"I am sorry," Pope commences, "you persist to take ill my not accepting your invitation, and to find, if I mistake not, your exception not unmixed with some suspicion." The letter of Wycherley is dated April 27, 1710, and if the contents of the letter of Pope, which is dated May 2, did not show that it was the answer, all doubt would be removed by the fact that it was headed "The Answer" by the poet, both in the octavo of 1735, and the quarto of 1737. This led to the conclusion that Wycherley, while professing to receive the strictures on his verses with kindness, had at the same time manifested in his letter some displeasure which his friend thought proper to omit, and which connected their quarrel with the secret soreness of the author at the candour of the critic.[175] Pope did indeed suppress the beginning and the end of Wycherley's communication; but the passages he kept back betray the falsity of his own insinuation. "I answered," the letter begins, "yours of the 15th, which I think was the last I had from you, about three days after my receiving it; but having not yet received any answer to it from you, I doubt your old pain of the head-ache has prevented it, which gives me a great deal of concern for you, insomuch that I have had thoughts of making you a visit before my journey into Shropshire, which has been delayed by delays and disappointments to me out of the country." The end is as follows: "My most humble service pray to Sir William Trumbull, and your good father and mother, whilst I can assure you from hence all the world here are your servants and friends. I know not but I may see you very suddenly at Binfield after all my broken promises."[176] Instead, therefore, of Wycherley being annoyed at Pope's refusal to accept his invitation, it was Wycherley who was designing to visit Pope; and instead of his persisting to take ill any part of his friend's conduct, his language was throughout expressive of cordiality and kindness.
The first intimation of a rupture is in a letter of Pope to Cromwell, on August 21, 1710, in which he says, "Since Mr. Wycherley left London, I have not heard a word from him, though just before, and once since, I writ to him, and though I know myself guilty of no offence but of doing sincerely just what he bid me." On October 28, he reverts to the subject, and protests by everything that is holy that he is not acquainted with the cause of the estrangement. He goes on, however, to state that he did not suppose any man could have been so suspicious as not to credit his own experience of a friend, and avers that he had done nothing which deserved to be concealed--a defence which seems to indicate a consciousness that Wycherley had heard some disparaging report. It was subsequently asserted by Pope's enemies, and never contradicted by Pope, that the alienation was produced by a copy of satirical verses he had written on the man he affected to caress. His offensive reply of May 2, to the genial letter of April 27, might alone explain the resentment of Wycherley, if the ungracious answer in its printed shape could be received as authentic. But I have shown that the opening sentence, in which Pope regrets that his correspondent persisted in taking ill his not accepting an invitation, is altogether fictitious, and with the evidence before us in the critical epistle of November 29, 1707, that he replaced his complimentary effusions by unvarnished truths, we may suspect that the uncompromising tone of his final letter was softened in the original, and that the published version is merely another instance of his anxiety to conceal the deference he had shown to Wycherley before the celebrity of the old dramatist had been eclipsed by the fame of the youthful poet. The almost eastern style which Pope adopted towards him a year and a half after the close of their correspondence, may be seen in one of his genuine epistles to Cromwell, which was printed by Curll. "I am highly pleased," the poet writes, November 12, 1711, "with the knowledge you give me of Mr. Wycherley's present temper, which seems so favourable to me. I shall ever have such a fund of affection for him, as to be agreeable to myself when I am so to him, and cannot but be gay when he is in good humour, as the surface of the earth, if you will pardon a poetical similitude, is clearer or gloomier, just as the sun is brighter or more overcast." Whatever may have caused the sun to be overcast, there could have been little ground of complaint against Wycherley, or Pope would not have fabricated the pretence that he had provoked his anger by declining an invitation.