piety, his
disinterested friendships, his reverence for the constitution of his
country, his love and admiration of virtue, and (what was the necessary
effect) his hatred and contempt of vice, his extensive charity to the
indigent, his warm benevolence to mankind, his supreme veneration of the
Deity, and above all his sincere belief of Revelation. Nor shall his
faults be concealed. It is not for the interests of his virtues that
they should. Nor indeed could they be concealed, if we were so disposed,
for they shine through his virtues, no man being more a dupe to the
specious appearances of virtue in others.[11] In a word, I mean not to
be his panegyrist but his historian. And may I, when envy and calumny
have taken the same advantage of my absence (for, while I live, I will
freely trust it to my life to confute them) may I find a friend as
careful of my honest fame as I have been of his! Together with his
works, he hath bequeathed me his dunces. So that as the property is
transferred, I could wish they would now let his memory alone. The veil
which death draws over the good is so sacred, that to tear it, and with
sacrilegious hands, to throw dirt upon the shrine, gives scandal even to
barbarians. And though Rome permitted her slaves to calumniate her best
citizens on the day of triumph, yet the same petulancy at their funeral
would have been rewarded with execration and a gibbet.[12] The public
may be malicious; but is rarely vindictive or ungenerous. It would abhor
all insults, on a writer dead, though it had borne with the ribaldry, or
even set the ribalds on work, when he was alive. And in this there is no
great harm, for he must have a strange impotency of mind indeed whom
such miserable scribblers can disturb or ruffle. Of all that gross
Beotian phalanx who have written scurrilously against the editor, he
knows not so much as one whom a writer of reputation would not wish to
have his enemy, or whom a man of honour would not be ashamed to own for
his friend.[13] He is indeed but slightly conversant in their works, and
knows little of the particulars of their defamation. To his authorship
they are heartily welcome. But if any of them have been so far abandoned
by truth as to attack his moral character in any respect whatsoever, to
all and every one of these and their abettors, he gives the lie in form,
and in the words of honest Father Valerian, _mentiris impudentissime_.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: "I own the late encroachments upon my constitution made me
willing to see the end of all further care about me or my works. I would
rest for the one in a full resignation of my being to be disposed of by
the Father of all mercy; and for the other (though indeed a trifle, yet
a trifle may be some example) I would commit them to the candour of a
sensible and reflecting judge, rather than to the malice of every
short-sighted and malevolent critic, or inadvertent and censorious
reader. And no hand can set them in so good a light," &c.--_Let. cxx._
to Mr. W.--WARBURTON.]
[Footnote 2: "I also give and bequeath to the said Mr. Warburton, the
property of all such of my works already printed as he hath written or
shall write commentaries or notes upon, and which I have not otherwise
disposed of or alienated; and as he shall publish without future
alterations."--_His Last Will and Testament._--WARBURTON.]
[Footnote 3: A subscription would have been simply a petition from
Warburton to the public, soliciting them to increase the value of the
legacy bequeathed him by Pope.]
[Footnote 4: The engravings were execrable; the type and paper good, but
not extraordinary. The outlay upon the edition, for which Warburton
takes credit as for a munificent act, was a common-place commercial
transaction, with the certainty of a large return.]
[Footnote 5: The corrections are few and trivial. The account which
Warburton gives of the novelties in his edition is from first to last
exaggerated.]
[Footnote 6: The only restored lines which improve the orthodoxy of the
Essay on Man relate to a future state.]
[Footnote 7: Either Warburton had never heard of Madame de Sévigné's
letters, or what is more likely, he was unable to taste their charm.
Their delicate graces, and native liveliness, would have been lost upon
the man who thought that Pope's artificial epistles were "true models of
familiar" letters.]
[Footnote 8: The assertion that the copies had not been published is
unaccountable. Every line of them had been published twice over by Pope
in his lifetime, and all but two or three pages, had been published
again and again.]
[Footnote 9:
A wit's a feather, and a chief's a rod,
An honest man's the noblest work of God.--WARBURTON.]
[Footnote 10: It will be printed in the same form with this, and every
future edition of his works, so as to make a part of them.--WARBURTON.
The Life which Warburton promised with such solemn pomp was never
written and he was content to assist Ruffhead in his feeble
compilation.]
[Footnote 11: Warburton intimates that Pope's only faults grew out of
his credulous belief in "the specious appearance of virtue," which was a
sarcasm directed against those friends of Pope who were the enemies of
Warburton.]
[Footnote 12: The demand of Warburton was not for a truce on the day of
Pope's funeral, which took place seven years before. He insisted that
because Pope was dead no one should ever again question his title to be
called "good." Neither Pope nor Warburton was accustomed to spare dead
men, and the claim for exemption was specially inconsistent in the
preface to works which were full of bitter attacks upon both living and
dead. Warburton was to go on circulating Pope's venom, and any victim
who retaliated was to be pronounced "sacrilegious," "a scandal even to
barbarians," and worthy to be "rewarded with execration and a gibbet."]
[Footnote 13: Warburton was a fortunate author. Though he published a
host of paradoxical notions, his opponents, if we are to trust his
repeated assertions, were always fools and knaves.]
INTRODUCTION.
In his will, dated December 12, 1743, not quite six months before he
died, Pope bequeathed his printed works to Warburton, on condition that
he published them without "future alterations." Warburton states that
the object of the proviso was to relieve him from the obloquy he might
incur by reproducing offensive strokes of satire. A few slight
alterations which had not the sanction of any prior edition were
nevertheless introduced by Warburton into some of the poems, and he
announced on the title-page and in the preface, that they were taken
from a corrected copy delivered to him by Pope. Mr. Croker mistrusted
the genuineness of the "alterations," and he intended to reject the text
of Warburton, and adopt in the main the text of the last octavo edition
which had appeared during the lifetime of the poet. The honour of
Warburton is not above suspicion, but Mr. Croker was misled by erroneous
inferences when he accused him of tampering with the text, and falsely
pleading the authority of "a copy corrected by the author himself."
Fantastic in his conceptions, violent in his animosities, hasty and
imperious in the expression of his opinions, Warburton sometimes
repented his rashness, and cancelled numerous leaves in his Shakespeare
and Pope after the volumes were printed off. Mr. Kilvert, who edited his
Literary Remains, found among his papers a cancelled leaf of the Pope,
containing the commencement of the Prologue to the Satires. On the first
page Warburton had inserted among the "Variations" a couplet which he
said was copied from the manuscript of Pope:
And now vile poets rise before the light,
And walk, like Margaret's ghost, at dead of night.
The allusion was to the ballad of William and Margaret, written by
Mallet. He was the ally of Pope and Bolingbroke, and when Pope was dead
he was employed by Bolingbroke to blast the memory of their former
friend.[1] The mention of Margaret's ghost gave Warburton the
opportunity of appending a bitter note upon Mallet, whom he accused of
"arraigning his dead patron for a cheat," and the leaf was cancelled to
get rid of both note and variation. Mr. Croker believed that Warburton
"forged" the variation to gratify his spleen against Mallet, whom he
detested, and that before the volume was published "either his own
conscience, or some prudent friend, suggested that such manifest fraud
would not be tolerated." The conjecture was unfounded. Pope presented
several of his manuscripts to the son of Jonathan Richardson, the
portrait-painter, for his trouble in collating them with the printed
text. Richardson's interlined copy of the first quarto volume of Pope's
poetry passed into the hands of Malone, and was ultimately bought by Mr.
Croker. The manuscripts which Richardson possessed in the handwriting of
Pope were purchased by Dr. Chauncey, and are still the property of his
descendants. Among them is the Prologue to the Satires, and it contains
the couplet Mr. Croker believed to have been forged. In every instance
where the manuscripts exist the variations printed by Warburton are
found to be authentic.
The inference of Mr. Croker from the variations must be reversed. They
do not invalidate, but attest, the fidelity of Warburton, and the
"alterations" in the text of the poems must pass unchallenged unless
there is some direct proof of their inaccuracy. The arguments, on the
contrary, are altogether in their favour. Four printed pages of the
first Moral Essay, with the corrections in manuscript, were discovered
by Mr. Kilvert among Warburton's papers. "Some of the words," says Mr.
Croker, "are so neatly written as to leave a strong impression on my eye
of their being Pope's; other portions of the manuscript are more like
Warburton's looser hand." The faint doubt expressed by Mr. Croker would
hardly have arisen if his suspicion had not been previously awakened,
for the corrections are all indubitably in the handwriting of the poet.
Nor was the manuscript in this instance the guide of Warburton. He
followed a copy of the Moral Essays printed by Pope in his last illness,
though never published. "Warburton has the propriety of it as you know,"
wrote Bolingbroke to Lord Marchmont, one of the executors; "alter it he
cannot by the terms of the will."[2] This of itself is an answer to Mr.
Croker. The executors had access to Pope's latest printed version of the
Moral Essays, which was Warburton's avowed authority, and he could not
alter a single word without certain detection, and the consequent
forfeiture of his legacy. He was alive to the risk. A portion of Pope's
revised edition of his poetical works was passing through the press at
the time of his death, and Warburton directed the printer to give the
sheets, when the executors inquired for them, to their colleague the
celebrated Murray, who was afterwards Lord Mansfield, adding, "Pray
preserve all the press copy to the least scrap."[3] The terms of the
will bound the editor to be faithful to his trust, under a penalty of
4,000_l._, the estimated value of the bequest,[4] and he saw the
necessity of having the voucher of the poet's handwriting for the
minutest departure from the previous text in such of the proofs as had
not received Pope's final imprimatur. A more ample guarantee could not
be desired for the authenticity of the particulars in which Warburton's
text differs from the printed copies superintended by Pope. All the
displaced readings, which are not utterly insignificant, are preserved
in the notes to the present edition, as well as numerous unpublished
variations, which are taken from the manuscripts of Pope, or the
transcripts of Richardson.
