he described his past act in the language of intention, he
said they were not above twenty-five. His account in July, when the
correspondence was no longer under his eye, and when his failing memory
made him forget the departure of Lord Orrery, is far less reliable than
his account in May when he was fresh from the task of sorting the
letters. A smaller number than he specified appeared in the quarto
which, exclusive of the answers of the Dean, contains only forty. This
upon an average does not amount to two a year, and the poet, when he had
an end to serve, would not have scrupled to call even sixty "few" in
comparison with the many that had been written. Swift imagined that the
missing letters might have been lost on some of those occasions when he
had been compelled to entrust his papers to friends, and Pope may
honestly have believed that they were detained by designing persons; but
they were never published, while those which were printed have a chasm
of seven years, from June, 1716, to August, 1723, or only one year more
than the Dean detected in the series he got ready to despatch to
Twickenham. The new correspondence, like Pope's previous volumes, was
merely a selection, and there is but a single letter of the poet to
Swift in 1714, none whatever in 1715, and again but a single letter in
1716. The suppression of the letters in 1717, as in 1715, or even a slip
of memory or a slip of the pen with the Dean, both of which had become a
frequent occurrence, will account for the slight discrepancy between the
chasm in the printed volume, and the chasm which Swift announced. The
letter of August, 1723, is the joint letter of Pope and Bolingbroke,
which was sent corrected to Curll, and this is followed by a second gap
from August, 1723, to September 14, 1725. The extensive hiatus in the
correspondence of which Pope was forewarned by Swift, must in all reason
be supposed to be the chief deficiency of which Pope complained, though
in language coloured to suit his purpose; and when a similar blank
exists in the quarto, there is a strong presumption that the letters
which he acknowledged had been sent to save appearances, were the same
letters of which the book was composed. A kindred circumstance supports
the conclusion. The last letter of Pope in the quarto is dated March 23,
1737, which falls in with the fact that the collection was gathered
together in May and transmitted to him in June; but if the volume of
1741 had proce