surreptitious edition which nobody gave any sign of preparing. The
hypocrisy broke out again when the Miscellany had appeared. "Nothing,"
wrote Wycherley, May 17, 1709, "has lately been better received by the
public than your part of it. You have only displeased the critics by
pleasing them too well, having not left them a word to say for
themselves against you and your performances. In earnest, all the best
judges of good sense or poetry are admirers of yours, and like your part
of the book so well that the rest is liked the worse." Pope replied, "I
shall be satisfied if I can lose my time agreeably this way, without
losing my reputation. As for gaining any, I am as indifferent in the
matter as Falstaff was, and may say of fame as he did of honour, 'If it
comes, it comes unlooked for; and there's an end on't.'" This
affectation of indifference was kept up by him to the end of his days.
Yet he was all the time composing, polishing, and publishing; his whole
existence was passed in painstaking, and almost drudging authorship; he
left no means untried, dishonest as well as fair, to sustain, extend,
and perpetuate his reputation; and he pursued every person with
inveterate malice who presumed to question his poetical supremacy. In
spite of his boasted apathy, there cannot be found in the annals of the
irritable race a more anxious, jealous, intriguing candidate for fame.

In his letter to Wycherley, Walsh remarked of Pope's Pastorals, "It is
no flattery at all to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his
age." Walsh must have been thinking of Virgil's Eclogues, which are his
most juvenile productions, though he is not supposed to have commenced
them till he was thirty years old. Pope admired them to excess, and in
his manhood he held to the belief that "it was difficult to find any
fault in them."[11] His desire was to repeat, with slight variations,
this ancient pattern, which he thought perfection. Virgil himself was a
plagiarist, but the Eclogues have more originality than the Pastorals.
The descriptions of both Virgil and Pope are artificial, but Virgil has
heart-felt touches from the life, of which the Pastorals afford no
trace. The taste of both was unformed, but the conceits of Virgil are
accompanied by a poetic vein which was not yet equally developed in
Pope. Since the Pastorals are an imitation of the Eclogues, it might be
expected, as usually happens in such cases, that the copy would have the
defects of