The text of Pope's poems is more easily settled than elucidated. No
other poet so near to our own time presents equal difficulties. His
satires abound in uncertain allusions, and controverted topics which
require a large amount of illustration and discussion. His philosophy
was not understood by himself, and it is a study to disentangle his
confused arguments, and interpret his doubtful language. He often
expressed his opinions with wilful ambiguity, took refuge in
equivocations, or had recourse to falsehoods, and we are constantly
forced upon perplexing investigations to recover the truth he
endeavoured to conceal. Fortunately his best poems and choicest passages
are least incumbered with puzzling questions, and his obscurities have
not much interfered with his popularity because the mass of readers are
content to enjoy the beauties and leave the enigmas unsolved.
The number and eminence of the commentators on Pope, the diversity of
their attainments, and the extent of their annotations appear to promise
all the help which knowledge, acuteness, and taste could supply. The
result is far below what might reasonably have been anticipated.
Warburton, Pope's first editor, had a vigorous understanding, and
possessed the enormous advantage that he carried on the work in concert
with the poet, and could ask the explanation of every difficulty. A
diseased ambition rendered his talents and opportunities useless.
Without originality he aspired to be original, and imagined that to
fabricate hollow paradoxes, and torture language into undesigned
meanings was the surest evidence of a fertile, penetrating genius. He
employed his sagacity less to discover than to distort the ideas of his
author, and seems to have thought that the more he deviated from the
obvious sense the greater would be his fame for inventive power. He has
left no worse specimen of his perverse propensity than the spurious
fancies, and idle refinements he fathered upon Pope. They are among his
baldest paradoxes, are conveyed in his heaviest style, and are supported
by his feeblest sophistry. His lifeless and verbose conceits soon
provoke by their falsity, and fatigue by their ponderousness. Lord
Marchmont said laughingly to Pope that "he must be the vainest man
alive, and must want to show posterity what a quantity of dulness he
could carry down on his back without sinking under the load."[5] The
exuberant self-sufficiency of Warburton deluded him into the belief that
the text derived its principal lustre from the commentary. He selected
for the frontispiece to his edition a monument on which were hung
medallions of himself and the poet, and Blakey, the draughtsman, told
Burke that "it was by Warburton's particular desire that he made him the
principal figure, and Pope only secondary, and that the light, contrary
to the rules of art, goes upwards from Warburton to Pope." A gentleman
remarked, when Burke related the anecdote, that they were drawn looking
in opposite directions.[6] The sarcasm summed up the opinion which has
always prevailed. The clumsy inventions of Warburton had not the
semblance of plausibility, and scarce anybody except his shadow, and
fulsome echo, Bishop Hurd, ever doubted that the text and commentary
looked different ways.[7]
Proud of his dreary paradoxes, Warburton scorned the humble office of
furnishing useful information. Pope had said, in his Imitations of
Horace, that because three ladies liked a luckless play, a spendthrift
had taken the whole house upon the poet's night,[8] which drew from
Warburton the following note:--"The common reader, I am sensible, will
be always more solicitous about the names of these three ladies, the
unlucky play, and every other circumstance that attended this piece of
gallantry, than for the explanation of our author's sense, or the
illustration of his poetry, even where he is most moral and sublime. But
had it been in Mr. Pope's purpose to indulge so impertinent a curiosity,
he had sought elsewhere for a commentator on his writings. Which defect
in these notes, the periodical scribblers, however, have been stupid and
shameless enough to object to them."[9] Warburton's reserve was
praiseworthy when his motive was respect for private feelings. His
general neglect to clear up the allusions in Pope's poems did not admit
of this apology, and in default of a better defence he called his
critics "stupid and shameless." His habit when reasons failed him was to
supply their place with abuse.
The edition of Warburton was published in 1751, and no attempt was made
to supersede it till Gilbert Wakefield commenced a new edition in 1794.
He was "labouring," he says, "for a subsistence," and the cost of the
work, which was printed at his own expense, obliged him to bring out a
volume at a time. Before the first volume was quite through the press he
learned that Joseph Warton was engaged on a similar undertaking. Warton
had the support of the London booksellers, and the edition of Wakefield
ended with his opening volume. The world did not lose the benefit of his
annotations. He published in 1796 his Observations on Pope, which
consist of notes on the remaining poems, and of supplemental notes to
the poems he had previously edited. Wakefield said that an "inculpable
perfection pervaded the whole body of Pope's compositions," and in the
extravagance of his admiration he overlaid the volume of his unfinished
edition with weak rhapsodies which masked the useful part of his
labours. He restrained his eulogistic excesses in his Observations, and
kept more closely to his main design of tracing Pope's "imitations of
his predecessors." All persons tolerably read in poetry could perceive
that the obligations Pope acknowledged in his notes were but a fraction
of the whole, and in 1740, Bowyer, the printer, with the assistance of
Mr. Clarke, a clergyman, commenced a collection of parallel passages.
From the letters of Clarke to Bowyer it appears that Pope was annoyed.
Bowyer profited by his irritation, and offered to treat with him. "I
think," wrote Clarke in 1742, "you buy his friendship cheap with a whole
hecatomb of notes, essays, illustrations, and the mob of
commentators."[10] The progress of the negociation is not recorded. The
result is revealed in the fact that Bowyer shortly afterwards became
Pope's printer. The sensitiveness which was disturbed at the gleanings
of Bowyer would have shuddered at the abundant harvest of Wakefield. He
himself had no intention of depreciating the merits of Pope. He only
wished to illustrate a favourite author. Many of the parallelisms are
too slight to be applicable, or they are common phrases the property of
every Englishman. A vast number remain which are a curious exhibition of
Pope's patience and skill in the art of poetical mosaic, and of the
large amount of borrowed beauties he intermixed with his undoubted
originality. The interpretation of the text, though subordinate with
Wakefield, was not neglected by him. He and a friend who assisted him,
Dr. William Bennet, Bishop of Cloyne, have explained more allusions than
all the other commentators, and the least known and appreciated of the
editors of Pope is the man who has done the most for his author.
The edition of Warton appeared in 1797. "His reason," he says in his
preface, "for undertaking the work was the universal complaint that Dr.
Warburton had disfigured and disgraced his edition with many forced and
far-sought interpretations, totally unsupported by the passages which
they were brought to elucidate." Warton had the stimulus of a second
motive. He published in 1756 the first volume of his Essay on Pope, and
his criticisms were roughly attacked in many passages of Ruffhead's Life
of the poet, which was prompted and partly written by Warburton. While
Warburton lived Warton did not venture to retaliate. The thirty years
which intervened had not extinguished his resentment, and he seized the
opportunity to revenge the ancient grudge. His consciousness of
Warburton's defects did not keep Warton from repeating the error of
filling page upon page with irrelevant matter. His Essay on Pope had
been a receptacle for his store of miscellaneous reading, and in a
separate work there was no objection to a medley of anecdote and
criticism. He was seventy-five when he published his edition of Pope,
and to save himself trouble he apportioned out the old farrago in notes.
Profuse in digressions, he is sparing of needful explanations. His turn
was for the lighter portions of criticism and biography, and most of his
apposite remarks are critical opinions. They are often just, but never
profound, for he had neither fervid feelings nor a robust understanding,
and his highest qualities are a fair poetical taste, and a tolerable
acquaintance with ancient and modern authors.
Bowles was a school-boy at Winchester when Warton was head-master, and
he intimated that this early connection was the cause of his being
employed to revise the next edition of Pope. It appeared in 1806. His
poetic sensibility was exquisite, and he was well-read, shrewd, and
candid. His failing was a hurry of mind which disqualified him for a
painstaking commentator. He was content to jot down in a careless,
colloquial style the off-hand thoughts of his quick and cultivated
intellect, and he did not add much to the scanty explanations of Warton
and Warburton. The chief merit of his edition is his excellent literary
criticism, which is truer, deeper, and more refined than that of his old
Winchester master. The estimate Bowles formed of the poetry and
character of Pope was allowed to pass unchallenged for thirteen years,
when some remarks of Campbell, in his Specimens of British Poets,
commenced a controversy which lasted from 1819 to 1826. In the series of
pamphlets he published to vindicate his opinions, Bowles exhibited his
wonted acuteness, courage, and negligence. With all his slips in minor
points the fresh facts which have come to light have more than confirmed
his view of Pope's moral obliquities, and in the discussion on the
principles of poetry he reduced the whole of his adversaries to silence.
He and Hazlitt were the only persons among the disputants, eminent or
obscure, who showed any real comprehension of the subject.
The next edition of Pope, justly considered by Mr. Croker to be the
worst, came out in 1824, and was superintended by Roscoe, the author of
the Life of Lorenzo de Medici, and Leo X. He barely contributed a single
illustrative note, his criticisms are platitudes, and his vindications
of Pope a tissue of blunders. He was misled by his credulous faith in
his hero, by the rashness with which he imposed his own guesses for
facts, and above all by his want of penetration and research. His
half-knowledge was worse than ignorance. A few of his multitudinous
errors were exposed by Bowles whom he had attacked. Roscoe replied in a
feeble, disingenuous pamphlet, which drew from Bowles his taunting and
crushing retort, Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe, Esq. This ended
the Pope controversy.
The faults of plan and execution in the editions of Warburton, Warton,
Bowles, and Roscoe stand out in strong relief, and Mr. Croker resolved,
as far as possible, to correct the mistakes, retrench the
superfluities, and supply the omissions. Warton and Bowles dismissed a
large proportion of the barren, oppressive commentaries of Warburton.
