standing of the Dean, and he
therefore openly repudiated what he was unable to excuse. If the
publication had vindicated Wycherley, it would have been its own
justification; but as it was put forth to do honour to Pope, he
sacrificed his veracity to avoid the imputation of vanity. He cruelly
sneered, in his "Prologue to the Satires" at the poor garretteer, who
urged the plea for printing his compositions that he was "obliged by
hunger and request of friends." The poet had not the excuse of hunger,
and he improved upon the model he satirised when he pretended that
_his_ friends had taken his papers, and printed them against his will.

The deception which Pope practised was never suspected till it was
revealed by his correspondence with Lord Oxford, which has hitherto
remained in manuscript. The repetition of the attempt on a more
elaborate scale was less successful, and it has always been believed by
the immense majority of inquirers that the promulgation of the
collection of 1735, which the poet vehemently denounced as an act of
intolerable treachery, was from first to last his own deed. "It seems,"
says Johnson, "that Pope being desirous of printing his letters, and not
knowing how to do, without imputation of vanity, what has in this
country been done very rarely, contrived an appearance of compulsion,
that when he could complain that his letters were surreptitiously
published, he might decently and defensively publish them himself."[23]
Fresh facts have rendered the evidence against him stronger than ever,
and the whole derives increased force from the information we now
possess that he had previously had recourse to a kindred falsehood. In
the first case he made a tool of a friend; in the second, he varied his
plan, and made a tool of an enemy.

Pope tells us, in the preface to the authorised edition of his
correspondence, which he brought out in quarto in 1737, that his disgust
at the publication of his letters to Cromwell, and "the apprehension of
more treatment of the same kind, put him upon recalling as many as he
could from those who he imagined had kept any."[24] He applied to his
friend Caryll, in December, 1726, to surrender his collection; and, on
renewing the request a few days later, he added, "I have desired the
same thing of Mrs. Blount, with whose late worthy husband I entertained
so long a correspondence, and of all others." It was more than two years
before Caryll could be induced to comply with the