In 1693 there appeared at the Hague a French translation of the Latin letters of Abelard and Heloisa. The work was several times reprinted, and a later editor, M. Du Bois, informs the reader that the translator had taken the liberty to omit, to add, and to transpose at his pleasure. "Some of the thoughts and expressions which are ascribed to Heloisa," continues M. Du Bois, "are so well imagined that if we are disappointed at not finding them in the original, and at her not having said the things she has been made to say, we are agreeably forced to acknowledge that they might have been said by her, and it is impossible not to be grateful to the paraphrast for his boldness." The original correspondence contains some interesting facts, much spurious rhetoric, and many dull pedantic quotations. The work in its integrity was not adapted for popular reading, but as the whole value of the letters depended on their genuineness, they were nearly worthless in their altered form. In 1714 Hughes, the author of the Siege of Damascus, translated the adulterate French concoction, and from the phraseology and substance of Pope's Epistle, it is manifest that he followed the English version of Hughes. Wakefield and Warton have only looked for parallel passages in the Latin, where they will often be sought in vain. The authenticity of the Latin letters has usually been taken for granted, but I have a strong belief that they are a forgery. The first letter is addressed by Abelard to a friend in misfortune, for the purpose of consoling him with a tale of greater woes. The sequel is not in keeping with the ostensible object. The autobiographical epistle is full of vain-glorious, irrelevant matter, which no one would have recorded whose intention was merely to soothe a sorrow-stricken man. The particulars relative to Abelard's intercourse with Heloisa are worse than gratuitous; they are abominable. The intrigue might be public; he might avow and deplore it; but some reserve was due to decency and his paramour. She was not an anonymous phantom who could not be reached by his revelations. He told her name, and her connections which, according to his narrative, were notorious already, and he was, therefore, forbidden by such honour as even exists among profligates to expose the secret details of her shame. But honour was unknown to him. The veil which rakes who gloated over past misdeeds would have scorned to draw aside was torn away by this pious penitent with treacherous baseness.[567] The disguise is thinly worn. The Abelard of the letter is not the contrite, sorrowing philosopher who is speaking of a gifted woman he had enthusiastically loved, and against whom he had deeply sinned. He is an unimpassioned author who founds a fiction upon a true story, and realising imperfectly the sentiments proper to the situation, relates what he thinks was likely to have happened without perceiving that the confessions would have been infamy in Abelard.