to you. Has he or not?"
The elaborate epistle of Bolingbroke was a reply to a letter which Swift
had addressed to Pope, and the consequent interest that Pope would have
had in the answer, may have induced the author, proud of his production,
to provide him with a copy; but however he came by it, a copy was
deposited by him in Lord Oxford's library, where, as in the quarto of
1741, it is the single example of an epistle by Bolingbroke alone. Swift
had by him a quantity of Bolingbroke's correspondence, some of which
would have been full as appropriate as the specimen that is given, and
it is a weighty fact in the question whether the Dean or the poet
furnished the materials to the printer, that the one letter selected was
the one letter that Pope possessed. The three letters which are inserted
from Swift to Bolingbroke incline the scale to the same side. The first
relates in part to Pope, the conclusion of the second is addressed to
him, and the third is the answer to the letter of August 30, 1729. It
was never pretended that the Dean received back his letters to
Bolingbroke, and it was not his habit to make copies; but with our
knowledge that the poet and Bolingbroke had much of their correspondence
with Swift in common, we may be sure that these three letters, at least,
had been in the hands of Pope, and if he did not retain the originals,
it would in 1729, the year to which they all belong, have been in
accordance with his common practice to transcribe them.

Thus what was printed of the correspondence, and what was not printed,
concur to show that Pope must have been the source from which it was
derived. The history of the circumstances under which the publication
took place will confirm this inference. Pope asserted that the quarto
was "copied from an impression sent from Dublin." There is now proof in
abundance that the Dublin edition, which came out as the seventh volume
of Swift's works, was copied from an impression sent from England. Mr.
Deane Swift, a cousin of his famous namesake, and the son-in-law of Mrs.
Whiteway, informed Mr. Nichols, in 1778, that "he was the only person
then living who could give a full account how Faulkner's seventh volume,
that is, how Swift's and Pope's correspondence came to be, not _first
printed_, but first published in Ireland."[142] The italics are Mr.
Swift's own, and the fact on which he laid such especial emphasis is at
once attested and explained by the statement of Faulkner