that he thought it would be better for no alterations to be made except when they were both present; most of the pieces, he considered, would appear better as maxims and reflections in prose than in verse. Here the correspondence, as we have it, ceases. Pope complained to Cromwell of his friend's silence; he had only done sincerely what Wycherley bade him. Wycherley was staying with Cromwell, and Pope sent friendly messages, and said he could not understand what was the cause of the estrangement, unless it were Wycherley's long indisposition. But in October 1711 Cromwell wrote that Wycherley, who had visited him at Bath, now again held Pope in high favour, and intended to visit him that winter, after inviting Pope to town. Pope said he was highly pleased at this change, but seems to have been slow in accepting Wycherley's invitation (Works, vi. 125–7).
The genuine Wycherley letters suggest that Pope has grossly misrepresented the relationship between himself and Wycherley, who, at any rate at the beginning, treated Pope as an old man and a famous writer might be expected to treat a clever lad of seventeen or eighteen, calling him ‘my great little friend’ and ‘my dear little infallible.’ ‘My first friendship, at sixteen,’ wrote Pope to Swift in 1729, ‘was contracted with a man of seventy, and I found him not grave enough or consistent enough for me, though we lived well till his death.’ Mr. Elwin thought that Wycherley's coolness arose not from Pope's criticisms of his verse, but from the discovery that Pope, while professing unlimited friendship, had made him the subject of satirical verse. In the ‘Essay on Criticism,’ published in May 1711, he spoke of those who,
In sounds and jingling syllables grown old,
Still run on poets in a raging vein,
E'en to the dregs and squeezing of the brain;
and added, ‘Such shameless bards we have.’ It is difficult not to believe that this was an attack on his old companion (Pope, Works, ii. 70–2). Afterwards Pope said: ‘Wycherley was really angry with me for correcting his verses so much. I was extremely plagued, up and down, for almost two years with them.’ However, Wycherley followed Pope's advice, and turned some hundreds of his verses into prose maxims. Pope's additions are to be found especially in the pieces on ‘Solitude,’ ‘A Life of Business,’ and ‘A Middle Life’ (Spence, pp. 113, 149).
On the marriage of Sir William Trumbull in 1709 Wycherley wrote to Pope: ‘His example had almost made me marry, more than my nephew's ill-carriage to me; having once resolved to have revenged myself upon him by my marriage.’ He often said that he would marry as soon as his life was despaired of; and accordingly, on 20 Dec. 1715, eleven days before his death, Wycherley was married, at his lodgings in Bow Street, by John Harris, with special license, to Elizabeth Jackson, of St. James's, Westminster (Register of St. Paul's, Covent Garden). ‘The old man then lay down,’ says Pope, ‘satisfied in the conscience of having by this one act paid his just debts, obliged a woman who he was told had merit, and shown an heroic resentment of the ill-usage of his next heir. Some hundred pounds which he had with the lady discharged those debts; a jointure of four hundred a year made her a recompense; and the nephew he left to comfort himself as well as he could with the miserable remains of a mortgaged estate’ (Pope to Blount, 21 Jan. 1715–16). Pope saw him twice afterwards, and found him less peevish than in health. After making his young wife promise, on the preceding evening, never to marry an old man again, Wycherley died on 1 Jan. 1716, and was buried in a vault under the church of St. Paul, Covent Garden (Le Neve, Monum. Angl. 1717, p. 305). Pope says that he died a Roman catholic. We are told on the one hand that his wife brought him a fortune of 1,500l., and on the other (by Pope) that she proved a cheat, was a cast mistress of the person who recommended her to Wycherley, and was supplied by him with money for her wedding clothes (Spence, p. 14). But this last statement is incompatible with Pope's other story that the lady's money enabled Wycherley to pay off his debts. Noble (Continuation of Granger, i. 240) describes her as daughter and coheir of Mr. Jackson of Hertingfordbury. In any case, she married again, her second husband being Captain Thomas Shrimpton, Wycherley's ‘loving kinsman’ and sole executor, who describes himself in a letter in Mrs. Oldfield's ‘Life’ as the nearest relative Wycherley had living on his mother's side (Gent. Mag. 1850, ii. 366). There were afterwards lawsuits about Wycherley's settlement on his wife.
Captain Shrimpton sold a number of Wycherley's manuscripts to a bookseller, but they were in so confused and illegible a state that it was necessary to employ Lewis Theobald [q. v.], the critic, to edit them. They were ultimately published in 1728, with a memoir by Major Richardson Pack, as ‘The Posthumous Works of William Wycherley, Esq., in Prose and Verse. In two parts.’ Neither these nor the 1704
