Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/223

 200l. or 300l. (, Anecdotes, p. 33). The estate that became his on his father's death in 1697 was left under limitations, he being only a tenant for life, and not being allowed to raise money for the payment of his debts. In 1694 Dennis was writing to Wycherley, at Clive, calling him ‘a humble hermit’ (, Select Works, ii. 491). When in town Wycherley was a great frequenter of Will's coffee-house, and Dryden wrote of his ‘dear friend,’ ‘I will not show how much I am inferior to him in wit and judgment by undertaking anything after him’ (ib. ii. 498, 505–6, 509, 534). Curiously enough, Jeremy Collier, in his attack on the immorality of the English stage (1698–9), made very little reference to Wycherley, though he dwelt much on the improprieties of Congreve and Vanbrugh; probably this was because these younger writers were then more before the public. Mr. Gosse (Life of Congreve, pp. 113–14) suggests that Wycherley was the author of the lively but anonymous tract ‘A Vindication of the Stage’ (17 May 1698); this piece is concerned especially with the defence of Congreve, and is noticed briefly at the end of Collier's ‘Defence of the Short View’ (1699). In another reply to Collier, ‘The Usefulness of the Stage,’ Dennis defended Wycherley, whose satirical dedication of the ‘Plain Dealer’ to Mother Bennet had been used by Collier as an authority against the stage.

In 1704 Wycherley published a folio volume of ‘Miscellany Poems,’ most of them written, he says, nine or ten years earlier. Wycherley lost the subscriptions to the book through the printer becoming bankrupt, and never telling Wycherley what he had received or from whom (Addit. MSS. 7121 f. 75, 28618 f. 85). The verses are poor and ribald, but the appearance of this book seems to have led to the strange friendship with young Pope, then a lad of sixteen. The correspondence which Pope published many years later, in 1735, was no doubt carefully edited, with the object of proving Pope's precociousness; it is known that some of his letters as published are concoctions from letters of later date written to other persons (Athenæum, 1857 pp. 12, 32, 1860 ii. 280, 319; Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. x. 485), and Mr. Courthope has shown, by publishing Wycherley's actual letters from the manuscripts at Longleat, that in Pope's version they were elaborately altered so as to convey a sense of his own superiority as a lad over the older writer (, Works, v. 73–4, 378–407). At sixty-four Wycherley was an old man whose memory had been very bad ever since his illness of 1678. Pope afterwards said: ‘He had the same single thoughts (which were very good) come into his head again that he had used twenty years before. His memory did not carry above a sentence at a time’ (, Anecdotes, p. 121). He would read himself asleep at night with his favourite authors—Montaigne, Rochefoucauld, Seneca, or Gracian, and next morning would write verses with all the thoughts of his author, without knowing that he was obliged to any one for his ideas (ib. p. 150).

The first letter from Pope to Wycherley—alleged to have been written in December 1704, when Pope was sixteen—relates to the manner in which, at their first meeting, Wycherley had defended his friend Dryden. Wycherley replied with compliments from the ‘hardened scribbler’ to the young beginner; and early in 1706 we find Pope revising and cutting down his friend's manuscript poems, and advising which of the pieces in the 1704 collection were worthy of reproduction. Pope's alterations were numerous, and he added lines of his own; ‘they are no more than sparks lighted up by your fire,’ he said. In November 1707 Wycherley said he was resolved to print some of his verses, and urged Pope to proceed with the papers. Pope apologised for the many changes he had made: ‘If I have not spared you when I thought severity would do you a kindness, I have not mangled you where I thought there was no absolute need of amputation.’ Wycherley said that, however much Pope might conceal it, he should always own that his ‘infallible Pope’ had saved him from ‘a poetical damning a second time.’ Tonson's sixth volume of ‘Miscellany Poems,’ published in 1709, contained Pope's ‘Pastorals,’ the third of which was addressed to Wycherley, and also some verses ‘To my Friend Mr. Pope, on his Pastorals,’ by Wycherley, but probably corrected by Pope himself (POPE, Works, i. 21–2). Wycherley talked of publishing Pope's letters to him in revenge for his raillery. By this time Pope was writing to Henry Cromwell about bearing Wycherley's frailty, and forgiving his mistake, due to a scoundrel who had insinuated malicious untruths (, Works, vi. 82, 86–7). The friends were sending each kind messages again by the end of 1709, and in April 1710 Wycherley said he should soon return to town from Shrewsbury for the summer, and begged Pope to proceed with the revision of his papers, in order that he might publish some of them about Michaelmas. Pope found numerous repetitions, and Wycherley asked him only to make marks in the margin without defacing the copy. Pope replied