“Why yet he doth deny his prisoners.”

Mr. Bowles says, that “he has seen passages in his letters to Martha Blount which were never published by me, and I hope never will be by others; which are so gross as to imply the grossest licentiousness.”  Is this fair play?  It may, or it may not be that such passages exist; and that Pope, who was not a monk, although a Catholic, may have occasionally sinned in word and deed with woman in his youth:  but is this a sufficient ground for such a sweeping denunciation?  Where is the unmarried Englishman of a certain rank of life, who (provided he has not taken orders) has not to reproach himself between the ages of sixteen and thirty with far more licentiousness than has ever yet been traced to Pope?  Pope lived in the public eye from his youth upwards; he had all the dunces of his own time for his enemies, and, I am sorry to say, some, who have not the apology of dulness for detraction, since his death; and yet to what do all their accumulated hints and charges amount?—­to an equivocal liaison with Martha Blount, which might arise as much from his infirmities as from his passions; to a hopeless flirtation with Lady Mary W. Montagu; to a story of Cibber’s; and to two or three coarse passages in his works. Who could come forth clearer from an invidious inquest on a life of fifty-six years?  Why are we to be officiously reminded of such passages in his letters, provided that they exist.  Is Mr. Bowles aware to what such rummaging among “letters” and “stories” might lead?  I have myself seen a collection of letters of another eminent, nay, pre-eminent, deceased poet, so abominably gross, and elaborately coarse, that I do not believe that they could be paralleled in our language.  What is more strange, is, that some of these are couched as postscripts to his serious and sentimental letters, to which are tacked either a piece of prose, or some verses, of the most hyperbolical indecency.  He himself says, that if “obscenity (using a much coarser word) be the sin against the Holy Ghost, he most certainly cannot be saved.”  These letters are in existence, and have been seen by many besides myself; but would his editor have been “candid” in even alluding to them?  Nothing would have even provoked me, an indifferent spectator, to allude to them, but this further attempt at the depreciation of Pope.

What should we say to an editor of Addison, who cited the following passage from Walpole’s letters to George Montagu?  “Dr. Young has published a new book, &c.  Mr. Addison sent for the young Earl of Warwick, as he was dying, to show him in what peace a Christian could die; unluckily he died of brandy: nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being maudlin! but don’t say this in Gath where you are.”  Suppose the editor introduced it with this preface:  “One circumstance is mentioned by Horace Walpole, which, if true, was