volume in which he had stitched specimens of the letters of his eminent

friends.[132] The joint letter of August, 1723, was preserved,[133] when

the letters of Pope to Swift for a considerable period before and after

were lost or destroyed, and it is likely that it escaped the common fate

by its insertion in the volume of selections. There it was easily

accessible, and as Worsdale, the reputed mock-clergyman, who had

personated Smythe, was sometimes resident in Dublin, his old employer

had a trusty, or at any rate a trusted agent, ready to his hand. Curll

did not print any more of his boasted originals, and he probably only

spoke on the faith of promises which had been made him with a view to

compel compliance from the Dean, by persuading him that traitors had

admission to his cabinet.

The announcement of the publication by Curll of the joint letter of

August 23 had not the desired effect upon Swift. In his reply he took no

notice of the circumstance, and Pope, finding that nothing he could urge

would shake his resolution, addressed, in the beginning of March, 1737,

a statement of the case to Lord Orrery, who was then in Ireland, and

engaged him to second his entreaties. Lord Orrery obtained a promise

from Swift that the correspondence should be returned, and offered to be

the bearer of it. The Dean accordingly acquaints Pope, July 23, 1737,

that "when his lordship goes over, which will be, as he hopes, in about

ten days, he will take with him all the letters I preserved of yours."

"I cannot," said Swift, in making the communication, "trust my memory

half an hour," and this passage was a proof that he did not exaggerate

his infirmity. Lord Orrery had set sail in the middle of June, and under

the same date that Swift wrote from Ireland that his lordship would go

over in about ten days, his lordship wrote to Swift from England, "Your

commands are obeyed long ago. Dr. King has his cargo, Mrs. Barber her

Conversation, and Mr. Pope his letters." Mrs. Barber's Conversation was

the manuscript of the "Polite Conversation" of Swift, which she had

asked permission to print for her own advantage, and the cargo for Dr.

King was the manuscript of the "History of the Four Last Years of Queen

Anne," which the Dean was anxious to print for his own credit. But much

as it was in his thoughts at this time, he only remembered his settled

intention to send the papers--whether history, conversation, or

letters--by Lord Orrery, and the act by which the intention was

fulfilled had already faded from his mind. The understanding of Swift

was rapidly yielding to his mournful malady, and the first faculty to

suffer was his memory.

The letters of Pope were therefore in his own keeping, and out of the

power of Swift, before July 23, 1737. The Dean, however, informed him

that "by reading the dates he found a chasm of six years," and that he

had searched for the missing correspondence in vain. Pope did not

abandon the hope of recovering it, and Swift, apparently in reply to his

applications, wrote on August 8, 1738, to acquaint him that every letter

received from him for twenty years and upwards had been sealed up in

bundles, and consigned to the custody of Mrs. Whiteway, whom he

describes as "a very worthy, rational, and judicious cousin of mine."

Mrs. Whiteway, who had none of the papers, had a short time before kept

Swift from sending a similar fictitious account, but the idea had taken

deep root in his mind, and rightly conjecturing that he would reiterate

it, she engaged Lord Orrery to inform Pope that she had neither got any

of the correspondence herself, nor had the slightest knowledge where it

was.[134] On the present, as on the former occasion, Swift showed her

what he had written, and on the 24th of August he subjoined a postscript

in which, after saying that he would correct, if it were possible, the

blunders committed in his letter, he simply added that his cousin had

assured him that "a great collection of your/my letters to me/you are

put up and scaled, and in some very safe hand." The counter-assurance of

Mrs. Whiteway to Lord Orrery that she had no knowledge of the

collection, shows that the corrected version was as fanciful as the

original statement. Swift's language in 1738 would imply that the chasm

in the correspondence no longer existed, and that no part of the series

had yet been transmitted to England; but it was the language of a man

labouring under the misapprehension and obliviousness produced by

disease, and could have little weight in opposition to the testimony

that Pope had received back a packet of his letters in the previous

year. Any doubt which could have existed on the point is done away by

the admission of Pope himself. Mrs. Whiteway had refused in 1740 to send

back some of his letters by the mother of the Mr. Nugent, who afterwards

became Lord Clare, because the poet had authorised her to entrust them

to a Mr. M'Aulay. "I believe," Pope wrote to Mr. Nugent, "they had

entertained a jealousy of you, as the same persons did before of my Lord

Orrery. They then prevented the Dean from complying to any purpose with

my request. They then sent a few just to save appearances, and possibly

to serve as a sort of plea to excuse them of being taxed with this

proceeding, which is now thrown upon the Dean himself."[135] The

"proceeding" was the committing the correspondence to the press, and

Pope, on his own part, to avoid being taxed with it, was privately

putting forth the plea that the bulk of his letters had not been

returned to him. The confession that he had received a few is a complete

answer to the delusion of Swift, and they must have been more than a

very few, or they would not have been sufficient "to save appearances."