Roscoe put back the whole of the bulky excrescence. Most of it had been
adopted by Pope, and to relieve the text, without excluding
interpretations sanctioned by the poet, Mr. Croker determined to print
the pedantic lumber in appendixes. The notes of the other editors rested
upon their intrinsic merits, and he intended to sift out the surplusage,
and only retain what was pertinent. To curtail is easy. The difficulty
was to clear up the many obscurities which remained, and Mr. Croker was
anxious to furnish his share of explanation, though he was convinced
that numerous contemporary allusions would always baffle curiosity. His
chief attention was directed to the satires, and he continued for many
years to pursue his investigations, and accumulate materials. His busy
life was succeeded by failing health, and he died before he had prepared
his notes for the press. The results of his research have luckily all
been preserved, for his habit was to write them out in full at the time.
He was an acute and eager enquirer into political, personal, and social
history, and no man could have been more competent to bring to the
surface the under-current of forgotten circumstances.
I have kept to the plan sketched out by Mr. Croker. "A commentary," says
Johnson, "must arise from the fortuitous discoveries of many men in
devious walks of literature," and few poets have had more commentators
than Pope. I have borrowed whatever I met with in previous writers that
throw light upon his meaning, faults, and beauties, have cast aside what
was plainly inapplicable and erroneous, and have done what I could to
fill up deficiencies. My own notes will be recognised by the absence of
any signature; all other notes throughout the work have the names of
their authors attached, even when a note is by the same author as the
text. The extracts from Warton are sometimes taken from his Essay, and
both in his case and that of Bowles I have occasionally joined together
scattered fragments which were connected in their subject. The rest of
the arrangements will be understood at a glance.
The letters of Pope demand a more particular discussion. Estimated by
their intrinsic merits they would call for little notice. "He laboured
them," says Horace Walpole, "as much as the Essay on Man, and as they
were written to everybody they do not look as if they had been written
to anybody."[11] Their dry and frigid generalities could not be more
happily exposed. The chief importance of the correspondence is in its
relation to the morality of Pope, and the fame of men whose reputation
is involved in the question of his uprightness. His real nature has
always been hotly debated. "His detractors," says De Quincey, "fancy
that in his character a basis of ignoble qualities was here and there
slightly relieved by a few shining spots; we, on the contrary, believe
that in Pope lay a disposition radically noble and generous, clouded and
overshadowed by superficial foibles; or, to adopt the distinction of
Shakespeare, they see nothing but 'dust a little gilt,' and we 'gold a
little dusted.'"[12] Pope boasted loudly of his virtue, and his
champions judge him by his own representations. His accusers hold that
his professions were hypocritical, as when Lord Macaulay speaks of his
"spite and envy, thinly disguised by sentiments as benevolent and noble
as those which Sir Peter Teazle admired in Mr. Joseph Surface."[13] The
charges brought against him are thickly scattered over his life, and
either the guilty appearances are deceptive, or we must admit that his
mind was essentially corrupt. His correspondence brings up the
ever-recurring enquiry, and we have to decide whether his letters are
not many of them fraudulent, and the circumstances attending their
publication a series of ignominious plots, infamous false accusations,
and impudent lies.
Every examination into the history of the letters was slight before Mr.
Dilke engaged in the laborious task. His familiarity with the books,
pamphlets, and periodicals of the time could not be exceeded, and his
doubts once awakened he accepted nothing upon trust. With an immense
amount of research and skill he proceeded to track Pope through his
tortuous courses. He laid bare the ramifications of the plot against
Curll, which was only known in a few of its prominent particulars. He
detected, what none of the editors and biographers had perceived, the
base manoeuvres and deceit which accompanied the publication of the
"Letters to and from Dr. Swift." He was originally put upon his
investigations by the manuscript collection of Pope's letters to Caryll,
and these revealed a new set of frauds in the evidence they supplied of
letters converted into a fictitious correspondence. His inclination was
to favour Pope whenever there was an opening for a liberal
interpretation, and it was not from hostility that he exposed the
net-work of fraud, and brought out the dark traits of a dishonourable
disposition with new and terrible force. He printed his discoveries in
the Athenæum[14], and after studying the facts afresh by the light of
his essays, I am compelled to adopt his conclusions. The evidence upon
which they rest is often circumstantial and intricate, and cannot be
followed to the end without steady attention, and some trial of
patience.
The letters of the poet which were first sent to the press were given by
Cromwell to his mistress, Elizabeth Thomas, who sold them in her
distress to Curll for ten guineas. She was a shameless woman, and boldly
justified her conduct. "Everyone," she said, "knows that the person to
whom a letter is addressed has the same right to dispose of it as he has
of goods purchased with his money." The right which originally belonged
to Cromwell, of publishing to the world whatever had been written to
him in the confidence of friendship, he had, by his gift, transferred to
herself; and thus it appeared that Cromwell had a right to be
treacherous to Pope, and Mrs. Thomas a right to be treacherous to both
Pope and Cromwell. With more reason she inferred that neither of them at
heart would be vexed at the proceeding. Cromwell, she urged, could not
be angry that the world should know "the professions of love, gratitude,
and veneration made him by so celebrated an author," and Pope could not
resent the exhibition of the "early pregnancy of his genius." "And yet,"
she continued, "had either of you been asked, common modesty would have
obliged you to refuse what you would not be displeased with if done
without your knowledge."[15] There can be little doubt, from his
subsequent conduct, that this was the light in which the publication was
viewed by the poet, notwithstanding his assertion in a note to the
Dunciad, "that he was ashamed of the letters as very trivial things,
full not only of levities, but of wrong judgments of men and books, and
only excusable from the youth and inexperience of the writer." Mrs.
Thomas did him an incalculable injury, not by revealing his secrets, but
by flattering his vanity. The favourable reception of his correspondence
originated the desire to give some further specimens to the world, and
led him into the miserable series of falsehoods and frauds by which he
endeavoured to accomplish his design without seeming to be privy to it.
The letters to Cromwell were published in Curll's "Miscellanea," of
which the title-page says "Printed in the year 1727;" but the dedication
to the letters themselves is dated June, 1726, and it was in 1726 that
they appeared. The incidental and scanty notices of them at the time are
sufficient to indicate the impression they produced. Thompson, writing
in October to Aaron Hill, says that "though careless and uncorrected,
they are full of wit and gaiety." There may have been many who thought
that they did as much credit to the heart as to the head of the poet. "I
have read the collection of letters you mention," Fenton wrote to Broome
in September, 1726, "and was delighted with nothing more than that air
of sincerity, those professions of esteem and respect, and that
deference paid to his friend's judgment in poetry which I have sometimes
seen expressed to others, and I doubt not with the same cordial
affection. If they are read in that light, they will be very
entertaining and useful in the present age; but in the next, Cicero,
Pliny, and Voiture may regain their reputation." The comments on Pope's
sincerity were plainly ironical. Fenton considered him to be extremely
hypocritical, and some person concerned in the publication of 1726 must
have formed the same opinion of his character, if the ludicrous
tail-piece is intended to be typical of the letters. A little man whose
diminutive stature did not permit him to clasp the taller figure in his
arms while they stood upon a level, is represented as having jumped off
the ground and seized his companion round the waist, who, with his hands
thrown into the air at the painful vehemence of the embrace, is
struggling to get loose. Undiscerning persons, who judged the poet by
his words, would form a different estimate, and would perceive only
proofs of his excellence where Fenton saw examples of his habitual
insincerity. "His correspondence," says Johnson, of the later collection
of 1735, "filled the nation with praises of his candour, tenderness, and
benevolence, the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his
friendship."[16]
The letters to Cromwell had more than an ephemeral success. Curll, in
his reply in 1729 to the attack on him in the Dunciad, after noticing
Pope's affected depreciation of them, says, "However, they sell very
well; price 5_s._"[17] The poet had already devised an excuse for
following them up by a second set. Theobald, who had earned his lasting
enmity by pointing out the errors in his edition of Shakespeare, was
employed by some booksellers to edit the posthumous papers of Wycherley,
which had been purchased from his heir. The work appeared in 1728. Pope
saw in this circumstance a pretence for dragging his own letters before
the world, and an opportunity of gratifying his spleen against Theobald.
He said that the poems were disreputable to the memory of his early
friend, and that the correspondence was published because it showed that
it was his last resolution to have suppressed them.[18] It showed the
reverse. The last printed letter of Wycherley exhibits him as intent as
ever upon preparing his poems for the press, and if we are to believe
that he subsequently abandoned the design, we must accept the fact upon
the bare assertion of Pope, which derives no support from any part of
the correspondence. But though it failed to answer the purpose avowed by
its editor, it answered purposes not avowed which were much nearer to
his heart. It shows that the verses of Wycherley were rugged, feeble,
and full of repetitions, and that whatever they possessed of strength
and harmony was due to the revision of Pope. It shows that he furnished
entire passages, and where the text is not explicit on the point he is
careful to reclaim his contributions in the notes. It displays on the
one hand the "first sprightly runnings" of the precocious young poet,
and on the other the "last dull droppings" of the veteran author, who
was verging upon his dotage. "If we were to judge," says Warburton, "of
this set of letters by the manner of thinking and turn of expression, we
should conclude that they were all mistitled, and that those given to
the boy of sixteen were written by the man of seventy, and the
contrary,--such sober sense, such gravity of manners, and so much
judgment and knowledge of composition, enlivened with manly wit,
distinguish those of Mr. Pope, while a childish jealousy, a puerile
affectation, a lying at catch for points, together with a total contempt
of method, make up the character of those of Mr. Wycherley." Warton
transcribes the judgment of Warburton, and adds his testimony to the
superiority of the letters of Pope. He says that he "has excelled
Wycherley in his own way of striving to be always witty," and that "the
perpetual attempt of the vain old man to be brilliant, the accumulation
of simile upon simile, the antithesis, the cant of satire, the severity
on authors, critics, and women, are sufficiently disgusting." In short,
the whole effect of the correspondence was to display the infirmities
of Wycherley and the merits of Pope; and his mode of relieving his
departed friend from the reproach of the posthumous poems was to reveal
the secret that the only portions of them which might have done him
credit were not his own, but the work of this zealous vindicator of his
fame.
