Allen adopted this suggestion, saying quietly that Pope had
always been a bad accountant, and would have come nearer the truth if he
had added a cypher to the figures.
Another fact came to light, which produced a fiercer outburst. Pope, it
was found, had printed a whole edition (1500 copies) of the _Patriot
King_, Bolingbroke's most polished work. The motive could have been
nothing but a desire to preserve to posterity what Pope considered to be
a monument worthy of the highest genius, and was so far complimentary to
Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke, however, considered it as an act of gross
treachery. Pope had received the work on condition of keeping it
strictly private, and showing it to only a few friends. Moreover, he
had corrected it, arranged it, and altered or omitted passages according
to his own taste, which naturally did not suit the author's. In 1749
Bolingbroke gave a copy to Mallet for publication, and prefixed an angry
statement to expose the breach of trust of "a man on whom the author
thought he could entirely depend." Warburton rushed to the defence of
Pope and the demolition of Bolingbroke. A savage controversy followed,
which survives only in the title of one of Bolingbroke's pamphlets, A
Familiar Epistle to the most Impudent Man living--a transparent
paraphrase for Warburton. Pope's behaviour is too much of a piece with
previous underhand transactions, but scarcely deserves further
condemnation.
A single touch remains. Pope was buried, by his own directions, in a
vault in Twickenham church, near the monument erected to his parents.
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