The Works of Alexander Pope. New edition. Including ... unpublished letters and other new materials. Collected in part by the late Rt. Hon. J. W. Croker. With introduction and notes by W. Elwin [and W. J. Courthope. The Life of Pope. By W. J. Courthope.] ... With portraits and other illustrations

Front matter

THE WORKS OF ALEXANDEE POPE. Geo-T.Doo. I&L Ejiaravar ' ' / CsOOZO -'/'--' ( ■ ■ / Fro - possession THE WORKS OF ALEXANDER POPE NEW EDITION. INCLUDING SEVERAL HUNDRED UNPUBLISHED LETTERS, AND OTHER NEW MATERIALS, COLLECTED IN PART BY TOE L.VTF. RT. HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER. AVITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES. BY REV. WHITWELL ELWIN. VOL. VI. CORRESPONDENCE.— VOL. I. WITH PORTRAITS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1871. [The right of Translation is reserved,'] LONDON: BRADBl'RY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHtTEFRIARS. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME OF CORRESPONDENCE. An asterisk isprefixcd to the letters which, either in whole or inpart, are not in the edition of Soscoe. PAGE Introduction to Pope's Correspondence xxi Preface to the Collection of 1735 xxxv Preface to the quarto of 1737 xxxvii Preface to the octavo edition of 1737 xliii Preface to the quarto of 1741 XL- Catalogue OF THE SURREPTITIOUS AND INCORRECT EDITIONS OF Mr. Pope's Letters xlix LETTERS BETWEEN POPE, SIR WILLIAM TRUMBULL, AND THE REV. RALPH BRIDGES: From 1705 to 1716.

LETTER. MONTH AND YEAR. PAGE 1. Trumbull to Pope. Milton's juvenile poems. Entreats Pope to publish his .... Oct. 19, 1705 1 2. The advantage of Pope's society. Thanks for artichokes June 15, 1706 2 3. Commendation of some of Pope's translations from Homer Apr. 9, 1703 3 4. Praises the Rape of the Lock. Begs Pope to avoid tavern company Mar. 6, 1713 4 5. Pope to Trumbull. Against flattery of authors. Happiness proceeds not from fame but goodness of heart Mar. 12, 1713 5 6. Account of the first performance of Cato . . Apr. 30, 1713 7 7. Trumbull to Pope. Thanks for the Temple of Fame. Desires to see Pope and hear from him Feb. 22, 1714-15 CONTENTS. VI MONTH AND YEAR. PAOE

LETTER. 8.

Introduction

TO public character like his inevitably excites ; and with what degree of friendship the wits might live, very few were so much fools as ever to enquire. Some part of this pretended discontent he learned from Swift, and expresses it, I think, most frequently in his correspondence with him. Swift's resentment was unreasonable, but it was sincere ; Pope's was the mere mimicry of his friend, a fictitious part which he began to play before it became him. When he was only twenty-five years old, he related that " a glut of study and retirement had thrown him on the world," and that there was danger lest "a glut of the world should throw him back upon study and retirement." To this Swift answered with great propriety, that Pope had not yet either acted or suffered enough in the world to have become weary of it.

And, indeed, it must be some very powerful reason that can drive back to solitude him who has once enjoyed the pleasures of society. In the letters both of Swift and Pope there appears such narrow ness of mind as makes them insensible of any excellence that has not some affinity with their own, and confines their esteem and approba tion to so small a number, that whoever should form his opinion of the age from their representation, would suppose them to have lived amidst ignorance and barbarity, unable to find among their con temporaries either virtue or intelligence, and persecuted by those that could not understand them. When Pope murmurs at the world, when he professes contempt of fame, when he speaks of riches and poverty, of success and dis appointment with negligent indifference, he certainly does not ex press his habitual and settled sentiments, but either wilfully disguises his own character, or, what is more likely, invests himself with temporary qualities, and sallies out in the colours of the present moment.