With such a futile excuse for printing the letters, Pope was anxious to
throw the responsibility upon some other person. He was the intimate
friend of Edward, the second Earl of Oxford, who, without being
possessed of much ability, courted the society of eminent men, and who,
with no great tincture of literature, had inherited from his father a
passion for collecting books and manuscripts. His correspondence with
the poet descended, with the rest of his personal papers, to his only
child, who married the Duke of Portland in 1734. From the Duchess the
papers passed to her eldest daughter, Lady Elizabeth, wife to the third
Viscount Weymouth, who subsequently became the first Marquess of Bath.
The Oxford manuscripts were consequently removed to Longleat, where they
have remained ever since among the treasures of a library which is
worthy of the regal edifice it adorns.[19] In Pope's letters to his
friend we have his own record of the device he adopted. He wrote to Lord
Oxford in September, 1729, and complained that the publication of
Wycherley's posthumous poems was derogatory to their author, as well as
to the critic who had advised him to re-cast them. "Something," he said,
"will be necessary to be done to clear both his and my reputation, which
the letters under his hand will abundantly do; for which particular
reason I would desire to have them lodged in your lordship's hands." He
had been slow in discovering that something was necessary to be done to
clear the reputation of his deceased friend; for Theobald's book had
come forth in 1728, and it was now the autumn of 1729. His tardy zeal
appears to have been entirely begotten by the idea that it could be made
the pretext for producing the correspondence; but having once conceived
the scheme, he did not allow it to languish. On the 6th of October he
advanced a step further, and began to shadow forth the real object of
the request. He informed Lord Oxford that some of the letters were to be
printed, and asked permission to state that they were already in his
library, "which," says he, "they shall be as soon as you will give
orders to any one to receive them." "I would not," he went on, "appear
myself as publisher of them, but any one else may, or even the
bookseller be supposed to have procured copies of them,--formerly or
now, it is equal. Certain it is that no other way can justice be
rendered to the memory of a man to whom I had the first obligations of
friendship, almost in my childhood." Lord Oxford merely replied that if
the documents were left in a box with the porter, the man had orders to
place it in the library, and that any mention of that library would be
agreeable to its owner;[20] but he took no notice of the intimation that
the poet designed to ascribe the publication to an imaginary agent. Pope
now considered him to be sufficiently prepared, and his next letter
disclosed the whole of the scheme, and at the same time announced its
execution. It then appeared that his noble dupe, who, as he was both
weak and amiable, was expected to prove a submissive tool, had been
asked to become the keeper of the manuscripts, that he might be held up
to the world as their publisher. "I am extremely obliged to you," Pope
wrote to him, "for your kind permission to quote your library, and to
mention it in what manner I pleased. I consulted Mr. Lewis upon the turn
of the preface, and have exceeded perhaps my commission on one point,
though we both judged it the right way; for I have made the publishers
say that your lordship permitted them a copy of some of the papers from
the library, where the originals remain as testimonies of the truth. It
is indeed no more than a justice due to the dead and to the living
author."[21] In other words, his lordship was asserted to have permitted
the bookseller to print the papers in his library, when they were not
even sent to his house till after they were printed, and this fiction
was fathered upon him without so much as his leave being asked, or his
having been suffered to read a single line of the work he was stated to
have authorised. When Pope alleged that the proceeding was "no more than
a justice due to the dead and the living author," he must have hoped
that the outrage to Lord Oxford of which he had been guilty in
committing the act, would appear to be diminished by the assurance with
which he communicated it. His deceptions were not confined to the
preface. He shortly afterwards wrote to Swift, and contrived to mention
that he had contracted a friendship at sixteen with a man of seventy. "I
speak," he said, "of old Mr. Wycherley, some letters of whom,
by-the-bye, and of mine, the booksellers have got and printed, not
without the concurrence of a noble friend of mine and yours. I do not
much approve of it, though there is nothing in it for me to be ashamed
of, because I will not be ashamed of anything I do not do myself, or of
anything that is not immoral, but merely dull."[22] The booksellers had
printed the letters with the concurrence of a noble friend, and the
noble friend had never heard a word on the subject till the printing was
completed. Pope did not much approve of it, and he had protested to Lord
Oxford that in no other way could justice be rendered to the memory of a
man to whom he had the first obligations of friendship. He would not be
ashamed of what he did not do himself, and he alone had edited the work
and sent it to the press. The value of his asseverations may be measured
by the triple falsehood he volunteered to Swift. He was aware that the
arguments by which he hoped to persuade Lord Oxford to become his dupe
would not impose upon the penetrating understanding of the Dean, and he
therefore openly repudiated what he was unable to excuse. If the
publication had vindicated Wycherley, it would have been its own
justification; but as it was put forth to do honour to Pope, he
sacrificed his veracity to avoid the imputation of vanity. He cruelly
sneered, in his "Prologue to the Satires" at the poor garretteer, who
urged the plea for printing his compositions that he was "obliged by
hunger and request of friends." The poet had not the excuse of hunger,
and he improved upon the model he satirised when he pretended that
_his_ friends had taken his papers, and printed them against his will.
The deception which Pope practised was never suspected till it was
revealed by his correspondence with Lord Oxford, which has hitherto
remained in manuscript. The repetition of the attempt on a more
elaborate scale was less successful, and it has always been believed by
the immense majority of inquirers that the promulgation of the
collection of 1735, which the poet vehemently denounced as an act of
intolerable treachery, was from first to last his own deed. "It seems,"
says Johnson, "that Pope being desirous of printing his letters, and not
knowing how to do, without imputation of vanity, what has in this
country been done very rarely, contrived an appearance of compulsion,
that when he could complain that his letters were surreptitiously
published, he might decently and defensively publish them himself."[23]
Fresh facts have rendered the evidence against him stronger than ever,
and the whole derives increased force from the information we now
possess that he had previously had recourse to a kindred falsehood. In
the first case he made a tool of a friend; in the second, he varied his
plan, and made a tool of an enemy.
Pope tells us, in the preface to the authorised edition of his
correspondence, which he brought out in quarto in 1737, that his disgust
at the publication of his letters to Cromwell, and "the apprehension of
more treatment of the same kind, put him upon recalling as many as he
could from those who he imagined had kept any."[24] He applied to his
friend Caryll, in December, 1726, to surrender his collection; and, on
renewing the request a few days later, he added, "I have desired the
same thing of Mrs. Blount, with whose late worthy husband I entertained
so long a correspondence, and of all others." It was more than two years
before Caryll could be induced to comply with the demand, and it would
seem that Mrs. Blount was little less backward; for, on November 28,
1729, Pope wrote to Swift, "I _lately_ received from the widow of one
dead correspondent, and the father of another,[25] several of my own
letters of about fifteen and twenty years old." When the poet had
gleaned together all the letters he could extort, "he immediately," he
says, "lessened the number by burning three parts in four of them: the
rest he spared, not in any preference of their style or writing, but
merely as they preserved the memory of some friendships which will ever
be dear to him, or set in a true light some matters of fact from which
the scribblers of the time had taken occasion to asperse either his
friends or himself." He was not more anxious to destroy the three parts
than to secure the fourth from destruction. "He laid by the originals
together with those of his correspondents, and caused a copy to be taken
to deposit in the library of a noble friend, that in case either of the
revival of slanders, or the publication of surreptitious letters during
his life or after, a proper use might be made of them."[26] The noble
friend was Lord Oxford, and the request to be allowed to place the
letters in his library was made by Pope in September, 1729, when he
stated that "he had had it at heart for half a year and more." Upon
obtaining Lord Oxford's consent, he had the correspondence transcribed
under his own inspection; and on October 16 he says, "I am causing the
manuscripts to be fairly written, and hope at your lordship's return to
be the presenter of them in person." By his own avowal he had carefully
culled his letters, had prepared the selected portions for some public
purpose, and had taken the unusual precaution of preserving them in
duplicate. The end which he declared they were intended to serve was a
palpable pretence. He never specified any slanders they refuted, and he
could have had little idea of employing them to test the truth of
surreptitious letters when he began by burning three parts of the
collection, and only retained a fourth. The manifest fact was, that,
while he was desirous of consigning to oblivion those portions of his
correspondence which would not add to his reputation, he was eager to
circulate the picked specimens which he imagined would promote his fame.
No advance seems to have been made towards the accomplishment of his
design till 1733, when Curll advertised a life of Pope. An unknown
person who wrote a feigned hand, and who signed his letters with the
initials P. T., then opened a correspondence with the bookseller, and
furnished some information upon the genealogy of the poet. He vindicated
him from the charge of plebeian descent, and affirmed that he sprung
from the same stock as Lord Downe.[27] This assertion was repeated by
Pope in one of the notes to his "Prologue to the Satires," though Mr.
Pottinger, his cousin, ridiculed the "fine pedigree," which had never
been heard of in the family, and which there is nothing to confirm.[28]
There is thus at starting a curious identity between the apocryphal
statements of P. T. and the apocryphal statements of Pope. But as P. T.
must have had access to the manuscripts in the keeping of Lord Oxford,
he might be supposed to have found the account among the memoranda of
the poet, and no great stress could be laid upon the coincidence to
prove that P. T. was Pope in disguise, if the general tenor of the
correspondence did not indicate its origin.
There was a feud between Pope and Curll. The bookseller believed that
the poet had drugged him with an emetic, he had been subsequently
satirised in the Dunciad, and he had lost no opportunity of retaliating.
An uncompromising panegyric upon his antagonist would have run counter
to his prejudices, and while P. T. is careful to tell nothing which is
not for the honour of Pope, he has the precaution to consult the
antipathies of Curll. He pretends that the poet, with whom he was
formerly well acquainted, has treated him like a stranger, and that he
cannot give so good an account of his manners as of his parentage. He
promises, if he receives encouragement, to make these moral deficiencies
the subject of a future letter, "without entering into anything in
anywise libellous." He omitted, however, in his next communication, to
keep this part of his engagement, and never reverted to it. He had
spoken of Pope's family in the same flattering and perhaps fictitious
terms as Pope himself; but, in spite of his pledge, and his animosity,
he forbore to relate the minutest particular to the discredit of the
poet. The inconsistency between the assumed character and the actual
conduct of P. T. is much too glaring. An enemy would have been far less
partial and considerate.
