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that are unpublished, are in the Oxford papers, and since none of the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