roker was misled by erroneous
inferences when he accused him of tampering with the text, and falsely
pleading the authority of "a copy corrected by the author himself."

Fantastic in his conceptions, violent in his animosities, hasty and
imperious in the expression of his opinions, Warburton sometimes
repented his rashness, and cancelled numerous leaves in his Shakespeare
and Pope after the volumes were printed off. Mr. Kilvert, who edited his
Literary Remains, found among his papers a cancelled leaf of the Pope,
containing the commencement of the Prologue to the Satires. On the first
page Warburton had inserted among the "Variations" a couplet which he
said was copied from the manuscript of Pope:

And now vile poets rise before the light,
And walk, like Margaret's ghost, at dead of night.

The allusion was to the ballad of William and Margaret, written by
Mallet. He was the ally of Pope and Bolingbroke, and when Pope was dead
he was employed by Bolingbroke to blast the memory of their former
friend.[1] The mention of Margaret's ghost gave Warburton the
opportunity of appending a bitter note upon Mallet, whom he accused of
"arraigning his dead patron for a cheat," and the leaf was cancelled to
get rid of both note and variation. Mr. Croker believed that Warburton
"forged" the variation to gratify his spleen against Mallet, whom he
detested, and that before the volume was published "either his own
conscience, or some prudent friend, suggested that such manifest fraud
would not be tolerated." The conjecture was unfounded. Pope presented
several of his manuscripts to the son of Jonathan Richardson, the
portrait-painter, for his trouble in collating them with the printed
text. Richardson's interlined copy of the first quarto volume of Pope's
poetry passed into the hands of Malone, and was ultimately bought by Mr.
Croker. The manuscripts which Richardson possessed in the handwriting of
Pope were purchased by Dr. Chauncey, and are still the property of his
descendants. Among them is the Prologue to the Satires, and it contains
the couplet Mr. Croker believed to have been forged. In every instance
where the manuscripts exist the variations printed by Warburton are
found to be authentic.

The inference of Mr. Croker from the variations must be reversed. They
do not invalidate, but attest, the fidelity of Warburton, and the
"alterations" in the text of the poems must pass unchallenged unless
there is some direct proo