ters actually written to Caryll. Another imaginary
letter to Addison contains the following not inapt passage from a letter
to Caryll:--

'Good God! what an incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his
best part, his soul, and how changing and variable in his frame of
body. What is man altogether but one mighty inconsistency?'

What, indeed! The method subsequently employed by Pope to recover his
letters from Swift, and to get them published in such a way as to create
the impression that Pope himself had no hand in it, cannot be here
narrated. It is a story no one can take pleasure in. Of such an
organized hypocrisy as this correspondence it is no man's duty to speak
seriously. Here and there an amusing letter occurs, but as a whole it is
neither interesting, elevating, nor amusing. When in 1741 Curll moved to
dissolve the injunction Pope had obtained in connection with the Swift
correspondence, his counsel argued that letters on familiar subjects and
containing inquiries after the health of friends were not learned works,
and consequently were not within the copyright statute of Queen Anne,
which was entitled, 'An Act for the Encouragement of Learning;' but Lord
Hardwicke, with his accustomed good sense, would have none of this
objection, and observed (and these remarks, being necessary for the
judgment, are not mere _obiter dicta_, but conclusive):

'It is certain that no works have done more service to mankind than
those which have appeared in this shape upon familiar subjects, and
which, perhaps, were never intended to be published, and it is this
which makes them so valuable, for I must confess, for my own part,
that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally
intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very
little worth any person's reading' (2 Atkyns, p. 357).

I am encouraged by this authority to express the unorthodox opinion that
Pope's letters, with scarcely half-a-dozen exceptions, and only one
notable exception, are very little worth any person's reading.

Pope's epistolary pranks have, perhaps, done him some injustice. It has
always been the fashion to admire the letter which, first appearing in
1737, in Pope's correspondence, and there attributed to Gay, describes
the death by lightning of the rustic lovers John Hewet and Sarah Drew. An
identical description occurring in a letter written by Pope to Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu