om 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 occasi