removed to Longleat, where they
have remained ever since among the treasures of a library which is
worthy of the regal edifice it adorns.[19] In Pope's letters to his
friend we have his own record of the device he adopted. He wrote to Lord
Oxford in September, 1729, and complained that the publication of
Wycherley's posthumous poems was derogatory to their author, as well as
to the critic who had advised him to re-cast them. "Something," he said,
"will be necessary to be done to clear both his and my reputation, which
the letters under his hand will abundantly do; for which particular
reason I would desire to have them lodged in your lordship's hands." He
had been slow in discovering that something was necessary to be done to
clear the reputation of his deceased friend; for Theobald's book had
come forth in 1728, and it was now the autumn of 1729. His tardy zeal
appears to have been entirely begotten by the idea that it could be made
the pretext for producing the correspondence; but having once conceived
the scheme, he did not allow it to languish. On the 6th of October he
advanced a step further, and began to shadow forth the real object of
the request. He informed Lord Oxford that some of the letters were to be
printed, and asked permission to state that they were already in his
library, "which," says he, "they shall be as soon as you will give
orders to any one to receive them." "I would not," he went on, "appear
myself as publisher of them, but any one else may, or even the
bookseller be supposed to have procured copies of them,--formerly or
now, it is equal. Certain it is that no other way can justice be
rendered to the memory of a man to whom I had the first obligations of
friendship, almost in my childhood." Lord Oxford merely replied that if
the documents were left in a box with the porter, the man had orders to
place it in the library, and that any mention of that library would be
agreeable to its owner;[20] but he took no notice of the intimation that
the poet designed to ascribe the publication to an imaginary agent. Pope
now considered him to be sufficiently prepared, and his next letter
disclosed the whole of the scheme, and at the same time announced its
execution. It then appeared that his noble dupe, who, as he was both
weak and amiable, was expected to prove a submissive tool, had been
asked to become the keeper of the manuscripts, that he might be held up
to the world as their publisher. "I am extremely