The first communication of P. T. was dated October 1733. He directed
Curll to signify the acceptance of his offer by inserting in the Daily
Advertiser the notice, "E. C. hath received a letter, and will comply
with P. T." This Curll did, and on the 15th of November got an answer
from P. T., in which the true purpose of the manoeuvre transpires.
Instead of sending traits of the defects in Pope's manners, he announces
that he has "a large collection of his letters from the former part of
his days till the year 1727, which will alone make the most authentic
memoirs of him that could be." He adds that they will form a four or
five shilling volume, and "yet I expect no more," he says, "than what
will barely pay a transcriber, that the originals may be preserved in
mine or your hands to vouch for the truth of them." He appealed to the
hatred as well as to the avarice of the bookseller. He again asserted
that he had experienced bad treatment from Pope and that his sole motive
was "to bestow upon him" the same "care" which Curll had done
already.[29] Again his thirst for retaliation ended in homage, for the
collection consisted of the identical letters which the poet had
prepared for the press, and which were intended to raise instead of to
lower his reputation. The conduct of P. T., who, having abjured profit
and only feigned revenge, was to get nothing by his roguery, is
altogether incomprehensible, if we are to suppose that he was what he
professed; but his conduct ceases to be a mystery if P. T. was Pope,
who, having finished editing his letters, may be presumed to have had
the same desire to find a pretext for printing them as he had exhibited
in the instance of the correspondence with Wycherley.
The point upon which the bargain went off for a time is equally
significant. P. T. enclosed an advertisement of the letters, and
required as a preliminary that it should be put forth by Curll, "for I
shall not," he said, "be justified to some people on whom I have
dependence, unless it seem to the public eye as no entire act of mine;
but I may be justified and excused if, after they see such a collection
is made by you, I acknowledge I sent some letters to contribute
thereto."[30] This reasoning carries its own refutation. If his patrons
could believe that Curll, without his aid, had got at the bulk of the
correspondence, they would quite as readily have credited that he had
not assisted the bookseller to the remainder. Nor is it likely that the
men who would have renounced P. T. if he had been a principal in the
business, would have connived at his becoming an accomplice. His plea
was as fanciful as his desire for revenge; but assume that Pope was the
real negotiator and his motive is transparent. The advertisement would
have threatened that very surreptitious publication of his letters,
against which he affirmed that he kept his own version in readiness. He
would have repudiated the impending piracy, and hastened in self-defence
to commit the genuine edition to the press. The promise contained in the
advertisement, that "the originals would be shown at Curll's when the
book was published," would have empowered him to give an air of
imposture to the transaction, and to damage his foe, who when challenged
would not have been able to produce the documents. According to the
language which Pope uttered in the name of P. T. he did expect to be
justified in his proceedings by means of the advertisement, but not at
all in the manner which he wished the bookseller to believe.
All the conditions required by Pope seemed met together in Curll. He was
an enemy, and could be denounced when he had been deceived. He had
printed the letters to Cromwell without the consent of the poet, and it
would readily be credited that he had repeated the act. He was not nice
in his notions of honour, and he might be expected to catch at an offer,
however discreditable, which promised both profit and revenge. But
whatever might be his greediness and his malice, they had not swallowed
up his caution, and notwithstanding that P. T. wrote again to express
his dissatisfaction that no advertisement appeared, Curll forbore to
announce letters he did not possess, at the bidding of a conspirator
whose name and person he did not know. The subject in consequence slept
from November 1733 till March 1735, when the poet was meditating some
fresh proceeding respecting his correspondence, for on the third of that
month, he requested Lord Oxford to send him by the hearer "the bound
book of copies of letters," which, he wanted, he said, "to inspect for a
day or two." There are transcripts among the Oxford papers of some of
the letters of Wycherley to Pope, which appeared in 1729. There are
transcripts of Pope's correspondence with Atterbury, which appeared in
1737. There are transcripts of a large part of the Swift correspondence,
which appeared in 1741. But while the earlier and later letters are
preserved on loose sheets the bound book has vanished, and there is not
a single transcript of any letter which was first given to the world in
the collection of 1735. The probability is that the book which Pope
professed to require for a day or two was never returned. The
circumstance is the more suspicious because he had the originals at
home, which would have served him for reference, whereas if his object
was to commit the letters clandestinely to the press he would use the
copy which had been specially prepared for the purpose,--which had been
expurgated, altered, and sometimes remodelled. Accordingly we find that
P. T. reappears at this crisis with the correspondence in print. He had
failed to lure Curll by a promise of letters which he would not produce.
He now changed his tactics, and offered him an entire impression of the
book.
This second act of the plot was opened by a communication of Curll to
Pope on the 22nd of March, three weeks after the letters had been
withdrawn from the library of Lord Oxford. He invited the poet to close
their differences, and, as a proof of his readiness to oblige him, sent
him the old advertisement of P. T. Curll asserted that he took the step
"by direction."[31] When he republished this statement he volunteered
another, which seems to be inconsistent with it, and says that the
discovery of the advertisement, when arranging his papers, determined
him to propose a cessation of hostilities.[32] As he was unconscious,
however, of any contradiction in the double account, it is probable that
he may have been influenced by some concurring advice. It strengthens
this view that Pope, in an anonymous "Narrative," which he subsequently
put forth, reports what Curll told a few days later, "to persons who
sifted him in the affair,"[33] which shows that the bookseller had
people about him in the interest of the poet, and these sifters, as the
critic in the Athenæum remarks, might, when needful, become prompters.
The progress of events proved that the letter of Curll was at least
singularly opportune, and if not written "by direction," was one of
those fortunate chances which often contribute to the success of the
best laid schemes. Pope replied to it by inserting an advertisement in
the "Grub Street Journal," the "Daily Journal," and "The Daily Post
Boy." He stated in this manifesto, that Curll "pretended that P. T. had
offered him to print a large collection of Pope's letters," that he
would have no correspondence with Curll, that he knew no such person as
P. T., that he believed the letters to be a forgery, and that he should
not trouble himself in the matter.[34] The poet might not choose to have
any intercourse with a former enemy of no good fame, but it was a
strange return for his peace-offering that he should advertise an insult
on him, and equally singular when he was incredulous, and had resolved
not to trouble himself about the matter, that he should parade in the
newspapers the contents of a private note. Yet extraordinary as was his
conduct, if he had not any covert design, it was consistent enough if he
was the agent in the plot for bringing his letters before the world. His
advertisement would convey the impression that he could not have
connived at the publication he was contriving; it would afford an
opening for P. T. to come again upon the stage; and by infuriating Curll
it would induce him to close at once with the proposal which was ready
to be made to him. In conformity with this supposition P. T., who had
not communicated with the bookseller for upwards of two years, saw the
advertisement directly it appeared, and he lost not an instant in
informing Curll that since their last negotiation he had printed the
letters.[35] It was true that Curll had betrayed him to Pope, but P. T.
was generous and would still give him the preference. The game required
that Pope should be incapable of being conciliated, and P. T. of taking
offence.
P. T. demanded that Curll should show he was in earnest by putting forth
the old advertisement. Curll complied, and the negotiation went forward.
An agent was sent to him who assumed the name of Smythe and professed to
be a clergyman, but who was so little conversant with the character he
personated that he wore a clerical gown and lawyer's bands. On the 7th
of May he went to Curll's house at night; and, to bring the bargain to a
conclusion, exhibited to him most of the sheets of the volume, and a
dozen original letters.[36] Before Curll had published this statement
Pope, for the purpose of discrediting the promise which had been made in
the advertisement, that the originals should be produced when the book
appeared, had committed himself to the assertion that they all remained
in their proper place.[37] They must nevertheless, observes the critic
in the Athenæum, have been out of his possession, and doing service on
the evening when Smythe trafficed with Curll. The bookseller was not
likely to be deceived, for he had the Cromwell correspondence in his
keeping, and knew the poet's handwriting well.[38] He was as little
likely to deceive, for he told the fact in the course of a
straight-forward story, without perceiving, or at least without pointing
out, its force in attesting the connivance of Pope.
Fifty copies of the letters were in the possession of Curll by the 12th
of May, and were speedily sold. Smythe sent for him at one o'clock to a
tavern in Leicester Fields, and half an hour afterwards one hundred and
ninety additional copies were brought by a couple of porters, who were
directed to carry them to the shop of the bookseller. There they were
immediately seized by an order from the House of Lords, and Curll was
commanded to attend next day.[39] The peers in 1722 had voted it a
breach of privilege to publish the writings of any member of their body
without his consent. Curll, in an advertisement which appeared for the
first time that morning, had given a list of the persons to whom Pope's
letters were addressed, and among the names were those of the Earl of
Halifax and the Earl of Burlington. To print letters to lords was no
offence. It was necessary that there should be letters from them, and of
this there was no other indication than that the list of names was
followed by the words,--"with the respective answers of each
correspondent."[40] Curll asserted that the advertisement came to him
through Smythe,[41] and the proceedings founded upon it in the hour that
it issued wet from the press were, as Johnson states, instigated by
Pope, "who attended to stimulate the resentment of his friends."[42] If
he had never set eyes upon the book before it was published, curiosity
would still have prompted him to turn over the leaves, and he must
immediately have discovered that it did not contain a single letter from
a peer. The wording of the advertisement may, therefore, be suspected to
have been devised by him to afford a colour for what he must have known
was a groundless prosecution. A committee was appointed to investigate
the complaint. It met on the 14th of May, and the case would have ended
as soon as it was begun, if Pope's spokesman, Lord Hay, who resided at
Twickenham, and was one of his associates, had not adduced from a letter
to Jervas a passage which he alleged to be a reflection on Lord
Burlington. But the person who furnished the work to Curll had, by an
elaborate device, provided against a charge which no one except its
contriver could have foreseen. The fifty copies, which were sold on the
morning of the 12th, before the power of the House of Lords was put in
motion, contained the letter. Those which were furnished in the middle
of the day, as if to meet the messenger sent to seize them, were all
defective, and in every case the letter to Jervas was among the
omissions.[43] Nor had the leaves which contained it been simply kept
back, but every trace of it had been obliterated by an alteration at
the printing-press. In the complete work the missing letter commenced on
p. 115 of vol. ii.[44] and ended on p. 117. In the imperfect books a
note on Trumbull, which began at p. 114, is carried on to the top of p.
