you
say of your letters," he wrote April 22, 1736, "my resolution is to
direct my executors to send you all your letters well sealed and
pacquetted, and leave them entirely to your disposal. These things are
all tied up, endorsed and locked in a cabinet, and I have not one
servant who can properly be said to write or read. No mortal shall copy
them, but you shall surely have them when I am no more." Since Swift
persisted in believing that he could protect private papers from Curll
quite as efficiently as the poet, who had signally failed in the
attempt, Pope reversed his petition, and disclosing his real intention,
begged that he might have them to print. "I told him," he says, in his
account to Lord Orrery, "as soon as I found myself obliged to publish an
edition of my letters to my great sorrow, that I wished to make use of
some of these, nor did I think any part of my correspondence would do me
a greater honour, and be really a greater pleasure to me, than what
might preserve the memory how well we loved one another. I find the Dean
was not quite of the same opinion, or he would not, I think, have denied
this." When Pope affected in 1729 to depreciate his correspondence with
Swift, that he might mask his design in gathering together his other
letters, he had even smiled to reflect "how gloriously our epistles
would fall short of every ingenious reader's expectations." He now
maintained that "our epistles" would confer upon him a vast deal of
honour, which he could not suppose would be obtained by balking
expectation. But though none of these inconsistencies are immaterial,
the most important circumstance, and one which bears upon the whole of
the subsequent evidence, is that Pope was pining for the publication of
the letters, and Swift would not consent to it.

An event happened opportunely to assist the solicitations of the poet.
Towards the close of 1736 Curll printed a couple of letters to Swift, of
which the first was written by Pope, and the second by Bolingbroke. The
bookseller announced that they were transmitted to him from Ireland,
together with several other valuable originals, and Pope on the 30th of
December employed this practical proof to convince the Dean that the
correspondence was not safe in his custody. The two letters, as they
were called, were in fact a joint epistle; for not only does the portion
of Bolingbroke purport to be a continuation of the portion of the poet,
but Swift, who had been abs