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 eagerne