The correspondence was renewed, with all the old kindness, in the following spring, but was soon again to be interrupted. Pope had, for some years, been engaged upon the occasional correction and emendation of Wycherley's worse than mediocre verses, and the unsparing honesty with which he discharged this delicate office, however creditable to his character, could not but be at times unpalatable to the author now seventy years of age, and rendered peevish by ill-health and loss of memory. His last published letter to Pope betrays some natural indignation at the wholesale slaughter which the young poet was making of his halting lines, although, with the politeness of an old courtier, he thanks him for his freedom, which he "shall always acknowledge with all sort of gratitude." It is probable, also, that some enemy of Pope had again possessed the old man's ear with slanders, to which his shattered memory would render him the more accessible, and Wycherley again broke off the correspondence, leaving his friend to wonder how he had displeased him, as knowing himself "guilty of no offence but of doing sincerely just what he bid me." Pope's references to Wycherley, during this new estrangement, show him to have been deeply hurt. They indicate, however, more of sorrow than of resentment, and his delight was unfeigned when, in the autumn of 1711, his friend was once more reconciled to him, and once more wrote to him and spoke of him in terms of the warmest affection. Cromwell, from whose correspondence with Pope we derive our information regarding this second reconciliation narrates the following pleasant incident. "Mr. Wycherley came to town on Sunday last, and, kindly surprised me with a visit on Monday morning. We dined and drank together; and I saying, 'To our loves,' he replied, 'It is Mr. Pope's health.'" On these terms we leave them. Their correspondence of this date has not been made public, nor do we know if malice or misunderstanding again destroyed the concord thus happily re-established. Pope's letters to Cromwell, moreover, cease about this time, and those which he addressed to others contain no further mention of Wycherley, until in January 1716, he describes to Mr. Blount the closing scene of the life of "that eminent comic poet, and our friend." In after years, speaking of Wycherley, Pope said: "We were pretty well together to the last: only his memory was so totally bad, that he did not remember a kindness done to him, even from minute to minute. He was peevish, too, latterly; so that sometimes we were out a little, and sometimes in. He never did an unjust thing to me in his whole life; and I went to see him on his death-bed."[6]