His hopes and fears, his joys and sorrows acted strongly upon his mind ; and if he differed from others it was not by carelessness. — Johnson. The best letters in this collection are of Swift and Arbuthnot, of Peterborough and Trumbull, as written from the heart, and in an easy, famUiar style. Those of Bolingbroke are in the form of dissertations, and those of Pope himself like the elegant and studied epistles of Pliny and Balzac. His letters seem evidently designed for the public eye, and are sometimes inconsistent with the facility and unreservedness that ought to take place and be predominant in a friendly and familiar correspondence. All of them are overcrowded with professions of integrity and disinterestedness, with trite reflections on contentment and retirement ; a disdain of greatness and courts ; a contempt of fame ; and an affected strain of common place morality.

They seem to be chiefly valuable for some literary particulars incidentally mentioned. — Warton. Pope's letters in general are not written so naturally as those of Gay, Swift, and Bolingbroke. Yet he delights in the idea of "pouring out himself," as he calls it, whereas (and I will not speak merely of those written in youth, the faults of which he acknowledges,1) they appear in general as much the result of labour (after many efforts rendered more easy perhaps) as his verses. They want that charm which no elegance of language can atone for — nature. Cowper, therefore, very properly designates him as a maker of letters. He sat down gravely and solemnly to show himself magnanimous, warmhearted, sincere, candid, humane, &c. Like all professors, what he says he often says in direct opposition to what he feels.2 At least, when he says, "These trifles disturb me not at all ;" "I write just what comes into my head ;" "I pour out my heart," <fec, a severe judge of character would think he felt quite the reverse, though, whilst writing in his study, contemplating his laurel circus, foe, from the window, where he had nothing to disturb him, he might, in a moment of triumphant self-applause, think, " What a happy, liberal, friendly, candid being am I !

" Pope never appears to so much disadvantage as when he writes to the ladies. The "Letters to Several Ladies," in particular, are con strained, affected, full of false wit, and false gaiety, and in everything the reverse of what he wished them to appear, the natural effusions of lively and gallant feelings. He certainly was sensible of this, as will be seeu by his own confession, and they were indeed written chiefly at an early age ; but as they were published, and with some care (by leaving out passages that might be thought offensive, and correcting others), it is plain he was not indifferent to them iu his latter days, though it must have been very strange if he was not aware how vainly laboured they were. The letters of Cowper, also a poet, form a perfect contrast to Pope's. In the one, I think I see a mind striving to be great, and affecting so be unaffected ; in the other, we contemplate, not the studious loftiness, but the playfulness of a mind naturally lofty, throwing at random a ray of sweetness, cheerfulness, and tenderness upon whatever subject occurs, mixed occasionally with severer touches of wisdom, and a mournful, but seldom angry survey of the follies of mankind.

We see the playful humour, mingled with melancholy, aud the melancholy, mingled with kindness, social feelings, sincerity and tenderness. I cannot close this parallel without one remark. Because Warton 1 In the preface to the quarto edition of his letters. 2 The language of truth and nature is so totally remote from affectation that it cannot be imitated. If, indeed, the imitation could be generally mistaken for the reality, then every man of shrewdness could deceive by professing what he did not feel. But such is the character of art, that even in the most consummate artist it betrays itself. —Bowles.

INTRODUCTION.

TO and Johnson have spoken as they felt of Pope, Hayley accuses them of unfriendliness. There are certain facts which ought to have cer tain judgments pronounced on them by every one who assumes as his guide, truth and fidelity. I will say if I had read Pope's letters, without knowing the author, or his character, I should have thought him different from what he has endeavoured to depicture himself, and feeling this, I have no hesitation to avow it. I do not deny that many of the letters are written with eloquence. Those are best that display his filial affection, and his friendship, but the egotism, the affected contempt of everybody but those of his own coterie, the ease that is laboured, and the warmth that is studied, make them infinitely less interesting than the letters of Gay, Jervas, or Arbuthnot. — Bowles.

The literary correspondence of Pope with Wycherley, Cromwell, and Walsh is interesting, as a model of what once passed for fine letter writing. Every nerve was strained to outdo each other in carving all thoughts into a filigree work of rhetoric, and the amœbæan contest was like that between two village cocks from neighbouring farms endeavouring to overcrow each other. To us, in this age of purer and more masculine taste, the whole scene takes the ludicrous air of old and young fops dancing a minuet with each other, practising the most elaborate grimaces, sinkings and risings the most awful, bows the most overshadowing, until plain walking, running, or the motions of natural dancing, are thought too insipid for endurance. In this instance the taste had perhaps really been borrowed from France, though often enough we impute to France what is the native growth of all minds placed in similar circumstances.

