hem as the moralizings of a doll Pecksniff. Historians of
literature often assert--mistakenly, I think--that Pliny's letters are
dull, because they are merely the literary exercises of a man
over-conscious of his virtues. But Pliny's virtues, however tip-tilted,
were at least real. Pope's letters are the literary exercises of a man
platitudinizing about virtues he did not possess. They have an
impersonality, like that of the leading articles in _The Times_. They
have all the qualities of the essay except intimate confession. They are
irrelevant scrawls which might as readily have been addressed to one
correspondent as another. So much so is this, that when Pope published
them, he altered the names of the recipients of some of them so as to
make it appear that they were written to famous persons when, as a
matter of fact, they were written to private and little-known friends.

The story of the way in which he tampered with his letters and arranged
for their "unauthorized" publication by a pirate publisher is one of the
most amazing in the history of forgery. It was in reference to this that
Whitwell Elwin declared that Pope "displayed a complication of
imposture, degradation, and effrontery which can only be paralleled in
the lives of professional forgers and swindlers." When he published his
correspondence with Wycherley, his contemporaries were amazed that the
boyish Pope should have written with such an air of patronage to the
aged Wycherley and that Wycherley should have suffered it. We know, now,
however, that the correspondence is only in part genuine, and that Pope
used portions of his correspondence with Caryll and published them as
though they had been addressed to Wycherley. Wycherley had remonstrated
with Pope on the extravagant compliments he paid him: Pope had
remonstrated with Caryll on similar grounds. In the Wycherley
correspondence, Pope omits Wycherley's remonstrance to him and publishes
his own remonstrance to Caryll as a letter from himself to Wycherley.

From that time onwards Pope spared no effort in getting his
correspondence "surreptitiously" published. He engaged a go-between, a
disreputable actor disguised as a clergyman, to approach Curll, the
publisher, with an offer of a stolen collection of letters, and, when
the book was announced, he attacked Curll as a villain, and procured a
friend in the House of Lords to move a resolution that Curll should be
brought before the House on a charge of bre