obliged to you," Pope
wrote to him, "for your kind permission to quote your library, and to
mention it in what manner I pleased. I consulted Mr. Lewis upon the turn
of the preface, and have exceeded perhaps my commission on one point,
though we both judged it the right way; for I have made the publishers
say that your lordship permitted them a copy of some of the papers from
the library, where the originals remain as testimonies of the truth. It
is indeed no more than a justice due to the dead and to the living
author."[21] In other words, his lordship was asserted to have permitted
the bookseller to print the papers in his library, when they were not
even sent to his house till after they were printed, and this fiction
was fathered upon him without so much as his leave being asked, or his
having been suffered to read a single line of the work he was stated to
have authorised. When Pope alleged that the proceeding was "no more than
a justice due to the dead and the living author," he must have hoped
that the outrage to Lord Oxford of which he had been guilty in
committing the act, would appear to be diminished by the assurance with
which he communicated it. His deceptions were not confined to the
preface. He shortly afterwards wrote to Swift, and contrived to mention
that he had contracted a friendship at sixteen with a man of seventy. "I
speak," he said, "of old Mr. Wycherley, some letters of whom,
by-the-bye, and of mine, the booksellers have got and printed, not
without the concurrence of a noble friend of mine and yours. I do not
much approve of it, though there is nothing in it for me to be ashamed
of, because I will not be ashamed of anything I do not do myself, or of
anything that is not immoral, but merely dull."[22] The booksellers had
printed the letters with the concurrence of a noble friend, and the
noble friend had never heard a word on the subject till the printing was
completed. Pope did not much approve of it, and he had protested to Lord
Oxford that in no other way could justice be rendered to the memory of a
man to whom he had the first obligations of friendship. He would not be
ashamed of what he did not do himself, and he alone had edited the work
and sent it to the press. The value of his asseverations may be measured
by the triple falsehood he volunteered to Swift. He was aware that the
arguments by which he hoped to persuade Lord Oxford to become his dupe
would not impose upon the penetrating under