Setting aside the representations of the poet, upon which no dependence

can be placed, except when he bears witness against himself, there is

nothing to oppose, and much to confirm the idea that they were the

identical "few" which were published in the quarto of 1741.

When Swift first collected the letters in May, 1737, he mentioned that

they were not much above sixty, and in July, when they had been sent

away, and he described his past act in the language of intention, he

said they were not above twenty-five. His account in July, when the

correspondence was no longer under his eye, and when his failing memory

made him forget the departure of Lord Orrery, is far less reliable than

his account in May when he was fresh from the task of sorting the

letters. A smaller number than he specified appeared in the quarto

which, exclusive of the answers of the Dean, contains only forty. This

upon an average does not amount to two a year, and the poet, when he had

an end to serve, would not have scrupled to call even sixty "few" in

comparison with the many that had been written. Swift imagined that the

missing letters might have been lost on some of those occasions when he

had been compelled to entrust his papers to friends, and Pope may

honestly have believed that they were detained by designing persons; but

they were never published, while those which were printed have a chasm

of seven years, from June, 1716, to August, 1723, or only one year more

than the Dean detected in the series he got ready to despatch to

Twickenham. The new correspondence, like Pope's previous volumes, was

merely a selection, and there is but a single letter of the poet to

Swift in 1714, none whatever in 1715, and again but a single letter in

1716. The suppression of the letters in 1717, as in 1715, or even a slip

of memory or a slip of the pen with the Dean, both of which had become a

frequent occurrence, will account for the slight discrepancy between the

chasm in the printed volume, and the chasm which Swift announced. The

letter of August, 1723, is the joint letter of Pope and Bolingbroke,

which was sent corrected to Curll, and this is followed by a second gap

from August, 1723, to September 14, 1725. The extensive hiatus in the

correspondence of which Pope was forewarned by Swift, must in all reason

be supposed to be the chief deficiency of which Pope complained, though

in language coloured to suit his purpose; and when a similar blank

exists in the quarto, there is a strong presumption that the letters

which he acknowledged had been sent to save appearances, were the same

letters of which the book was composed. A kindred circumstance supports

the conclusion. The last letter of Pope in the quarto is dated March 23,

1737, which falls in with the fact that the collection was gathered

together in May and transmitted to him in June; but if the volume of

1741 had proceeded from Swift, it would be a curious coincidence, that

not a single line written by the poet since the time when his

correspondence was returned to him should have found its way into the

work.

It is against the innocence of Pope that in his public statements he

kept out of sight the fact that he had received back a certain portion

of the correspondence, and designedly conveyed the impression that the

whole of it remained with Swift. In the advertisement to the quarto it

is said that Pope could not be prevailed upon to revise the volume

printed in Dublin; but that he had furnished the London booksellers with

a few more of the letters of the Dean a little to clear up the history

of their publication. The reader is informed that he will see this

history in one view if he observes the passages marked by inverted

commas. The story they reveal is that Swift ultimately promised to send

the correspondence, that he collected it for the purpose, and ended by

sending none of it. The Dean's communication of August 8 is produced as

exhibiting the final result, and Pope marked with inverted commas the

declaration, "I can faithfully assure you that every letter you have

favoured me with, these twenty years and more, are sealed up in bundles

and delivered to Mrs. Whiteway." The sense in which the poet wished the

passage to be understood is defined in the table of contents. "The

entire collection of his and Mr. Pope's letters for twenty years and

upwards found, and in the hands of a lady, a worthy and judicious

relation of the Dean's.--This a mistake, not in hers, but in some other

safe hands." A note was added by Pope to the letter for the purpose of

strengthening the case against Swift; but not one syllable did he let

drop to indicate that the Dean was deceived in supposing that the series

remained unbroken, and that no part of it had been sent back. The

testimony of another witness, which had the appearance of corroborating

the error, was produced by the poet. The assertion in the postscript

that Mrs. Whiteway vouched for "a great collection being in some very

safe hand," seems to have beguiled him into the belief that the missing

letters had turned up, and Lord Orrery having lately come from Ireland

he applied to him on the subject. Lord Orrery answered, that Mrs.

