opted all
the letters but seven, and his assertion that these seven were
fabrications was a falsehood.

Besides the necessity Pope was under of rejecting some of the P. T.
letters to bear out his mendacious charge of forgery, he had particular
reasons for disclaiming three at least of the four letters which
proceeded from his own pen. The letter he addressed to Miss Blount and
Miss Marriot was a disquisition on a human monstrosity exhibiting in
London. He had said in his Essay on Criticism that "vile obscenity
should find no pardon." He was among the offenders he pronounced
unpardonable, and often revelled in dull and studied indecorums which he
mistook for wit. The laboured letter he esteemed so highly that he sent
it to two of his female correspondents was more than ordinarily gross
and stupid. The fancied humour appeared to the public revolting
coarseness, and he cast out the letter because it excited disgust and
contempt.

The next letter Pope rejected consisted of a satirical and false
description of Blenheim. He represented a fraction of the house to be
the whole, and founded upon his mis-statement the reflection, "I think
the architect built it entirely in complaisance to the taste of its
owners; for it is the most inhospitable thing imaginable, and the most
selfish." A second sarcasm on the Duchess in the P. T. volume was
obliterated in the octavo of 1737. "Cleland," Pope writes to Gay, "is at
Tunbridge. He plays now with the old Duchess of M----, nay, dines with
her after she has won all his money." In the octavo of 1737 he erased
the name, and left the passage to be applied to any old duchess who was
then alive. He had obviously some inducement to renounce his abuse of
the Duchess of Marlborough, and the probable cause was that a friendly
intercourse had grown up in the interval. He speaks of her to Swift in
1739 as paying "great court to him."[120]

His desire to disavow an ebullition of enmity which had been succeeded
by renewed cordiality, was his apparent motive for cancelling a letter
addressed to Gay. Fielding relates that no person during "the reign of
King Alexander" would read a work which had not his license, and "this
license he granted to only four authors--Swift, Young, Arbuthnot, and
Gay--his principal courtiers and favourites."[121] It chanced that one
of the courtiers was in disgrace when the P. T. volume appeared, and
Pope introduced a sneer at his egotism and pomposity. "In a word," he
sa