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 breach of privilege, one of the letters (it was stated) having been written to Pope by a peer.  Curll took a number of copies of the book with him to the Lords, and it was discovered that no such letter was included.  But the advertisement was a noble one.  Unfortunately, even a man of genius could not devise elaborate schemes of this kind without ultimately falling under suspicion, and Curll wrote a narrative of the events which resulted in seriously discrediting Pope.

Pope was surely one of the least enviable authors who ever lived.  He had fame and fortune and friends.  But he had not the constitution to enjoy his fortune, and in friendship he had not the gift of fidelity.  He secretly published his correspondence with Swift and then set up a pretence that Swift had been the culprit.  He earned from Bolingbroke in the end a hatred that pursued him in the grave.  He was always begging Swift to go and live with him at Twickenham.  But Swift found even a short visit trying.  “Two sick friends never did well together,” he wrote in 1727, and he has left us verses descriptive of the miseries of great wits in each other’s company:—­

    Pope has the talent well to speak,
      But not to reach the ear;
    His loudest voice is low and weak,
      The Dean too deaf to hear.

    Awhile they on each other look,
      Then different studies choose;
    The Dean sits plodding o’er a book,
      Pope walks and courts the muse.

“Mr. Pope,” he grumbled some years later, “can neither eat nor drink, loves to be alone, and has always some poetical scheme in his head.”  Swift, luckily, stayed in Dublin and remained Pope’s friend.  Lady Mary, Wortley Montagu went to Twickenham and became Pope’s enemy.  The reason seems to have been that he was more eager for an exchange of compliments than for friendship.  He affected the attitude of a man in love, when Lady Mary saw in him only a monkey in love.  He is even said to have thrown his little makeshift of a body, in its canvas bodice and its three pairs of stockings, at her feet, with the result that she burst out laughing.  Pope took his revenge in the Epistle to Martha Blount, where, describing Lady Mary as Sappho, he declared of another lady that her different aspects agreed as ill with each other—­