[Footnote 10: It will be printed in the same form with this, and every future edition of his works, so as to make a part of them.--WARBURTON.
The Life which Warburton promised with such solemn pomp was never written and he was content to assist Ruffhead in his feeble compilation.]
[Footnote 11: Warburton intimates that Pope's only faults grew out of his credulous belief in "the specious appearance of virtue," which was a sarcasm directed against those friends of Pope who were the enemies of Warburton.]
[Footnote 12: The demand of Warburton was not for a truce on the day of Pope's funeral, which took place seven years before. He insisted that because Pope was dead no one should ever again question his title to be called "good." Neither Pope nor Warburton was accustomed to spare dead men, and the claim for exemption was specially inconsistent in the preface to works which were full of bitter attacks upon both living and dead. Warburton was to go on circulating Pope's venom, and any victim who retaliated was to be pronounced "sacrilegious," "a scandal even to barbarians," and worthy to be "rewarded with execration and a gibbet."]
[Footnote 13: Warburton was a fortunate author. Though he published a host of paradoxical notions, his opponents, if we are to trust his repeated assertions, were always fools and knaves.]
In his will, dated December 12, 1743, not quite six months before he died, Pope bequeathed his printed works to Warburton, on condition that he published them without "future alterations." Warburton states that the object of the proviso was to relieve him from the obloquy he might incur by reproducing offensive strokes of satire. A few slight alterations which had not the sanction of any prior edition were nevertheless introduced by Warburton into some of the poems, and he announced on the title-page and in the preface, that they were taken from a corrected copy delivered to him by Pope. Mr. Croker mistrusted the genuineness of the "alterations," and he intended to reject the text of Warburton, and adopt in the main the text of the last octavo edition which had appeared during the lifetime of the poet. The honour of Warburton is not above suspicion, but Mr. Croker was misled by erroneous inferences when he accused him of tampering with the text, and falsely pleading the authority of "a copy corrected by the author himself."