On June 12, 1713, Pope wrote to Caryll, "As I hope, and would flatter myself, that you know me and my thoughts so entirely as never to be mistaken in either, so it is a pleasure to me that you guessed so right in regard to the author of that 'Guardian' you mentioned." On June 23 he wrote again, and said, "Your last is the more obliging as it hints at some little niceties in my conduct which your candour and affection prompt you to recommend to me." Both these sentences are inserted in an undated letter to Addison, which is compiled from three letters to Caryll, and no one could credit that Caryll and Addison had independently, and almost simultaneously communicated their guesses to Pope that he was the author of a particular essay in the "Guardian," and at the same time "hinted at little niceties in his conduct." The remainder of the letter to Addison is full of inconsistencies. The result of the imposition is to confound dates, events, opinions, and persons. Addison knows Pope and his thoughts so entirely as never to be mistaken in either; Addison's candour and affection prompt him to advise Pope in little niceties of conduct, and the perfect knowledge, the affection, the candour, and the advice, which are represented as proceeding from the most exquisite genius of the age, all appertain to an obscure country gentleman whose intimacy could not confer, in the eyes of the world, any lustre upon his friend. The whole of the letters to Addison are an absolute fiction. Four out of the five are from the Caryll correspondence, and the internal evidence is opposed to the genuineness of the fifth. The deception is aggravated by the erroneous aspect it imparts to the celebrated quarrel. In the letters which preceded the commencing rupture Pope appears as the zealous champion and bosom associate of the man he afterwards maligned, and we are left to suppose that the vaunted generosity on one side had been met by envy and hostility on the other. It is of virtual forgeries like these, which were specially concocted for the public, that the poet had the hardihood to say in his preface, "Many of them having been written on the most trying occasions, and all in the openness of friendship, are a proof what were his real sentiments, as they flowed warm from his heart, without the least thought that ever the world should be witness to them." He not only pretended that they derived a value from being the spontaneous expression of his feelings as they rose, but pledged his word that his motive in treasuring them up was to supply an authentic register of historical, literary, and personal events, and especially to provide a corrective to the misrepresentations of less scrupulous chroniclers. "I think more and more of it," he said to Lord Oxford, September 15, 1729, when dwelling upon the value of the collected letters and the importance of preserving them, "as finding what a number of facts they will settle the truth of, both relating to history and