ys 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