tion which had been originally laboured.
Some of his ambitious epistles, like his letter to Arbuthnot of July
26, 1734, were no doubt mere essays, which were only written when they
were committed to the press. In the quarto of 1741, he repeated the
device he had employed in the quarto of 1737. He pretended in both cases
that the correspondence he printed himself had been printed by others
without his knowledge, and in defiance of his wish. He next adopted and
republished the letters he affected to repudiate, and having already
revised them to the uttermost, asserted that he could not be induced to
revise them at all. So completely had truth with him been swallowed up
in vanity. "Had he," he tells us in the preface to the quarto of 1737,
"sat down with a design to draw his own picture, he could not have done
it so truly, for whoever sits for it, whether to himself or another,
will inevitably find his features more composed than his appear in these
letters; but if an author's hand, like a painter's, be more
distinguishable in a slight sketch than a finished picture, this very
carelessness will make them the better known from such counterfeits as
have been, and may be, imputed to him." He did everything he professed
to have left undone. The careless sketch was a studied portrait got up
for exhibition, and the minutest details had been disposed with a view
to flatter the likeness and increase the effect.

In the conduct of Pope to Bolingbroke there are points of resemblance to
his conduct in the case of the correspondence, which render the evidence
a material supplement to the present inquiry. Bolingbroke allowed him to
get put into type the political letters on "The Spirit of Patriotism,"
on "The Idea of a Patriot King," and on "The State of Parties," under
the promise that the pamphlet should be confined to five or six persons,
who were named by the author. Pope fulfilled his pledge by causing a
separate edition of 1500 copies to be struck off, and enjoined the
printer to lay by the sheets "with great secresy till further
orders."[177] In the dangerous manoeuvre of printing covertly the
original volume of the Swift correspondence which he sent to the Dean,
he may, perhaps, have remained concealed from the inferior agents, and
have conducted the details of the business through the medium of
Worsdale. In the instance of the pamphlet he was not afraid to put
himself into the power of the printer, who, says Bolingbroke, "kept