e attitude--it
must, one hopes, have cost him a blush--of one who is seriously
aggrieved, but who is generously anxious to shield a friend in
consideration of his known infirmity. He is forced, in sorrow, to admit
that Swift has erred, but he will not allow himself to be annoyed. The
most humiliating words ever written by a man not utterly vile, must have
been those which Pope set down in a letter to Nugent, after giving his
own version of the case: "I think I can make no reflections upon this
strange incident but what are truly melancholy, and humble the pride of
human nature. That the greatest of geniuses, though prudence may have
been the companion of wit (which is very rare) for their whole lives
past, may have nothing left them but their vanity. No decay of body is
half so miserable." The most audacious hypocrite of fiction pales beside
this. Pope, condescending to the meanest complication of lies to justify
a paltry vanity, taking advantage of his old friend's dotage to trick
him into complicity, then giving a false account of his error, and
finally moralizing, with all the airs of philosophic charity, and taking
credit for his generosity, is altogether a picture to set fiction at
defiance.

I must add a remark not so edifying. Pope went down to his grave soon
afterwards, without exciting suspicion except among two or three people
intimately concerned. A whisper of doubt was soon hushed. Even the
biographers who were on the track of his former deception did not
suspect this similar iniquity. The last of them, Mr. Carruthers, writing
in 1857, observes upon the pain given to Pope by the treachery of
Swift--a treachery of course palliated by Swift's failure of mind. At
last Mr. Dilke discovered the truth, which has been placed beyond doubt
by the still later discovery of the letters to Orrery. The moral is,
apparently, that it is better to cheat a respectable man than a rogue;
for the respectable tacitly form a society for mutual support of
character, whilst the open rogue will be only too glad to show that you
are even such an one as himself.

It was not probable that letters thus published should be printed with
scrupulous accuracy. Pope, indeed, can scarcely have attempted to
conceal the fact that they had been a good deal altered. And so long as
the letters were regarded merely as literary compositions, the practice
was at least pardonable. But Pope went further; and the full extent of
his audacious changes was