Whiteway knew nothing of the letters, that he was satisfied they were

neither lost nor burnt, and that his attempts to discover where they

were deposited had been fruitless. To us, who are aware that Lord Orrery

had been the bearer of an instalment of the correspondence, it is plain

that he is referring to that portion of it which could not be found when

he carried over the remainder. To those who had only before them the

version contained in the quarto, and who merely read of an intention to

send letters by him in July, 1737, which had not been forwarded in

August, 1738, his general expressions in answer to Pope would appear to

apply to the whole of the correspondence, and seem a confirmation of the

delusion of Swift. The poet made himself responsible for the

misconceptions of the Dean by marking them with inverted commas, by

supporting them with specious subsidiary evidence, and attesting that

they embodied the history of the publication; and since they leave an

impression which he knew to be false upon the precise particular which

implicates himself, his disingenuous sanction of the error must be

considered to be the act of conscious guilt.

"I should think with you, madam," Lord Orrery wrote to Mrs. Whiteway,

"that some of Mr. Pope's servants had stolen the letters, did not many

appear from various people to the Dean, of which Mr. Pope cannot be

supposed either to have seen the copies or originals." With our present

information, the letters in the collection which are not from the pen of

Pope tell the other way, and contribute in a powerful degree to fix the

publication on him. The replies of Swift, together with much of Swift's

correspondence with Gay, are included in the volume, and it will be

found upon examination that all these materials were likely to have been

furnished by the poet, and that part of them could have been furnished

by nobody else. He has twice touched upon the subject in the annotations

to the quarto. The first note is attached to the heading, "Letters of

Dr. Swift to Mr. Gray," and states that they were "found among Mr. Gay's

papers, and returned to Dr. Swift by the Duke of Queensberry and Mr.

Pope." The second note is appended to that portion of the postscript of

August 24, 1738, in which the Dean mentions "a great collection of

your/my letters to me/you." "It is written," subjoins the poet, "just

thus in the original. The book that is now printed seems to be part of

the collection here spoken of, as it contains not only the letters of

Mr. Pope, but of Dr. Swift, both to him and Mr. Gay, which were returned

him after Mr. Gay's death, though any mention made by Mr. P. of the

return or exchange of letters has been industriously suppressed in the

publication, and only appears by some of the answers."

The case of Gay is first to be considered. There is not an allusion in

any of the "answers," either to the exchange of the letters which passed

between Gay and Swift, or the return of the letters which Swift

addressed to Gay. An exchange, at all events, had not taken place. The

letters of Gay were retained by Swift, and after the death of the Dean

they were printed from the originals. Three only are contained in the

quarto of 1741, and these are joint productions of Gay and Pope,[136]

which would naturally have been made over to the latter when he

reclaimed the whole of his correspondence with Swift. If the Dean was

the culprit we must believe that while publishing, or permitting others

to publish, his own letters to Gay, he deliberately excluded every one

of Gay's replies, with the exception of the three in which Pope had a

share. If Pope was the culprit the peculiarity is explained. He

published the three letters which, being in part his own writing, had

been sent back to him in 1737, and he published no others because the

rest of the letters of Gay were not in his possession.

As the Duke of Queensberry was living, the introduction of his name is a

species of guarantee that Swift had received back his letters to Gay;

but the conclusion does not follow, which Pope intended to be drawn,

that the Dean must therefore have supplied them to the printer. "One

thing," says Swift to Gay, Nov. 20, 1729, "you are to consider, because

it is an old compact, that when I write to you, or Mr. Pope, I write to

both." On the death of Gay the correspondence passed a second time

through Pope's hands, and with his habit at that period of getting the

letters of his intimates, as well as his own letters, transcribed for

future use, it may readily be imagined that he would not miss the

opportunity of securing a valuable collection, in which he may be said

to have had a common property with his departed friend[137]. Hence it

happens that copies of all Swift's letters to Gay, together with one

that was not printed, are preserved among the Oxford manuscripts, and

with this evidence that the entire series was not less in the power of

Pope than of Swift, suspicion must incline to the one who had made

elaborate preparations for publication, and who had shown himself eager

for it. The suppression too of Gay's replies, contrary to the general

rule observed in the work, would here again favour the opinion that the

letters of Swift were sent to the press by the person to whom the

replies were inaccessible, and not by the person who had the

correspondence on both sides at his command.