115, and Pope's epitaph upon him, which appears in no other copies of
the correspondence, is added to cover a little of the vacant space. The
word "Finis" follows the note, though, in spite of this indication that
the whole is concluded, the work recommences on p. 117 with the letters
to Gay, which continue to p. 154.[45] The coincidence was far too
extraordinary to be undesigned. Pope, who had incited the prosecution
the very hour the book was published, and who had been in such haste to
instruct Lord Hay that the debate in the House of Lords was concluded,
and the sheets seized by two o'clock, could alone have adapted one batch
to afford a pretext for the proceeding, and another batch to render the
proceeding abortive,--he alone could have arranged the delivery of the
respective parcels, and sent the fifty copies which contained the
obnoxious passage, in time to be sold in the morning, and the one
hundred and ninety copies in which it was wanting, just in time to be
captured by the messenger from the House of Lords. His object was not to
procure the confiscation of the correspondence, and stop the sale. He
wished to simulate indignation, and divert suspicion from himself
without interfering with the success of the work, and he conducted the
prosecution with so much care to ensure defeat that we may readily
credit the assertion of Curll, "that the lords declared they had been
made Pope's tools."[46]
While the copies seized by the messenger had not the letter to Jervas,
they contained in compensation an address "to the reader," which was not
in the first fifty copies sent to Curll. This preface betrays throughout
the hand of Pope. The original proposition was that it should be
furnished by Curll; and, notwithstanding the revenge by which he
professed to be actuated, P. T. maintained that the poet ought to be
mentioned with praise. "We must by no means," he said, "seem to use him
with disregard, but rather commend, lest by any circumstances I writ to
you the publisher be detected."[47] I This was seven years after the
appearance of the Dunciad, and Pope was not so universally beloved as
that the intimation that the correspondence was put forth by an enemy
could direct suspicion to the culprit. The pretence was too palpable to
impose upon any one, and P. T., who, among other motives for his
procedure, probably mistrusted Curll's cordiality or skill in a
panegyric, determined upon consideration to supply it himself. He was
not sparing in his tribute. "Mr. Pope," he wrote, "has not any great
cause to think the publication much offence to his modesty, or
reflection on his judgment, when we take care to inform the public that
there are few letters of his in this collection which were not written
under twenty years of age. On the other hand, we doubt not the reader
will be much more surprised to find at that early period so much variety
of style, affecting sentiment, and justness of criticism in pieces which
must have been writ in haste, very few perhaps ever re-viewed, and none
intended for the eye of the public."[48] This was the very language of
the poet. He coveted the distinction of precocity of talent, and was
perpetually directing attention to the early age at which he affirmed,
and sometimes falsely, that many of his letters and poems were penned.
He asserted that his most finished epistles were thrown off in haste,
which, as they were always held to bear the marks of labour in every
sentence, is the last topic of praise that would have been selected by
anybody else. He was anxious to persuade the world that they were not
revised before they were published, and he prevaricated to foster the
deception.[49] He protested that they were never meant for the press,
which no one believed, and which could least of all be credited by the
assumed traitor who transcribed them from the copy that had been
deposited in the library of Lord Oxford to ensure their preservation.
The vindictive P. T. was both so fortunate and so hearty in his
commendations that he proved the mere echo of Pope in his
self-applauding moods.
The other topics in the address "to the reader" were the same topics
which were subsequently reiterated by the poet. In his narrative of the
P. T. plot, and in the preface to the authorised edition of his
correspondence, he relates the method by which the Cromwell letters were
obtained as affording a vindication of his own collection.[50] P. T. was
beforehand with him in citing the precedent to explain the means by
which his piratical volume was formed, and to justify its
publication.[51] The similarity of language and ideas in the mention of
the Wycherley letters was much more peculiar. Lord Oxford appears to
have refused to father the volume of 1729, for Pope never again alleged
that he sent it to the press. But neither did the poet avow that he
himself was responsible for its appearance. On the contrary, he renewed
the false statement that the letters were not printed till after they
were deposited in Lord Oxford's library, and spoke indefinitely of the
agency through which they were given to the world. "It happened soon
after," he says in his Narrative, "that the posthumous works of Mr.
Wycherley were published in such a manner as could no way increase the
reputation of that gentleman, who had been Mr. Pope's first
correspondent and friend; and several of these letters so fully showed
the state of that case that it was thought but justice to Mr.
Wycherley's memory to print a few to discredit that imposition."[52]
"The next year," he says, in the preface to the quarto of 1737, "the
posthumous works of Mr. Wycherley were printed in a way disreputable
enough to his memory. It was thought a justice due to him, to show the
world his better judgment, and that it was his last resolution to have
suppressed those poems. As some of the letters which had passed between
him and our author cleared that point, they were published in 1729, with
a few marginal notes added by a friend."[53] "The letters to Mr.
Wycherley," says P. T.'s address to the reader, "were procured some
years since on account of a surreptitious edition of his posthumous
works. As those letters showed the true state of that case, the
publication of them was doing the best justice to the memory of Mr.
Wycherley."[54] Pope misrepresented the tenor of the letters as an
excuse for divulging them; but how came the vindictive P. T. to be the
first to hit upon an untruth in which he had no sort of interest, and to
serve the cause of his antagonist by promulgating the fanciful
description? Pope ascribed the publication to an indefinite agency, to
avoid acknowledging that he was the sole originator of the work; but how
came his enemy P. T. to anticipate his wishes, and the ambiguous
phraseology in which he conveyed them? The identity of thought and
expression was the more singular that P. T., in a private communication
to Curll, had confirmed the original story of the poet, and asserted
that "a noble lord had handed to the press the letters of
Wycherley."[55] To the world he varied the tale, and the variation was
the same which was adopted a week or two afterwards by Pope.
A coincidence remains which more than all the rest proclaims Pope to be
the author of the address "to the reader." Nothing would have served
better his purpose in the prosecution than to prevail upon Curll to
confess that the letters were of his own procuring and printing. Upon
the seizure of the books Smythe wrote to him in the name of P. T.,
promising that he should have the work upon easier terms, and holding
out the prospect of a second and more important volume of correspondence
if he would keep secret the whole transaction, would assert that he had
the letters from different hands, and avow that he had printed them, as
he did Cromwell's before.[56] The preface, which had never been seen by
Curll, and which was appended, as if in anticipation of the event, to
all the copies carried off to the House of Lords, contained the same
tale he was instructed to tell. "The collection," it said, "hath been
owing to several cabinets, some drawn from thence by accidents, and
others, even of those to ladies, voluntarily given. It is to one of that
sex we are beholden for the whole correspondence with H. C[romwell]
Esq., which letters being lent her by that gentleman she took the
liberty to print." On the 12th of May, the day the work was published,
Pope gave a similar account to Caryll of the mode by which the contents
were procured. "What," he said, "makes me sick of writing is the
shameless industry of such fellows as Curll, and the idle ostentation,
or weak partiality of many of my correspondents, who have shown about my
letters (which I never writ but in haste, and generally against the
grain, in mere civility; for almost all letters are impertinent further
than _Si vales, bene est; ego valeo_) to such a degree that a volume of
two hundred or more are printed by that rascal. But he could never have
injured me this way, had not my friends furnished him with the occasion,
by keeping such wretched papers as they ought to have burned." The whole
of this passage is an egregious specimen of misrepresentation and
hypocrisy. A glance at the work must have revealed to Pope that the new
letters it contained were those which had been returned to him,--the
letters to Gay, Digby, Blount, and Caryll; that it comprised letters
_to_ as well as _from_ him,[57]--letters of which he was the sole
depositary; that the text was not taken from the originals, but from the
copy he had amended and re-cast; and that it was, therefore, impossible
that his acquaintances should have furnished materials which could only
have been derived from one source,--the bound book in the Oxford
library. His pretence that his letters were hasty and insignificant
expressions of civility, when he had spared no pains in collecting and
editing them; his affected indignation at his friends "for keeping such
wretched papers as they ought to have burned," when he himself had
preserved them in duplicate, and designed them for publication; his
transparent fiction that almost the entire circle of his
correspondents,--Addison, Steele, Congreve, Gay, Walsh, Trumbull,
Craggs, Digby, Blount, and others,--had been guilty of "idle ostentation
or weak partiality," in showing these "wretched papers" to somebody who
transcribed them for the press,--are all so many additional arguments to
show the conscious guilt of Pope, and the gross and clumsy inventions by
which he endeavoured to divert suspicion. The fable he concocted is, in
its essential circumstance, identical with the fabulous story of P. T.
While P. T. on his part is telling a falsehood to the public in the
preface, and begging the bookseller to tell it in the House of Lords,
Pope on his own behalf is telling the same falsehood in private to
Caryll. This concurrence of misrepresentation between the letter of the
poet, and P. T.'s address "to the reader" and instructions to Curll,
could not have proceeded from independent and hostile persons.
