ning
to those who were acquainted with the facts, and another to the
multitude who were in the dark. He had the contradictory ends to answer
of propitiating Mrs. Whiteway and concealing the truth, and his
language, like everything he wrote on the question, is consequently
vague and evasive.

In the same letter in which Pope ignored the existence of the printed
book to Allen, and pretended that the Irish edition was taken directly
from the originals, he further asserted that the "Dean's people" had at
length consented to give up the manuscripts. If the originals were
really in their possession there would be strong grounds for concluding
that the conspirators were at Dublin. If, on the contrary, the
allegation of the poet was a wilful untruth, this additional
misrepresentation must lead us to conclude that he was the author of a
fraud from which he defended himself by falsehood. Mrs. Whiteway had, it
is true, commissioned Mr. Nugent to acquaint him that she had secured
several of his letters. Mr. Nugent, having delivered the message in
March, 1740, informs her in April that he was authorised to receive
them, and begs her to transmit them to him in London by a safe
hand.[145] She evidently preferred that they should go direct to their
owner, and wrote to Pope in May, that she would forward them by the
first trustworthy messenger who would deliver them to Pope himself. It
was agreed between them that Mr. M'Aulay should be the person; but they
were ultimately sent to Lord Orrery, at his country seat in Ireland, in
January or February, 1741, and were, no doubt, conveyed by him to their
final destination when he visited England in March. The critic in the
Athenaeum plausibly conjectures that they were the letters which had been
written since the transmission of the collection in June, 1737, and the
late period at which they were received would account for none of them
appearing in the quarto, which was published by the middle of April,
1741.

When Pope, at the beginning of August, 1740, heard from Faulkner that
the Dean had given him permission to print, or rather to reprint, the
correspondence, he expressed his conviction to Mr. Nugent, who was still
meddling in the business, that the offer of returning the letters was a
feint. "I presume now," he added, "that she would have sent but a few of
no consequence, for the bookseller tells me there are several of Lord
Bolingbroke's, &c., which must have been in the Dean's own
cu