The assertion that the letters were returned which Swift addressed to

Pope, is next to be examined. According to the poet his surrender of

them appears from _some_ of the answers of Swift; but the single passage

by which it is implied, is that in which the Dean speaks of "a great

collection of [your/my] letters to [me/you]." The very letter in which

the sentence occurs commences with a lament by Swift that he has

"entirely lost his memory," and the strange double form in which he

describes the correspondence seems chiefly to indicate a consciousness

that his recollection of its nature was uncertain and confused. On one

half of the subject he had manifested his misconceptions a few days

before. He had forgotten the chasm in the series of Pope's letters, had

forgotten that any of them had been restored to their author, had

forgotten Mrs. Whiteway's denial that she possessed them, and when she

again corrected him, continued to fancy they were deposited with some

person he knew not whom, in some place he knew not where. His notions

respecting his letters to Pope were not likely to be better founded than

his notions respecting the letters of Pope to him. But more than this,

he only professed to make the statement upon the authority of his

cousin, and his cousin disavowed all knowledge of the collection. Far

from being aware that the Dean had received back his letters to Pope,

she expressed her conviction that the materials for the printed volume

could not have been drawn from Ireland, just because those letters

formed part of it.[138] The literal interpretation of a single phrase of

Swift, in a letter which bears internal evidence of the grievous extent

of his malady, being negatived by the authority upon which it claims to

be based, there still exists the ambiguous assurance of Pope that he

returned the correspondence after the death of Gay, which happened in

December, 1732. The replies, however, of Swift in the quarto, instead of

stopping at this date, extend to August, 1738, and those of the last

half-dozen years must have remained with the poet. The Dean had said in

1717, that he kept no copies of letters. Mrs. Whiteway testified that he

had never taken a copy during the twelve years she had been at his

elbow, "excepting of a letter to a lord-lieutenant or a bishop, whom he

feared might make an ill use of it;" and as for the letters to Pope she

had seen him write them, and send them off immediately. Letters of which

Pope had the originals, and Swift no copies, must plainly have owed

their publicity to Pope.

There is another inconsistency which makes it very doubtful whether the

poet could have sent back the earlier letters of Swift any more than

the later. After informing the Dean, on December 30, 1736, that the

joint letter of August, 1723, had been recently printed by Curll, Pope

went on to say, "Your answer to that letter, he has not got; it has

never been out of my custody; for whatever is lent is lost, wit as well

as money, to these needy poetical readers." Here we have Pope avowing

that he retained in 1736 an answer of the Dean, which belonged to the

year 1723. There is no indication that it was an exception to the rest

of the correspondence, and the presumption therefore is that none of the

letters which Pope received from Swift had been restored upon the death

of Gay in 1732. The poet's assertion is rendered more suspicious by the

absence of all allusion to the circumstance in the arguments which he

addressed through Lord Orrery to Swift, in March, 1737, with a view to

convince him that his refusal to return Pope's own letters was unjust.

No plea could have had greater force than the statement that Pope had

already sent back the letters of Swift, and was only asking the Dean to

deal by him as he had dealt by the Dean.

Although we were to suppose, against the evidence, that the poet had

given up the whole of the originals, he must still have retained copies.

He avowedly inserted six letters of the Dean in the quarto to clear up

the history of the publication, and four of the number belong to the

years 1732 and 1733, which shows that Pope continued to have the command

of the correspondence at the period of its appearance in 1741. Indeed

copies of five of the published letters of Swift to Pope, with eight

that are unpublished, are in the Oxford papers, and since none of the

six, which the poet contributed to the quarto, are among them, more must

have existed, unless he had kept the originals. That he had never parted

with them is the just conclusion from the facts,[139] and his note is

one of those instances in which he had recourse to the licence he

allowed himself of "equivocating genteelly." The letters of Swift to

Gay may be presumed to have been returned to Swift, when the Duke of

Queensberry examined Gay's papers after his death. The expressions in

the Dean's child-like postscript of August 24 gave a colour to the

notion that he had also got back his letters to Pope. The admission

suggested to the poet to draw up a note which, read by the ordinary

rules of language, affirms that the letters to himself were returned, as

well as the letters to Gay, but in which the return of the letters, by a

forced construction, might be made to apply to Gay alone, who is the

immediate antecedent. This accounts for the death of Gay having been

fixed upon for the era of the alleged restoration to the Dean of his

correspondence with Pope, though there was no connection between the

events, and though the choice of so early a date left unexplained the

appearance in the quarto of the subsequent letters of Swift. That "any

mention made by Mr. P. of the return or exchange of letters should be

industriously suppressed" by Mr. P. "in the publication," was a

necessary consequence, or it would have been manifest that the only

letters which had been returned were those of Gay. By evasions like

these the poet satisfied a conscience that held a lie to be justifiable,

provided it was couched in language which could be wrested by the

deceiver into a different sense from what it bore to the deceived.

