tto, _Vellem nescire literas_, bewailed in the preface itself
the necessity for the publication, hoped that no honest man might be
reduced to a similar dilemma, talked with injured indignation of thefts,
forgeries, and piracies, and exhorted the legislature to provide a
remedy against the evil. His tone was not moderated by the suspicions he
had roused, and the humiliations he had undergone. They had just as
little effect in abating his love of treachery, or blunting his appetite
for epistolary fame, and he was no sooner clear of one plot than he
engaged in another of the same description, and for the same ends.

His correspondence with Swift appeared in 1741. The English edition was
a sequel to the quarto of 1737, and formed part of what was called on
the title-page, "The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, in Prose, Vol. II." In
a prefatory notice to the reader, the letters are stated to have been
"copied from an impression sent from Dublin, and said to have been
printed by the Dean's direction," an impression, it is added, "which was
begun without our author's knowledge, and continued without his
consent." Pope held the same language in private to Allen and Warburton,
and professed to be extremely annoyed at the step. His account has been
almost uniformly accepted as true till the critic in the Athenaeum showed
that the publication of the correspondence with Swift was no exception
to the previous proceedings of the poet, and that, as in the case of the
Wycherley letters of 1729, and the miscellaneous collection of 1735, he
himself had sent the manuscripts to the press, and charged the act upon
others.

On November 28, 1729, Pope protested to Swift that it was many years
since he endeavoured to play the wit in his familiar correspondence. He
assured the Dean that as he had a greater love and esteem for him than
for others, so he wrote to him with even more than ordinary negligence.
"I smile to think," he continues, "how Curll would be bit were our
epistles to fall into his hands, and how gloriously they would fall
short of every ingenious reader's expectations." Warburton tells us that
Pope valued himself upon this abstinence from all effort to be
brilliant;[127] but his pretence of sinking the author in the friend
gained no credit from Swift, who took care to show his incredulity. "I
find," he replied on February 26, 1730, "you have been a writer of
letters almost from your infancy; and, by your own confession, had
schemes