No decay of body is half so miserable." The most audacious hypocrite of fiction pales beside this.

Pope, condescending to the meanest complication of lies to justify a paltry vanity, taking advantage of his old friend's dotage to trick him into complicity, then giving a false account of his error, and finally moralizing, with all the airs of philosophic charity, and taking credit for his generosity, is altogether a picture to set fiction at defiance.
I must add a remark not so edifying.

Pope went down to his grave soon afterwards, without exciting suspicion except among two or three people intimately concerned.

A whisper of doubt was soon hushed.

Even the biographers who were on the track of his former deception did not suspect this similar iniquity.