severed in the practice till near the close of his life. The last
letter from Pope which he caused to be transcribed is dated July 17,
1735, and he died on the 6th of April, 1736. When his grandson sold the
hereditary estate in 1767, and retired from England to the continent,
the family papers were left behind, stowed away in boxes, where they
remained for nearly three quarters of a century. They then came into the
possession of Mr. Dilke, and have since been presented by his grandson,
Sir Charles W. Dilke, to the British Museum. Among the manuscripts were
a dozen folio books, containing the farm and domestic accounts, and in a
volume similar in appearance Mr. Dilke discovered the copies of the
letters of Pope, together with copies of others from the Dukes of
Berwick, Beaufort, and Norfolk, from Dryden, Wycherley, Steele, Roger
Lestrange, St. Evremond, and Le Grand. The external and internal
evidence leaves no doubt of their authenticity. One unexpected
confirmation of their genuineness turned up in an autograph letter of
Pope to the younger Caryll, dated Nov. 8, 1712, and which was sent by
Mr. Tuckwell to Mr. Croker. The letters to the younger Caryll remained
with his widow. The few which exist are originals in the custody of
different collectors, and this letter of Nov. 8 is a link in a series of
facts that are only known through the transcripts in the Caryll folio.
The recovery of documents, which Pope did not suspect were in existence,
discloses to us his mode of dealing with his correspondence when, having
no idea that it could rise up against him, he ventured to use it without
reserve.

After calling in his letters to his friends, Pope proceeded to arrange
them in order, and said "they formed altogether an unimportant, but yet
an innocent history of himself." "You make, I assure you," he wrote to
Caryll, July 8, 1729, "no small figure in these annals from 1710 to 1720
odd. Upon my word, sir, I am glad to see how long, and how often, and
how much I have been obliged to you, as well as how long, how often, and
how much I have been sensible of and expressed it." Notwithstanding this
assurance, Caryll made a very small figure indeed in the published
collection. Four letters only were addressed to the "Hon. J. C., Esq."
in the volume of 1735, and these initials, in the quarto of 1737, were
added to a fifth letter which had previously been headed, "Mr. Pope to
----." One other letter, in the quarto, bore the title to "Mr