e from the
Caryll correspondence, and the internal evidence is opposed to the
genuineness of the fifth. The deception is aggravated by the erroneous
aspect it imparts to the celebrated quarrel. In the letters which
preceded the commencing rupture Pope appears as the zealous champion and
bosom associate of the man he afterwards maligned, and we are left to
suppose that the vaunted generosity on one side had been met by envy and
hostility on the other. It is of virtual forgeries like these, which
were specially concocted for the public, that the poet had the hardihood
to say in his preface, "Many of them having been written on the most
trying occasions, and all in the openness of friendship, are a proof
what were his real sentiments, as they flowed warm from his heart,
without the least thought that ever the world should be witness to
them." He not only pretended that they derived a value from being the
spontaneous expression of his feelings as they rose, but pledged his
word that his motive in treasuring them up was to supply an authentic
register of historical, literary, and personal events, and especially to
provide a corrective to the misrepresentations of less scrupulous
chroniclers. "I think more and more of it," he said to Lord Oxford,
September 15, 1729, when dwelling upon the value of the collected
letters and the importance of preserving them, "as finding what a number
of facts they will settle the truth of, both relating to history and
criticism, and parts of private life and character of the eminent men of
my time." In the preface to the quarto of 1737 he made a statement of
the same nature, and protested that the letters he kept were selected
from the letters he destroyed, "merely as they preserved the memory of
some friendships which would be ever dear to him, or set in a true light
some matters of fact from which the scribblers of the times had taken
occasion to asperse either his friends or himself." He volunteered the
declaration to Lord Oxford when he was engaged in the manufacture of the
correspondence which was to falsify the facts he pretended it "would
settle the truth of," and he renewed the assertion in public as a
prelude to the fabrications themselves.

The Wycherley correspondence furnishes fresh illustrations of the
malpractices of the poet. For Pope's own share in it the published
version is our only authority. The originals of Wycherley's part in it
were placed in Lord Oxford's library in Oct