ddison, Congreve, Prior, Parnell, and Gay. She said
these were as easily pilfered, and would have been as interesting to the
world, as the letters of Pope and Swift;[159] but nobody invaded the
sanctity of the private correspondence of the poet's contemporaries,
even when the papers were open to half the gossips of Dublin. He stood
alone in a misfortune which happened to him no less than four times,
and which it is to be feared would have happened a fifth if he had lived
long enough to accumulate the materials for a fresh volume. He relaxed
his correspondence with Caryll in 1729, and with Swift in 1737, as a
means to compel them to resign his former letters, and to both he used
the same expression,--that "he did not write upon the terms of other
_honest_ men."[160] The fallacy of the parallel was in the epithet. If
he had resembled other men in their honesty he might have shared in
their immunity from the alleged treachery of friends like Oxford and
Swift, and of enemies like Curll.

Of all the deceptions which the poet practised to get his correspondence
under the eye of the world, his dealings towards Swift are the worst. He
had failed to gain his consent to putting forth the letters while any
judgment yet remained to him; but no sooner had he sunk into dotage
than, trusting to his inability to detect the cheat, Pope beguiled him
into sanctioning the publication by sending him the volume ready
printed, with a flattering exhortation, the echo of what he had written
on a former occasion,[161] "importing that it was criminal to suppress
such an amiable picture of the Dean and his private character."[162] The
moment Swift fell into the pit his friend had dug for him, his friend
denounced him for the act. "I think," he wrote to Mr. Nugent, "I can
make no reflections upon this strange incident but what are truly
melancholy, and humble the pride of human nature,--that the greatest of
geniuses, though prudence may have been the companion of wit (which is
very rare) for their whole lives past, may have nothing left them at
last but their vanity. No decay of body is half so miserable!"
Extraordinary language to come from the pen of the man whose vanity,
without any excuse from the decay of his faculties, had made him eager
to print the letters in 1737, and who had been only thwarted in his
desire because Swift was wanting in the vanity by which he himself was
impelled,--infamous language when the deed he reprobated was his own,