Madame de Se'vign^'s letters were really models of grace. But Balzac, whose letters, how ever, are not without interest, had in some measure formed himself upon the truly magnificent rhetoric of Pliny and Seneca. Pope and his correspondents, meantime degraded the dignity of rhetoric by applying it to trivial commonplaces of compliment, whereas Seneca applied it to the grandest themes which life or contemplation can supply. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, on first coming amongst the wits of the day, naturally adopted their style. She found this sort of euphuism established ; and it was not for a very young woman to oppose it. But her masculine understanding and powerful good Bense, shaken free, besides, from all local follies by travels and ex tensive commerce with the world, first threw off these glittering chains of affectation.

Dean Swift, by the very constitution of his mind, plain, sinewy, nervous, and courting only the strength that allies itself with homeliness, was always indisposed to this mode of corre spondence. And, finally, Pope himself, as his earlier friends died off, and his own understanding acquired strength, laid it aside altogether. One reason doubtless was, that he found it too fatiguing ; since in this way of letter writing he was put to as much expense of wit in amusing an individual correspondent as would for an equal extent have sufficed to delight the whole world. A funambulist may harass his muscles and risk his neck on the tight-rope, but hardly to enter tain his own family. Pope, however, had another reason for dechning this showy system of fencing ; and strange it is that he had not discovered this reason from the very first.

As life advanced, it happened unavoidably that real business advanced ; the careless condition of youth prompted no topics, or at least prescribed none, but such as were agreeable to the taste, and allowed of an ornamental colouring. But when downright business occurred, exchequer bills to be sold, meetings to be arranged, negotiations confided, difficulties to be ex plained, here and there by possibility a jest or two might be scattered, a witty allusion thrown in, or a sentiment interwoven ; but for the main body of the case it neither could receive any ornamental treatment, nor if, by any effort of ingenuity, it had, could it look other wise than silly and unreasonable : Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta doceri. Pope's idleness, therefore, on the one hand, concurring with good sense and the necessities of business on the other, drove him to quit his gay rhetoric in letter-writing.

But there are passages surviving in his correspondence which indicate that, after all, had leisure and the coarse perplexities of life permitted it, he still looked with par tiality upon his youthful style, and cherished it as a first love. But iu this harsh world, as the course of true love, so that of rhetoric, never did run smooth ; and thus it happened that, with a lingering farewell, he felt himself forced to bid it adieu. Strange that any man should think his own sincere and confidential overflowings of thought and feeling upon books, men, and public affairs less valuable in a literary view than the legerdemain of throwing up bubbles into the air for the sake of watching their prismatic hues, like an Indian juggler with his cups and baUs. We of this age, who have formed our notions of epistolary excellence from the chastity of Gray's, the brilliancy of Lady Mary Wortley Montague's during her later life, and the mingled good sense and fine feeling of Cowper's, value only those letters of Pope which he himself thought of inferior value.

And even with regard to these, we may say that there is a great mistake made ; the best of those later letters between Pope and Swift, (fee, are not in themselves at all superior to the letters of sensible and accomplished women, such as leave every town in the island by every post. Their chief interest is a derivative one ; we are pleased with any letter, good or bad, which relates to men of such eminent talent ; and sometimes the subjects discussed have a separate interest for Kxviii

INTRODUCTION.

TO themselves. But as to the quality of the discussion, apart "rom the person discussing and the thing discussed, so trivial is the value of these letters in a large proportion, that we cannot but wonder at the preposterous value which was set upon them by the writers. — De Quincey. The casual criticisms on Pope's letters do not differ in general from the estimate of Warton, Bowles, and De Quincey. " His literary correspondence," wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montague, iu 1754, " lays open such a mixture of dullness and iniquity that one would imagine it visible even to his most passionate admirers." ' "I found this consequence," said Cowper to Unwin, " attending, or likely to attend the eulogium you bestowed, — if my friend thought me witty before, he shall think me ten times more witty hereafter ; where I joked once I will joke five times, and for one sensible remark I will send him a dozen.

