But the most remarkable instance of his excessive vanity and avarice, was the collecting and publishing the familiar letters which had passed between him and his friends. The ostensible pretence was, that Curll had obtained some of his epistles from Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, and published them; but this could never be an excuse for the author's printing the private correspondence which had passed between him and many eminent persons then living, and that too without consent. This was a scandalous breach of confidence, but it was not the only one of which Pope was guilty. One of his earliest and best friends was Bolingbroke, as the poet has confessed in these lines : And St. John's self, great Dryden's friend before, His lordship entrusted to Pope's care the manuscript of his "Patriot King," under the seal of secresy. The manuscript, however, found its way to the press, without the knowledge of the author, who in 1749, published it himself with a preface, in which he gives this account of his deceased friend. "The following papers were written several years since, at the request, and for the sake of some particular friends, without any design of making them publick. How they came to be so at this time, it may be proper to give an account. The original draughts were entrusted to a man on whom the aus thor thought he might entirely depend, after he had exacted from him, and taken his promise, that they should never go into any hauds, except those of five or six friends, who were named by him. In this confidence the author rested securely for some years, and although he was not without suspicion, that they had been communicated to more persons than he intended they should be, yet he was kept, by repeated as.surances, even from suspecting that any copies had come into hands unknown to him. But this man was no sooner dead, than he received information, that an entire edition of 1500 copies of these papers had been printed; that this very man had corrected the press, and that he had left them in the hands of the printer, to be kept with great secresy till further orders. The honest printer kept his word with him, better than he kept his with his friend; so that the whole edition came at last into the hands of the author, except some few copies, which this person had taken out of the heap and carried away. By these copies it appeared, that the man who had been guilty of this breach of trust, had taken upon him further, to divide the subject, and to alter and omit passages, according to the suggestion of his own fancy. What aggravates this proceeding is, that the author had told him on several occasions, among other reasons, why he would not consent to the publication of these papers was, that they had been wrote in too much haste and hurry for the public eye, though they might be trusted to a few particular friends: he added more than once, that some things required to be softened, others, perhaps, to be strengthened, and the whole most certainly, to be corrected, even if they were to remain, as he then imagined they would, in the hands of a few friends only." Another of Pope's earliest and most zealous friends was Swift; yet even the dean altered his opinion of him at the close of life. George Faulknor, the Dublin printer, who was intimately acquainted with the dean, told Dr. Birch, that 5 "Swift "Swift had long conceived a mean opinion of Mr. Pope, on account of his jealous, peevish, avaricious temper. Swift gave Pope the property of his Gulliver, the copy of which he sold for 3007. and he gave up to him, in 1727, his share of the copy of the three volumes of Miscellanies, which came to 150. Swift was also angry with Pope for his satire upon Mr. Addison, whom he esteemed as an honest, generous, friendly man. Worsdale the painter, was employed by Pope, to go to Curll, in the habit of a clergyman, and sell him the letters which are printed, a copy of which Pope sent to Swift, in Ireland, by Mr. Gerrard, an Irish gentleman, then at Bath; this induced Swift to give Mr. Faulknor leave to reprint them in Dublin, though Mr. Pope's edition was published first." He The conduct of Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, was very malignant, and treacherous. At the time when he was professing the greatest friendship for her ladyship, he circulated the grossest falshoods concerning her character. also vilified her in his satires, under the name of Sappho, though, when he was charged with it, he denied, in the most solemn manner, that he inintended the character or appeilation for her. Even Warburton himself is obliged to own that the poet is not to be defended, and that there were allegations against him, of which he was not clear. Such being his treatment of those by whom he had been caressed and patronised, who can wonder at his unmerciful severity towards the objects of his satirical fury? While the keenness of his wit, the force of his descriptions, and the strength of the colouring, render these productions of his Muse still attractive, the upright and benevolent mind cannot but look upon the author as a man actuated by the worst of passions and exercising his great talents, not to expose vice and folly, but to make individuals odious. That his motive in the composition and publication of his satires, was to make a pecuniary advantage of the wanton and vicious taste of the publick, is certain from the circumstance of his drawing the character of the Duchess of Marlborough, under the appellation of Atossa, and accepting a bribe of two thousand pounds for the suppression of it, notwithstanding which it was afterwards printed. That a writer of such a spirit should be attacked in his turn was natural; he had raised a host of enemies, who assailed him in a variety of pamphlets, which Pope caused to be bound up in folio, quarto, and octavo volumes according to their sizes, and prefixing to each this motto from Job, "Oh! that mine adversary had written a book." He was remarkably fond of scriptural allusions, but for the most part his applications of them are justly chargeable with levity and profaneness. Thus, in his "Rape of the Lock," where he is describing a card table, what can be more shock ing than the following parody of a sublime passage in the Mosaick History of the Creation? The skilful nymph reviews her force with care, Let spades be trumps! she said, and trumps they were. Nor is his famous epitaph upon Sir Isaac Newton less exceptionable : Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night, God said, let Newton be, and all was light. This extravagant hyperbole has been well ridiculed in an epigram by a young writer, who has given only the initials of his name. If Newton's existence enlighten'd the whole, I. T. had been right, for he could not have err'd, The religious sentiments of Pope, are not easily to be ascertained. At the request of Steele indeed, he wrote that beautiful devotional soliloquy, "The dying Christian to his Soul," but in afterlife he turned Bolingbroke's system into an elegant poem under the title of "An Essay on Man,"† in * Dr. Percival's Moral and Literary Dissertations, p. 153. + Soon after the appearance of the first part of this poem, which came out without a name, one Morris, who had attempted some things in the poetical way, particularly a piece |