ay'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 n