Now this foolish vanity would have spoiled me quite, and would have made me as disgusting a letter-writer as Pope, who seems to have thought that unless a sentence was well-turned, and every period pointed with some conceit, it was not worth the carriage. Accordingly he is to me, except in very few instances, the most disagreeable maker of epistles that ever I met with."2 "The object," says Hallam, when speaking of the letters of Voiture, " was to say what meant little with the utmost novelty in the mode, and with the most ingenious compliment to the person addressed : so that he should admire himself, and admire the writer. Voiture seems to have fancied that good sense spoils a man of wit. Pope, in addressing ladies, was nearly the ape of Voiture. It was unfortunately thought necessary, in such a correspondence, either to affect despairing love, which was to express itself with all possible gaiety, or, where love was too presumptuous, to pour out a torrent of nonsensical flattery which was to be rendered tolerable by far-fetched turns of thought." a " I do not hesitate to say," remarks Mr. Croker, "that Pope's correspondence, as originally published, has little of either the lighter or the graver merits of familiar letters.

I at least remember none more barren of matter, less enlivened by wit, or less explanatory of the history of either the writer or the times." Gray the poet had a higher opinion of them. He said to Mr. Nicholls " that they were not good letters, but better things." 4 Those letters are the most interesting which, like Cowper's, are a true reflection of daily life and ideas. Johnson's assertion must be received with large deductions when he says that no one, in a letter, lays open his heart to a friend, since a letter is " a calm and deliberate 1 Letters and Woiks, ed. Moy Thomas, vol. ii. p. 254. 2 Cowper's Works, ed. Southey, 1854, vol. ii. p. 257. 3 Hallam, Lit. Hist., 5th ed., vol. iii. p. 362. 4 Works of Gray, ed. Mitford, vol. v. p. 37. performance" intended to secure the friend's good opinion, and hearts are too evil to be displayed.

The deliberation is commonly slight. Familiar letters are usually hasty productions, thrown off with the freedom and carelessness of conversation, and if, as Johnson remarks, " no man sits down to depreciate by design his own character," so multitudes have no intention to disguise it. Their object is to relate with frankness the events, thoughts, and feelings of the hour, and the representation need not be disingenuous and unfaithful because particular infirmities are not gratuitously dragged forth from the recesses of the mind. Some reservations are becoming. The mistrust excited by studied epistles has probably its foundation in the belief that what is artless in form is genuine in substance, and that what is laboured is sophisticated. Even the suspicion with which ambitious letters are regarded may be pushed too far.

When Shenstone heard that his letters to his friend Mr. Whistler had been burnt by a surviving brother, he wrote to Mr. Graves, " I confess to you that I am considerably mortified, and rather than they should have been so unnecessarily destroyed, would have given more money than it is aUowable for me to mention with decency. I look upon my letters as some of my chefs-d'ceuvre; and, could I be supposed to have the least pretensions to propriety of style or sentiment, I should imagine it must appear principally in my letters to his brother, and one or two more friends."1 The author who aspired to make his intimate letters master-pieces of " style and sentiment," who designed them for posterity, and mourned over their destruction, would certainly be less open than if he wrote for the private eye of a companion.

He would aim at effect, and would only express the facts and sentiments he imagined would assist his reputation. "Yet the letters would not of necessity be untrustworthy. Within their Umited range they might be perfectly honest, and have as much veracity as au auto biography, or an essay, or any other composition intended for the world. Artificial letters may have their value, provided they are truthful and are not altogether insignificant. The vice of the letters pubUshed by Pope is not merely that they are studied, but that they are usually barren and insincere. Pope was eager in denying that he took pains with his letters. He acknowledged that those to Wycherley, and to "several ladies" had " too much of a juvenile ambition of wit or affectation of gaiety." " The rest," he said, " every judge of writing will see were by no means efforts of the genius, but emanations of the heart," and he professed his belief that " this very carelessness would make them the better known from such counterfeits as have been, and may be imputed to him."*1 In private he showed the same anxiety to have 1 Works of Shenstone, ed. 1791, vol. iii. p. 234. 2 Pope's Correspondence, ed. Elwin, vol. i. p. xxxviii. xh credit for negligence and facility, and he assured Caryll, in May, 1735, that he had never written any letters " but in haste, and generally against the grain."

