Besides the necessity Pope was under of rejecting some of the P. T. letters to bear out his mendacious charge of forgery, he had particular reasons for disclaiming three at least of the four letters which proceeded from his own pen. The letter he addressed to Miss Blount and Miss Marriot was a disquisition on a human monstrosity exhibiting in London. He had said in his Essay on Criticism that "vile obscenity should find no pardon." He was among the offenders he pronounced unpardonable, and often revelled in dull and studied indecorums which he mistook for wit. The laboured letter he esteemed so highly that he sent it to two of his female correspondents was more than ordinarily gross and stupid. The fancied humour appeared to the public revolting coarseness, and he cast out the letter because it excited disgust and contempt.
The next letter Pope rejected consisted of a satirical and false description of Blenheim. He represented a fraction of the house to be the whole, and founded upon his mis-statement the reflection, "I think the architect built it entirely in complaisance to the taste of its owners; for it is the most inhospitable thing imaginable, and the most selfish." A second sarcasm on the Duchess in the P. T. volume was obliterated in the octavo of 1737. "Cleland," Pope writes to Gay, "is at Tunbridge. He plays now with the old Duchess of M----, nay, dines with her after she has won all his money." In the octavo of 1737 he erased the name, and left the passage to be applied to any old duchess who was then alive. He had obviously some inducement to renounce his abuse of the Duchess of Marlborough, and the probable cause was that a friendly intercourse had grown up in the interval. He speaks of her to Swift in 1739 as paying "great court to him."[120]
His desire to disavow an ebullition of enmity which had been succeeded by renewed cordiality, was his apparent motive for cancelling a letter addressed to Gay. Fielding relates that no person during "the reign of King Alexander" would read a work which had not his license, and "this license he granted to only four authors--Swift, Young, Arbuthnot, and Gay--his principal courtiers and favourites."[121] It chanced that one of the courtiers was in disgrace when the P. T. volume appeared, and Pope introduced a sneer at his egotism and pomposity. "In a word," he says to Gay, "Y----g himself has not acquired more tragic majesty in his aspect by reading his own verses than I by Homer's." The offence of Young was a species of remonstrance he sent to the monarch under the guise of advice. Pope completed his Essay on Man in 1734, and Young urged him in "a pressing letter to write something on the side of revelation in order to take off the impression of those doctrines which the Essay seemed to convey." Harte, a minor courtier of king Alexander, told Warton that the sensitive monarch "took the letter amiss."[122] He was annoyed at the censure implied in the exhortation, and retaliated by ridiculing the self-importance of his monitor. When Pope was taxed with personalities he could not defend, he never scrupled, where it was possible, to deny that he alluded to the person who remonstrated. When evasion was impracticable, and the work had not been avowed, the easiest course was to repudiate the authorship.