So complete, indeed, is the lack of precise and well-authenticated information upon this, by far the most obviously interesting side of Voltaire’s life in England, that some writers have been led to adopt a very different theory from that which is usually accepted, and to suppose that his relations with Pope’s circle were in reality of a purely superficial, or even of an actually disreputable, kind.  Voltaire himself, no doubt, was anxious to appear as the intimate friend of the great writers of England; but what reason is there to believe that he was not embroidering upon the facts, and that his true position was not that of a mere literary hanger-on, eager simply for money and reclame, with, perhaps, no particular scruples as to his means of getting hold of those desirable ends?  The objection to this theory is that there is even less evidence to support it than there is to support Voltaire’s own story.  There are a few rumours and anecdotes; but that is all.  Voltaire was probably the best-hated man in the eighteenth century, and it is only natural that, out of the enormous mass of mud that was thrown at him, some handfuls should have been particularly aimed at his life in England.  Accordingly, we learn that somebody was told by somebody else—­’avec des details que je ne rapporterai point’—­that ’M. de Voltaire se conduisit tres-irregulierement en Angleterre:  qu’il s’y est fait beaucoup d’ennemis, par des procedes qui n’accordaient pas avec les principes d’une morale exacte.’  And we are told that he left England ‘under a cloud’; that before he went he was ‘cudgelled’ by an infuriated publisher; that he swindled Lord Peterborough out of large sums of money, and that the outraged nobleman drew his sword upon the miscreant, who only escaped with his life by a midnight flight.  A more circumstantial story has been given currency by Dr. Johnson.  Voltaire, it appears, was a spy in the pay of Walpole, and was in the habit of betraying Bolingbroke’s political secrets to the Government.  The tale first appears in a third-rate life of Pope by Owen Ruffhead, who had it from Warburton, who had it from Pope himself.  Oddly enough Churton Collins apparently believed it, partly from the evidence afforded by the ‘fulsome flattery’ and ‘exaggerated compliments’ to be found in Voltaire’s correspondence, which, he says, reveal a man in whom ’falsehood and hypocrisy are of the very essence of his composition.  There is nothing, however base, to which he will not stoop:  there is no law in the code of social honour which he is not capable of violating.’  Such an extreme and sweeping conclusion, following from such shadowy premises, seems to show that some of the mud thrown in the eighteenth century was still sticking in the twentieth.  M. Foulet, however, has examined Ruffhead’s charge in a very different spirit, with conscientious minuteness, and has concluded that it is utterly without foundation.