Lord Bolinbroke most angry, and I suppose does, is Pope’s having presumed to correct his work.  As to his printing so many copies, it certainly was a compliment, and the more profit (which however could not be immense) he expected to make, the greater opinion he must have conceived of the merit of the work:  if one had a mind to defend Pope, should not one ask,(37) if any body ever blamed Virgil’s executors for not burning the AEneid, as he ordered them?  Warburton, I fear, does design to defend Pope:  and my uncle Horace to answer the book; his style, which is the worst in the world, must be curious, in opposition to the other.  But here comes full as bad a part of the story as any:  Lord Bolinbroke, to buy himself out of the abuse in the Duke of Marlborough’s life, or to buy himself into the supervisal of it, gave those letters to Mallet, who is writing this life for a legacy in the old Duchess’s will, (and which, with much humour, she gave, desiring it might not be written in verse,) and Mallet sold them to the bookseller for a hundred and fifty pounds.  Mallet had many obligations to Pope, no disobligations to him, and was one of his grossest flatterers; witness the sonnet on his supposed death, printed in the notes to the Dunciad.  I was this morning told an anecdote from the Dorset family that is no bad collateral evidence of the Jacobitism Of the Queen’S four last years.  They wanted to get Dover Castle into their hands, and sent down Prior to the present Duke of Dorset, who loved him, and probably was his brother,(38) to persuade him to give it up.  He sent Prior back with great an(-,er, and in three weeks was turned out of the government himself but it is idle to produce proofs; as idle as to deny the scheme.

I have just been with your brother Gal. who has been laid up these two days with the gout in his ankle; an absolute professed gout in all the forms, and with much pain.  Mr. Chute is out of town; when he returns, I shall set him upon your brother to reduce him to abstinence and health.  Adieu!

(30 At Whitehall.

(31) Daughter of Edward Young’ Esq. and wife of William, Earl of Rochford.  She had been maid of honour to the Princess of Wales.

(32) Penelope, sister of Sir Richard Atkyns.

(33) Fulke Greville, Esq. son of the Hon. Algernon Greville, second son of Fulke, fifth Lord Brooke.  His wife was the authoress of the pretty poem entitled “an Ode to Indifference."-D.

(34) This event was commemorated in the following doggrel lines:—­

“Poor Jenny Conway
She drank lemonade,
At a masquerade,
So now she’s dead and gone away."-D.

(35) Lord Bolingbroke discovered what Pope had done during his lifetime, and never forgave him for it.  He-obliged him to give up the copies, and they were burned on the terrace of Lord Bolingbroke’s house at Battersea, in the presence of Lord B. and Pope.-D.