The letters he published have none of the spontaneous characteristics he boasted. They are pretentious, stiff, and laboured. Johnson observes that it is " not easy to distinguish affectation from habit." A ready test can be applied to the letters of Pope. He was often compeUed to write on the spur of the moment. His zeal in reclaiming and destroying his hasty letters met with imperfect success. Many escaped, and Bowles is right in saying that they are a decisive proof how different was the style of Pope's off-hand productions from the formal compositions he sent to the press.1 The original "carelessness" was a fiction, which he followed up by the second, and more explicit falsehood, that " he would not go about to amend " these unconsidered trifles.2 " Very few of the original autographs," says Mr. Croker, " are extant, for as Pope had recalled them from the hands of his friends, and altered them for publication, he would naturally take care that they should not after wards rise in judgment against his new version, but of these few all that I have seen, or heard of, bear marks of the garbling process to which they were subjected."

The evidence of Pope's extensive corrections and manipulations has multiplied since. The letters he feigned to be all ease and nature were doubly artificial — they were elaborately composed at the outset, and industriously edited at an interval of years. Shenstone had the candour to confess that he looked upon his letters as " some of his chefs-d'œuvre," and mourned their destruction. Pope only differed from Shenstone in the greater vanity, and monstrous lying, which made him protest that they were " wretched papers he never writ but in haste," that they " ought to have been burned," that they were printed without his knowledge and against his will,3 that they were flung before the world with every primitive blemish uncorrected, and that he was vexed beyond measure to find the idle scratchings of his pen divulged.

The letters of Pope are artificial and they are barren. They are full of the cumbrous, manufactured, vapid compliments described by Hallam and De Quincey, of the trite reflections and common-place morality mentioned by Warton, of the boastful affectations and pharisaical self-sufficiency exposed by Johnson. The insignificant matter is rendered more tiresome by its frequent obscurity. Pope's compliments are so far-fetched that they are often barely intelligible. His opinions are constantly deUvered with the darkness as well as with the pomp of an oracle. He loved to utter high-sounding sentiments on politics and religion, which are meant to seem lofty 1 Bowles's Pope, vol. i. p. xevi. 2 Pope's Correspondence, vol. i. p. xli. 3 Pope's Correspondence, vol. i. p. 356. and magnanimous, and which on examination are found to be little better than evasive nonsense.

He had cultivated the art of using words to conceal his thoughts, or want of thought, and his paltry ambiguities, his mean expedients to avoid a manly openness of speech, are never more prominent than in his famUiar letters, where, from their special unfitness, they are peculiarly distasteful. No great author, who had been all his life a painstaking " maker of epistles," could have produced fewer tolerable specimens of his craft, and as the remainder of his collection is conspicuous for its emptiness, the remark of Gray is incomprehensible when he says that though " bad letters they are better things." The hollo wuess of Pope's professions in his letters was demonstrated by Johnson, who was inclined to absolve him from the charge of "hypocritical falsehood.'' He might have been beguiled by self deception.

Thi3 construction is no longer tenable. He avowed in the beginning of his preface to the quarto of 1737 that before the P. T. volume appeared he had picked out the correspondence he intended should be printed if any of his letters were surreptitiously published, or certain slanders were revived. In the conclusion of his preface he exclaimed against the wrong which had been done him by the surreptitious publications. As an author he had been deprived of the power of judging what was entertaining or reputable. As a man he had been deprived of the privUege of deciding what sentiments he would divulge or conceal. As a member of society he was injured by the exposure of his famUy secrets, passions, tendernesses, and weaknesses.1 With slight variations, Pope reprinted, and thus authenticated, the text of the P. T. volume, and in every instance where we can compare it with the letters he sent to his correspondents, we see that the letters he caUed surreptitious are the very letters he had altered and edited for the press.