Curll did not choose, when he was before the Committee of the House of
Lords, to father the lie which had been suggested to him. The
proceedings were adjourned from the 14th to the 15th, that the clerk
might search through some more copies of the book for the missing letter
to Jervas, and P. T. employed the interval in again pressing Curll to
assume the entire responsibility of the work. He gently rebuked him for
owning that the books were sent by an unknown hand which might, he said,
"be thought shuffling, and induce inquiry and suspicion of some dark
transaction;" and he assured him that the lords would consider him more
sincere if he professed that he had the letters from different hands,
and had printed them himself.[58] Curll repudiated the notion of
evidencing his sincerity by deposing to a falsehood, and of silencing
inquiry and suspicion by pretending that he had procured a quantity of
manuscripts from a variety of persons whom he must have refused to name.
"My defence," he replied, "is right; I only told the Lords I did not
know from whence the books came. This was strict truth and prevented all
further inquiry."[59] The pertinacity of P. T. in endeavouring to
persuade the bookseller to commit himself to a lie was as gratuitous as
it was shameless, for he had no interest in the deception he urged.
Curll had several weeks before announced to Pope that this mysterious
agent was the collector of the letters, and Pope in communicating the
intelligence to the public declared that he knew no such person. The
renewed mention of a couple of fanciful initials could not increase P.
T.'s risk of detection, any more than it could signify whether he had
sold the correspondence to Curll to be printed, or had printed it first
and sold it afterwards. But what would have been purposeless in P. T.
was important to Pope. The friends who had returned him the letters
which appeared in the volume must have joined with the public in
ascribing the work to him, and it was of the utmost moment that Curll
should absolve him from the imputation. Having entrapped his victim into
a false confession, he would have loudly appealed to it to prove that he
was not only innocent but injured. He would have complained to the
world, as he had done to Caryll, of the "idle ostentation and weak
partiality" which had caused his hasty and artless letters to be
printed, and his vanity would have been doubly gratified by the
appearance that his choicest compositions were the careless scratchings
of his pen, and that the personal and literary merits they displayed had
been forced into day to the grievous annoyance of his reluctant modesty.
Every incident which arose in the progress of the controversy
strengthened the case against Pope. At the same time that Smythe, on the
behalf of P. T., exhorted Curll to give false evidence before the House
of Lords, he informed the bookseller of the method by which a portion of
the correspondence had been acquired. P. T. had been engaged with a
noble friend of Mr. Pope in preparing for the press the letters of
Wycherley, and had caused some extra copies to be struck off. These, he
said, "put into his head the thought of collecting more," and when he
printed the materials he had since accumulated he imitated as closely as
possible the type and paper of the stored up sheets.[60] P. T. made a
merit of the revelation, and wished that Curll should see in it a proof
of the openness and confidence with which he was treated. In reality it
was an endeavour to explain the awkward circumstance that the prose part
of Pope's Wycherley had been done up with the letters of 1735. The
publication of 1729 was entitled the second volume of Wycherley's
"Posthumous Works," and contained a couple of notes referring to poems
which were inserted or omitted in what was called "the present edition."
But as Pope's letters were not an edition of Wycherley's Works, the
absurdity of the reference might have led at any moment to the exposure
of the fact that the sheets of the old book had been transferred to the
new, and it was better at once, by an air of candid confession, to
account for the importation than to run the risk of discovery. Curll had
soon a rival version to give of the manner in which these sheets were
procured. He announced that Gilliver, who published the Wycherley volume
of 1729, had declared that Pope bought of him the remainder of the
impression, consisting of six hundred copies, and directed the other
letters comprised in the volume of 1735 to be printed to match them.[61]
There can be no difficulty in deciding between these opposite
statements. The assertion of P. T. we know to be a falsehood, for Pope
himself, and not the noble friend, prepared the letters of Wycherley for
the press. None of the inferior agents could have carried off any large
number of books, without detection, nor could have stowed them away from
1729 to 1735. The motive to thieve what was already published could only
have been lucre, and yet thirty pounds were taken for three hundred
octavos of 470[62] pages each, when but 50 of these pages were derived
from the sheets that cost nothing. If, too, there was any truth in P.
T.'s story, he was encumbered with the pile of stolen goods when he
opened the correspondence with Curll in 1733, whereas it is clear from
his communications at that time that the idea of supplying printed books
had not then occurred to him. The trick which had been practised was
known to Pope when he put forth his "Narrative," and he might have
obtained a clue to the culprit by an investigation at the
printing-office. He nevertheless made no comments on the subject, nor,
loudly as he exclaimed against the abstraction of his letters, did he
breathe a whisper against the abstraction of the sheets of the
Wycherley. Not a single specimen, again, of the work of 1729 is now
known to exist, which is in some degree explained by its absorption into
the volume of 1735; but, on the supposition that the sheets transferred
to that volume were merely extra copies, struck off secretly for P. T.,
there is no reason why the Wycherley of 1729 should have disappeared.
The conflicting statement of Curll is not embarrassed by any of these
difficulties, and was never denied by either Gilliver or Pope, which is
of itself sufficient to establish its truth, when we bear in mind that,
instead of confronting calumny with silence, the poet denounced every
charge he could repel.
The letter urging Curll anew to make a false statement of the means by
which he obtained the correspondence, was received by him on the morning
of May 15. "I am," he said, in his reply, "just again going to the Lords
to finish Pope."[63] He verified his boast. In place of adopting the
advice of P. T., he showed the letter which contained it.[64] Pope's
double dealing had been strongly suspected on the previous day, when it
was discovered that the copies seized had been altered in anticipation
of the charge he preferred. There was now a second coincidence to
connect him with the plot. The letter produced by Curll revealed that
the correspondence had been taken from the archives of Lord Oxford, and
that the story Pope had volunteered to Caryll, and which he undoubtedly
reiterated to his friends among the Lords, was not only an invention to
conceal the truth, but the same invention which P. T. exhorted the
bookseller to adopt. Some step was necessary to save the poet from
discomfiture. He therefore put forth an advertisement in the "Daily
Post-boy," acknowledging, what he was no longer able to deny, that "some
of the letters could only be procured from his own library, or that of a
noble Lord," and promising twenty guineas to either Smythe or P. T. if
they would "discover the whole affair," and forty guineas if they "could
prove that they had acted by the direction of any other person."[65]
This was an old device of the poet. To escape from the obloquy he
incurred by an impious and indecent parody of the First Psalm, he
inserted an advertisement in the "Postman," offering a reward of three
guineas for the discovery of the person who sent it to the press. The
publisher, Mrs. Burleigh, declared that she possessed the manuscript in
his own handwriting, and expressed her readiness to produce it, but he
never ventured to accept the challenge or to contradict her
assertion.[66] Pope did not acknowledge that the essence of a falsehood
was in the deceit. "If you have seen a late advertisement," he wrote to
Miss Blount, August 7, 1716, alluding probably to this transaction, "you
will know that I have not told a lie, which we both abominate, but
equivocated pretty genteelly." Without in strict language disclaiming
the authorship, he intended that the reader should understand it as a
disclaimer. His advertisement respecting the letters was a kindred case.
He meant it to be received as a denial of all connivance at the
publication of his correspondence, and in strict language he denied
nothing. He said that the book was printed by P. T., in combination with
Smythe, which was equally true, if P. T. was Pope. He could use the
phrase "_some_ of the letters," when driven to confess that they were
procured from the library of Lord Oxford, because the volume contained
the Cromwell and Wycherley letters, which had been printed before. He
could hold out the bait of rewards to himself without any risk of
betrayal, and the manoeuvre must have been adopted in concert with his
accomplice Smythe, upon whose secresy and fidelity he was already
dependent.
The Committee of the Lords reported that there was not a letter from any
peer in the work, and since no law had been infringed, they recommended
that the seized copies should be restored.[67] Motte, the bookseller,
writing to Swift in July 31, 1735, says, that when Curll was before the
House, "he was ruffled for the publication in a manner as, to a man of
less impudence than his own, would have been very uneasy." With whatever
virulence he may have been attacked by the partisans of the poet, he was
invulnerable from his want of character as well as from his want of
shame, and he had the gratification of inflicting wounds he could not
receive. "Pope," he said to the Lords, "has a knack of versifying, but
in prose I think myself a match for him."[68] He afterwards boasted that
he had not only vindicated his assertion, but that he might affirm "with
regard to all the attacks made upon him by the petulant little
gentleman,--_veni, vidi, vici_."[69] His ally, P. T., derived no
satisfaction from this victory over their common antagonist. Curll had
proved a less ready dupe than had been anticipated, and his insidious
prompter reproached him for his adherence to the truth. Smythe informed
him that P. T. was out of humour with him for not "owning the printing"
at his final attendance before the Committee of the House of Lords; that
he had probably by his wilfulness lost a future copyright of immense
value, and that his imperfect sheets would not be completed, nor
additional books supplied, unless he paid twenty pounds in advance.[70]
The reply of Curll was lofty and defiant. He said he cared nothing for
any man's ill-humour; that he would never stoop to own a fact of which
he was innocent; that he had acted justly, which was what he should
always think wisely; that he despised the future copyright of which
hopes were held out to him; that he would have no more dealings with
such dark suspicious characters, and that unless he was frankly and
fairly treated, he would print all the letters he had received from
them.[71] P. T. had previously stipulated that his letters should be
given up to him,[72] but Curll had the precaution to take copies before
he returned the originals, and, to avoid cavil, he stated that he would
make an affidavit of their accuracy. The effect of the threat showed the
alarm it excited. Smythe completely changed his tone. He no longer
prefers complaints against Curll, nor exacts conditions. He is his
friend and servant, and will bring him the remainder of the impression
on Thursday. He professes to be tired with the caprice of P. T. and has
hardly written the words when he announces that he has been sent for by
him, and hears from the messenger that he is in good humour.[73] Though
P. T. was awed, Curll no longer trusted him, and before Thursday came
the bookseller had advertised what he called, from the signature of the
chief conspirator, the "Initial Correspondence."[74]
P. T. and Smythe put forth a counter-advertisement on the 23rd of May,
in which they declared that they would retaliate by committing to the
press the letters of Curll.[75] The ostensible motive of the mock
clergyman and his employer was to cover the bookseller with infamy. The
effect, they said, will be, "to open a scene of baseness and
foul-dealing that will sufficiently show to mankind his character and
conduct." The correspondence does not bear out this description. The
documents show that the lying and trickery rested with P. T., while the
bookseller was veracious in his assertions and straight-forward in his
proceedings. "That Curll," says Johnson, "gave a true account of the
transaction it is reasonable to believe, because no falsehood was ever
detected."[76] It was his boast that falsehood had been his abhorrence
throughout the discussion, and he drew vaunting comparisons between
Pope's addiction to the vice, and his own detestation of it.[77] His
very failings in one direction had helped to sustain his virtue in
another. He had too much effrontery to care to descend to duplicity, and
it is impossible to read his many controversial manifestoes without
perceiving that he was in general as truthful as he was impudent. In the
instance of Pope's letters, there is the original blot, that he saw no
discredit in publishing papers which he supposed to be purloined; but he
had already avowed the fact before the House of Lords, and the crime was
more than shared by P. T. In everything else the acts and language of
the bookseller contrast favourably with the meanness and falsehoods of
his correspondent, who would not have assisted to disseminate the record
of his own misdeeds. But it was different with the poet. He must have
seen that the inevitable tendency of the "Initial Correspondence" would
be to convict him of the offences he had tried to fasten upon Curll. His
single chance of diminishing its disastrous effect was to promulgate it
as evidence upon his own side, and not to allow it to come forth solely
as the hostile statement of an opponent. The proceeding in P. T. would
have been to aid in propagating the proofs of P. T.'s "baseness and
foul-dealing." In Pope it was an effort to throw upon the initials the
stigma which would otherwise have fallen upon Pope himself.
