s hardly any resemblance to the
genuine text. He must have revised the letter of Arbuthnot as well as
remodelled his own. "I am almost displeased," he remarks in the real,
not in the counterfeit reply, "at your expression '_scarcely_ any of
those suspicions or jealousies which affect the truest friendships;' for
I know of _not one_ on my part." He accordingly erased from Arbuthnot's
letter the expression he disapproved, and fathered upon him the
unqualified assertion, "I think since our first acquaintance there has
not been any of those little suspicions or jealousies that often affect
the sincerest friendships." To what extent he may have carried this
principle of altering the opinions of his correspondents to fit his
personal views cannot be discovered. A single instance of the artifice
in a man so unscrupulous destroys all confidence in the documents which
rest on his unsupported authority, and there is often reason to suspect
that he gives us not what others said, but what he thought it
advantageous to himself that they should say.

In comparison with this perversion of facts, the attempt of Pope to
improve his letters, regarded as literary productions, would be of
trifling moment, if it did not present another example of the audacious
falsehoods he imposed upon the world. Speaking in the preface to the
quarto of 1737 of the correspondence he reprinted from what he calls the
surreptitious editions, he says "for the chasms in it, we had not the
means to supply them, the author having destroyed too many letters to
preserve a series." He intends us to infer that the selection was not
his own, though the passage is virtually an admission that the
collection of P. T. was the collection deposited with Lord Oxford, or
there could not have been such an identity between them as that none of
the gaps in the P. T. volume could be filled up from the bound book in
the Oxford library. "Nor," he continues, "would he go about to amend
them, except by the omission of some passages improper, or at least
impertinent to be divulged to the public, or of such entire letters as
were either not his, or not approved of by him." He would have us
believe that they had been dragged before the world in their first crude
state, without a single subsequent touch from his pen, though he had
previously amended them with studious care--had culled the best
passages, blended extracts from two or three letters into one, and
constantly corrected composi