On the appearance of Theobald's edition of the Posthumous Works of Wycherley, the poet poured out his indignation to Lord Oxford. "I foresaw," he said, October 6, 1729, "some dirty trick in connection with my friend Wycherley's papers which they were publishing, and nothing can at once do justice so well to him and to me, who was by him employed in them, as the divulging of some parts of his and my letters." At the moment that he was penning this denunciation against "dirty tricks in relation to Wycherley's papers," though no trick had been practised, he was busily engaged in aspersing his friend by garbling the papers he professed to divulge out of justice to his memory. His motives were not malignant. He was simply desirous to do credit to himself, but to effect this end he did not scruple to falsify their private correspondence, and under the plea of justifying a man who was in his grave, took advantage of his death to libel him in safety. When with our scanty means of testing the fidelity of the letters, we find that part of them were misplaced, distorted, and invented, the rest of the series must be received with distrust, and some which cannot be proved to be fabricated are among the most suspicious of the whole.
Where the originals of Pope's letters were in hostile hands, as was the case with his letters to Cromwell and to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he was compelled to be sparing in his operations. He omitted sentences and altered phrases, but could not venture upon wholesale perversions of the truth. Of the bulk of the letters he published we have neither the originals nor reliable copies; but when we chance to light upon the materials from which he worked, we find, as might be expected, that he was not more conscientious in his use of them than in his reckless falsification of his correspondence with Wycherley and Caryll. The volume of 1735 concludes with a letter from Arbuthnot, dated July 17, 1734, and in the quarto of 1737 we have the pretended reply of the poet. Among the Arbuthnot papers in the possession of Mr. Baillie, is the actual answer sent by Pope, and it turns out that the printed substitute is an elaborate composition that has hardly any resemblance to the genuine text. He must have revised the letter of Arbuthnot as well as remodelled his own. "I am almost displeased," he remarks in the real, not in the counterfeit reply, "at your expression '_scarcely_ any of those suspicions or jealousies which affect the truest friendships;' for I know of _not one_ on my part." He accordingly erased from Arbuthnot's letter the expression he disapproved, and fathered upon him the unqualified assertion, "I think since our first acquaintance there has not been any of those little suspicions or jealousies that often affect the sincerest friendships." To what extent he may have carried this principle of altering the opinions of his correspondents to fit his personal views cannot be discovered. A single instance of the artifice in a man so unscrupulous destroys all confidence in the documents which rest on his unsupported authority, and there is often reason to suspect that he gives us not what others said, but what he thought it advantageous to himself that they should say.