The resolution of P. T. to proclaim his own disgrace was less
extraordinary than his manner of doing it. It was announced on the 24th
of May, that "the clergyman concerned with P. T. and Edmund Curll to
publish Mr. Pope's letters hath discovered the whole transaction, and a
narrative of the same will be speedily printed."[78] Hence it appears
that Smythe had made a full confession to the author of the "Narrative,"
and P. T. must be presumed to have been a party to it, since he
transmitted the originals of the communications he had addressed to
Curll, together with Curll's replies. This "Narrative" was the work of
Pope. He alone could have furnished several of the particulars, together
with the letter which Curll wrote to him in March, 1735; and the
statements, the misrepresentations,[79] the reflections, and sometimes
the words, are the same which he employed in the preface to the quarto
of 1737. Hitherto, P. T. had been so fearful of detection by the poet,
that in the language of Smythe, he suspected his own shadow. He now
unmasked himself without a motive, and without reserve, to the man he
had injured. He had nothing to tell of Curll but what Curll had insisted
upon relating before the House of Lords, and the only novel information
he could give was the details of his own thefts and frauds. This,
indeed, was what Pope would chiefly have cared to learn. He would have
been eager to ascertain who the person could be that had got access to
his letters, and the means by which they were copied and printed; and he
certainly would not have called anything "a discovery of the _whole_
transaction," which contained no revelation upon the only points of the
least importance. But it is extremely improbable that the wary P. T.
should have wantonly turned self-accuser. To the last this fabulous
personage continued to act in the manner which was most convenient to
Pope, and the true explanation of the pretended confession is, that it
was a fiction of the poet to account for his possession of the
correspondence with Curll.
More inexplicable than all was the forbearance of Pope to produce the
facts in his "Narrative." He might feel bound to suppress the names of
culprits who had volunteered a confession of their crime; but he might
have told the manner of the theft, and specified the printer employed by
P. T. He refrained, on the contrary, from revealing the particulars
which would have absolved him from an odious imputation. He kept back
every tittle of evidence which would have acquitted him if he was
innocent, and have implicated him if he was guilty. His story has none
of the circumstantiality of an actual occurrence; his statements are as
indefinite as the agents were shadowy. He disclosed the dealings of P.
T. with Curll, which Curll had noised abroad, and was about to publish,
but he does not bestow a thought upon the far more essential question
of the mode in which the correspondence was purloined, and seems to be
satisfied himself, and wishes that the world should be satisfied
likewise, with learning that a person, whose only designation was a
couple of initials, sent the letters ready printed to the bookseller.
Obliged to abandon his original story of the means by which they found
their way to the press, Pope had now some powerful reason for diverting
attention from the subject, and leaving the mystery unexplained.
He speedily manifested his desire to consign P. T. to oblivion, and
reverted to his former scheme of imputing the publication to Curll. In
the very "Narrative" which showed that the bookseller had no share in
gathering together the correspondence, Pope inculcated the idea that he
had been active in the task. He charged him with having put forth an
advertisement of the letters to Cromwell, in which "he promised
encouragement to all persons who should send him more," and adds, a
little lower down, "By these honest means Mr. Curll went on increasing
his collection."[80] The accused challenged him to produce the
advertisement, and the accuser was silent. He persevered nevertheless in
misrepresenting to his acquaintances Curll's part in the business.
Writing to Fortescue, on March 26, 1736, of the volume of 1735, he calls
it "the book of letters which Curll printed and spared not," though the
poet's own witnesses, P. T. and Smythe, had demonstrated, even in their
anger against Curll, that he had nothing to do with procuring or
printing the letters, and was merely the vendor of the copies he had
bought. In Pope's complaints to his other friends, Curll is the single
culprit to whom he ascribed the injury he had suffered, and on no one
occasion did he go through the form of keeping up his P. T. fiction. His
misrepresentations to the world at large were more covertly expressed.
He spoke in his authorised edition of the "publisher's own accounts in
his prefaces," and, as his first example, quotes P. T.'s address "to the
reader," which he knew from the letters of Smythe had never been seen by
the publisher till it was shown him at the bar of the House of Lords. To
help out the mis-statement in the text his reference in a note is made
to Curll's reprint of the collection of 1735, instead of to the volume
in which the address "to the reader" was originally produced.[81] Nor
was it, perhaps, without design that in the catalogue of surreptitious
editions, prefixed to an octavo impression of his letters which appeared
in 1737, he put first in the list, as if it had been the parent of the
rest, an edition of Curll, which was taken from the volume of P. T., and
allotted the second place to the primitive text. He never revived the
clumsy fabrication he had been compelled to promulgate in his
"Narrative." In private he transferred the crimes of P. T. to Curll; in
public he insinuated what he dared not assert for fear of retaliation;
but neither in public nor private was anything heard of the phantom who
had purloined, printed, and sold the correspondence. Had his existence
been real, or the invention been credited, Pope would not have persisted
in calumniating the bookseller for want of a culprit upon whom to lay
the offence.
Faulkner, the Dublin printer, told Dr. Birch, in 1749, that James
Worsdale was the person who went to Curll, by Pope's direction, in the
habit of a clergyman.[82] Before the entry in Birch's diary was
published, Dr. Johnson had given the same account in his "Lives of the
Poets."[83] Worsdale was a painter, dramatist, and actor, and, as if his
triple calling was insufficient for his versatile disposition, he
followed a fourth, and was hired, Johnson says, to conduct clandestine
negotiations. When an attempt was made to extort money from the second
son of Sir Robert Walpole, he was engaged to mix with the conspirators,
to win their confidence, and to betray it. They were convicted of the
fraud, and Worsdale, in giving his evidence, "acted with so much life
and spirit the several parts he had performed during the time of sifting
out the mystery as gave no small diversion to the court."[84] According
to Horace Walpole, the poet had employed this personator and detector of
rogues in his more reputable capacity, to make several copies of a
portrait of Atterbury.[85] He seemed formed to carry on the traffic with
Curll, and since it was his profession to aid in plots, he might be
expected to be a secret as well as a willing assistant. Johnson, who
attached some weight to his evidence, says he was of doubtful
veracity,--an objection which would have applied to the disclosures of
any representative of Smythe; for no upright man would have played a
part in a scheme of deception. His assertion would have been worthless,
if it had stood alone; but it at least falls in with the numerous
circumstances which all conjoin to criminate Pope.
If his impatience to print the Wycherley correspondence renders it
probable that he would be anxious to print the more important collection
which he had sedulously prepared for the press; if the deception he
practised in 1729, to avoid being taxed with the proceeding, and to
throw it upon somebody else, favours the belief that he repeated the
deception in 1735 with the same intention; and if the various facts
connected with the publication unite to prove with accumulative force
that he was the sole contriver of it, there is the further argument that
no other person had the slightest interest in perpetrating the act. "The
numbers," says Dr. Johnson, "offered to sale by the private messengers,
showed that the hope of gain could not have been the motive to the
impression." Money was so little the object that a parcel of the books
was sent to Lintot, "for which no price was ever demanded, as he had
made known his resolution not to pay a porter, and consequently not to
deal with a nameless agent."[86] Any person in the employment of Lord
Oxford, who had access to the papers, and was competent to transcribe
them, would not have undergone the toil, and risked detection, disgrace,
and ruin for the sake of a few pounds which he must have shared with his
accomplice Smythe. The vaunted revenge of P. T. could not have been the
motive; for beyond the empty profession, it was belied alike by his
words and deeds. The poet in truth loved himself too well to be able to
counterfeit speciously the part of a hater. P. T. published the letters
which Pope meant to be published; he lauded Pope in Pope's own strain;
he took the measures which were most to Pope's advantage; he reflected
Pope's vanities, weaknesses, and falsehoods, and behaved throughout in a
manner as identical with Pope's position as it was remote from his own.
Lucre and revenge were propensities to which P. T. was a stranger,
though he aspired to a reputation for the latter, and the only passion
apparent in his conduct is his mania to gratify by dishonesty and deceit
the literary ambition of Pope.
"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 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 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 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 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
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