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