The correspondence between Swift and Bolingbroke completed the series,

which Pope complained was printed without his consent. Of the eight

letters from Bolingbroke, seven were written in conjunction with the

poet. These joint compositions, like the partnership letters of Gay, are

exactly those which would have been returned to Pope. One of the number

furnishes evidence, which almost amounts to a demonstration, that the

collection of 1741 proceeded from himself. When he brought out the

avowed edition of his letters in 1737, he inserted at the end of the

volume a letter of Swift, a letter of his own, and the joint letter from

himself and Bolingbroke, of which Curll had obtained a copy. This little

supplement was ushered in by a notice which says, "Since the foregoing

sheets were printed off, the following letters having been published

without the consent of their writers, we have added them, though not in

the order of time." Whatever the motive the announcement was deceptive.

The letter of Swift was his reply to the joint letter of Pope and

Bolingbroke--that very reply which the poet boasted a month or two

before could not be produced surreptitiously, because it had never been

out of his custody. Nobody else, by his own showing, had the power to

make it public, no earlier impression of it is known to exist, and, as

will be seen by comparing it with the copy from the Oxford papers, it

was printed with omissions and variations, which must have been the act

of the poet, or he would have restored the genuine readings when he

included it in his appendix. In juxtaposition with it is a letter from

Pope to Swift, dated December 10, 1725, which in like manner has never

been found in any prior publication, and which of all his letters to the

Dean is the single one we are certain was in his power when the quarto

of 1737 was in the press. He transcribed the original at the time it was

written, and sent a copy to Lord Oxford, ostensibly to let him see the

way in which he was mentioned in it, but partly, perhaps, because the

poet thought well of the production.[140] This letter of December, 1725,

reappears in tho quarto of 1741, with the addition for the first time of

a postscript by Bolingbroke. A copy of the entire performance is among

the Oxford papers, and reveals the fact that the Pope portion, and the

Bolingbroke portion, are both abridged in the published version. Yet

although the persons who brought out the collection of 1741, had the

manuscript before them, or they could not have given Bolingbroke's share

of the letter, they nevertheless, by a marvellous coincidence, print

Pope's share precisely as it had been printed by Pope himself in 1737.

The conclusion is irresistible that the editor of the quarto of 1737,

was the editor of the collection of 1741. The postscript of Bolingbroke

was not written when he was in the house with Pope, but was added

subsequently when he got back to Dawley,[141] and its omission from the

volume of 1737 was due to the circumstance, that the poet had not then

received back his correspondence from Swift, and only possessed a copy

of his own carefully composed essay.

The letter of Bolingbroke to Swift, in which the poet had no share, was

commenced at Aix-la-Chapelle on August 30, 1729, and completed at Dawley

on October 5. Pope appears not to have seen it before it was sent; for

four days later, on October 9, he says to Swift, "Lord Bolingbroke has

told me ten times over, he was going to write to you. Has he or not?"

The elaborate epistle of Bolingbroke was a reply to a letter which Swift

had addressed to Pope, and the consequent interest that Pope would have

had in the answer, may have induced the author, proud of his production,

to provide him with a copy; but however he came by it, a copy was

deposited by him in Lord Oxford's library, where, as in the quarto of

1741, it is the single example of an epistle by Bolingbroke alone. Swift

had by him a quantity of Bolingbroke's correspondence, some of which

would have been full as appropriate as the specimen that is given, and

it is a weighty fact in the question whether the Dean or the poet

furnished the materials to the printer, that the one letter selected was

the one letter that Pope possessed. The three letters which are inserted

from Swift to Bolingbroke incline the scale to the same side. The first

relates in part to Pope, the conclusion of the second is addressed to

him, and the third is the answer to the letter of August 30, 1729. It

was never pretended that the Dean received back his letters to

Bolingbroke, and it was not his habit to make copies; but with our

knowledge that the poet and Bolingbroke had much of their correspondence

with Swift in common, we may be sure that these three letters, at least,

had been in the hands of Pope, and if he did not retain the originals,

it would in 1729, the year to which they all belong, have been in

accordance with his common practice to transcribe them.

