ching and tinkering a
mass of rubbish.

Any man of ripe years would have predicted the obvious consequences;
and, according to the ordinary story, those consequences followed. Pope
became more plain-speaking, and at last almost insulting in his
language. Wycherley ended by demanding the return of his manuscripts, in
a letter showing his annoyance under a veil of civility; and Pope sent
them back with a smart reply, recommending Wycherley to adopt a previous
suggestion and turn his poetry into maxims after the manner of
Rochefoucauld. The "old scribbler," says Johnson, "was angry to see his
pages defaced, and felt more pain from the criticism than content from
the amendment of his faults." The story is told at length, and with his
usual brilliance, by Macaulay, and has hitherto passed muster with all
Pope's biographers; and, indeed, it is so natural a story, and is so far
confirmed by other statements of Pope, that it seems a pity to spoil it.
And yet it must be at least modified, for we have already reached one of
those perplexities which force a biographer of Pope to be constantly
looking to his footsteps. So numerous are the contradictions which
surround almost every incident of the poet's career, that one is
constantly in danger of stumbling into some pitfall, or bound to cross
it in gingerly fashion on the stepping-stone of a cautious "perhaps."
The letters which are the authority for this story have undergone a
manipulation from Pope himself, under circumstances to be hereafter
noticed; and recent researches have shown that a very false colouring
has been put upon this as upon other passages. The nature of this
strange perversion is a curious illustration of Pope's absorbing vanity.

Pope, in fact, was evidently ashamed of the attitude which he had not
unnaturally adopted to his correspondent. The first man of letters of
his day could not bear to reveal the full degree in which he had fawned
upon the decayed dramatist, whose inferiority to himself was now plainly
recognized. He altered the whole tone of the correspondence by omission,
and still worse by addition. He did not publish a letter in which
Wycherley gently remonstrates with his young admirer for excessive
adulation; he omitted from his own letters the phrase which had provoked
the remonstrance; and, with more daring falsification, he manufactured
an imaginary letter to Wycherley out of a letter really addressed to
his friend Caryll. In this letter Pope h