And many of the ways he took to add to his own fame, and take
away from that of others, were mean and tortuous to the last
degree. Deceit and crooked ways seemed necessary to him. It has
been said that he hardly drank tea without a stratagem, and that
he played the politician about cabbages and turnips.*
*Lady Bolingbroke.
He begged his own letters back from the friends to whom they were
written. He altered them, changed the dates, and published them.
Then he raised a great outcry pretending that they had been
stolen from him and published without his knowledge. Such ways
led to quarrels and strife while he was alive, and since his
death they have puzzled every one who has tried to write about
him. All his life through he was hardly ever without a literary
quarrel of some sort, some of his poems indeed being called forth
merely by these quarrels.
But though many of Pope's poems led to quarrels, and some were
written with the desire to provoke them, one of his most famous
poems was, on the other hand, written to bring peace between two
angry families.
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