Thus what was printed of the correspondence, and what was not printed,

concur to show that Pope must have been the source from which it was

derived. The history of the circumstances under which the publication

took place will confirm this inference. Pope asserted that the quarto

was "copied from an impression sent from Dublin." There is now proof in

abundance that the Dublin edition, which came out as the seventh volume

of Swift's works, was copied from an impression sent from England. Mr.

Deane Swift, a cousin of his famous namesake, and the son-in-law of Mrs.

Whiteway, informed Mr. Nichols, in 1778, that "he was the only person

then living who could give a full account how Faulkner's seventh volume,

that is, how Swift's and Pope's correspondence came to be, not _first

printed_, but first published in Ireland."[142] The italics are Mr.

Swift's own, and the fact on which he laid such especial emphasis is at

once attested and explained by the statement of Faulkner himself to Dr.

Birch in August, 1749. "Mr. Pope," he said, "sent to Ireland to Dr.

Swift, by Mr. Gerrard, an Irish gentleman, then at Bath, a printed copy

of their letters, with an anonymous letter, which occasioned Dr. Swift

to give Mr. Faulkner leave to reprint them at Dublin, though Mr. Pope's

edition was published first."[143] Faulkner also solicited the sanction

of Pope, and we have the poet's summary of the application, in the

letter he wrote to Mr. Nugent on August 14, 1740: "Last week I received

an account from Faulkner, the Dublin bookseller, that the Dean himself

has given him a collection of letters of his own and mine, and others,

to be printed, and he civilly asks my consent, assuring me the Dean

declares them genuine, and that Mr. Swift, Mrs. Whiteway's son-in-law,

will correct the press, out of his great respect to the Dean and myself.

He says they were collected by some unknown persons, and the copy sent

with a letter importing that it was criminal to suppress such an amiable

picture of the Dean, and his private character appearing in those

letters, and that if he would not publish them in his lifetime others

would after his death." It is manifest from these particulars that

Faulkner was not then aware that Pope himself had sent the

correspondence to Swift, and the conviction was only forced upon his

mind by subsequent events. But the bookseller could not be mistaken on

the point that the letters were handed to him in print. As he later told

Dr. Birch that the Dean had given him leave to reprint them because they

were printed already, so he proclaimed that his volume was a reprint at

the time. He inserted at the end of his _first_ edition the few new

letters which were added in the quarto of 1741, and says that he found

them in the London impression "after he had _reprinted_ the foregoing

sheets." Faulkner had no sort of motive to deceive. Whether the letters

were in type or in manuscript he had equally received them from Swift,

and obtained his authority to publish them.

If further testimony is required it is supplied by Pope. To the mention

of Mrs. Whiteway in Lord Orrery's letter of 1738 the poet appended a

note in which he says, "This lady since gave Mr. Pope the strongest

assurances that she had used her utmost endeavours to prevent the

publication--nay, went so far as to secrete the book, till it was

commanded from her, and delivered to the Dublin printer, whereupon her

son-in-law, D. Swift, Esq., insisted upon writing a preface to justify

Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it, and to lay it upon the corrupt

practices of the printers in London; but this he would not agree to, as

not knowing the truth of the fact." It was therefore a book, and a

_printed_ book, which was delivered to Faulkner, since if the collection

transmitted to the Dean had been in manuscript, Mrs. Whiteway and her

son-in-law would not have laid it upon the corrupt practices of the

printers, and it must have been transmitted from England, or they would

neither have laid it upon the printers of London, nor have proposed "to

justify Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it." The story was told him

while it could be refuted if it was false; but he did not venture to

question the existence of the printed volume, and had nothing more to

say than that he did not personally know that it was due to the corrupt

practices of the London booksellers. He might have gone further, and

stated that he knew the booksellers to be innocent.

The assertion of Faulkner, that it was Pope who sent this volume to

Swift, is equally supported by unexceptionable evidence. The collection

of 1735 was secretly printed and sold to Curll, and when a secretly

printed work turns out to be the origin of the collection of 1741, the

nature of the device proclaims its author. But the circumstance which

most implicates Pope is his anxiety that it should not transpire that a

printed volume had been sent to Swift at all. He informed his friend

Allen that he had endeavoured to put a stop to the work, and that this

had drawn forth replies from the "Dean's people--the women and the

bookseller." With their statements before him, he kept back from Allen

the main fact that the Dublin volume was taken entirely from a printed

copy, and speaks instead as if it was taken from the originals. He adds

that it is too manifest to admit of any doubt how many tricks have been

played with the Dean's papers, and accused his "people" of secreting

them as long as they feared he would not permit them to be published.

This dishonest substitution of "originals" and "papers" for the printed