They had been selected, fused, abridged, amended, redirected, and falsified with a steady eye to his self-exaltation, and the wad over the treacherous promulgation of careless letters which he had not been permitted to purge of a single fault, or imprudence, was a lie to persuade the world that the flattering portrait he had painted for pubUc exhibition was a true picture of the author in his rapid, unstudied effusions — of the man in his confidential, unguarded hours. The "hypocritical falsehoods" were direct, and Pope could not, in Johnson's language, "believe himself." He could as little believe himself when he said that his object in preserving the letters he did not burn was "to set iu a true Ught" misrepresentations of himself and his friends, facts of history and criticism, and circumstances in the life and character of his eminent contemporaries.2 His object was 1 Pope's Correspondence, vol. i. p. xlii. 2 Pope's Correspondence, vol. i. p. xxxvii.

Pope to Lord Oxford, Sept. 15, 1729. more often to shield himself by calumniating others, to palm off for real a fictitious correspondence which had never been seen by the persons with whom it purported to have been carried on, and to replace a variety of facts by fabrications. The evidence that Pope corrupted 3his letters, and gave a false account of them in his preface, is independent of the proofs that he ushered into the world the Wycherley, P. T., and Swift correspondence, and charged his own machinations upon Lord Oxford, Curll, and Swift. Iu this second set of successive, protracted frauds, he displayed a complication of imposture, degradation, and effrontery which can only be paraUeled in the lives of professional forgers and swindlers. He feared that the representa tion he had prepared of his extemporaneous talents, and native goodness, would lose its effect if he was known to have selected and pubUshed the letters, and he plunged from infamy to infamy that he might invest Ids counterfeited virtue with a specious appearance of truth.

The systematic outrage of common principle precludes the suppo sition that Pope could have been the dupe of his own encomiums. He was a conscious and deliberate pretender. In a letter signed William Cleland, which he prefixed to the Dunciad, and which nobody doubts was his own composition, he makes Cleland say of him, " I am one of that number who have long loved and esteemed Mr. Pope, and had often declared it was not his capacity or writings, (which we ever thought the least valuable part of his character), but the honest, open, and beneficent man that we most esteemed and loved in him." This was his usual rant, and he could no more suppose that he was " honest and open " than that he was a brawny athlete six feet high. His very vaunts would have indicated that he knew his guilt. " One of his worst mistakes," wrote Aaron Hill to Richardson, September 10, 1744, " was that unnecessary noise he used to make in boast of his morality.

It seemed to me almost a call upon suspicion that a man should rate the duties of plain honesty, as if they had been qualities extraordinary. And, in fact, I saw on some occasions, that he found these duties too severe for practice, and but prized himself upon the character in pro portion to the paius it cost him to support it."1 Gratuitous protesta tions of vulgar honesty would seem humiliating to upright minds. They are the sure symptom of a blunted, accusing conscience. Indeed Pope's false pretences were altogether wanting in tact, and he imagined that no deception was too clumsy to be believed. " He has been very sparing of the letters of his friends," he said in the preface to the quarto, " and thought it a respect shown to their memory to suppress in particular such as were most in his favour.

As it is not to vanity, but to friendship, that he iutends this monument, he would 1 Richardson's Correspondence, vol. i. p. 106. XXX1U save his enemies the mortification of showing any further how well their betters have thought of him, and at the same time secure from their censure his Uving friends, who, he promises them, shall never be put to the blush, this way at least, for their partiality to him." The author of the Duncipd is anxious to spare his enemies the mortification of seeing how well their betters have thought of him ; the egotist, who was always extoUing his own virtues, is fearful lest his friends should be put to the blush for their partiaUty to him, and he stultifies his affected delicacy in the act of proclaiming it, and takes the benefit of the praise he is pretending to suppress.

His notion of sparing his enemies mortification, and his friends shame resolves itself into sub stituting his own panegyrical representation for the authentic, and probably milder language of his correspondents. The generality of his artifices were not more subtle or plausible. Johnson says that when the P. T. letters appeared in 1735 they filled the nation with praises of Pope's worth and amiabiUty. The quarto of 1737, he says on the contrary, attracted Uttle notice, and "produced neither public praise nor public censure."1 Hay ley thought the accounts contradictory, and Bowles has shown that they were not. The volume of 1735 was read, he says, because it was new, and with greater avidity because the outcry of Pope, his appeal to the House of Lords, his ostensible desire to obstruct the publication, raised the belief that the letters would reveal the secrets of distinguished men.