stody."[146] Mrs. Whiteway had merely undertaken to return to Pope
the letters which were written by Pope, and it is not apparent why the
printing of several of the letters of Bolingbroke should have involved
the conclusion that she was practising a feint, and would only have sent
a few of no consequence. The incongruity of the observation seems to
have been the result of the guilt which dictated it. The poet was aware
that the originals promised him were a comparatively small number, which
had no connection with the printed letters, and he was meeting the
circumstance by anticipation, in the probable event of its reaching the
ears of Mr. Nugent. The rest of the correspondence was already in his
possession, and he assigned a foolish reason why Mrs. Whiteway would not
have sent it, because the real reason could not be stated.

It was several months subsequent to this communication to Mr. Nugent,
and after he had received the comments of Mrs. Whiteway on the volume
which came from England, that he opened his griefs to Mr. Allen. The
letter is not dated; but a letter to Warburton, which gives a portion of
the same information as a piece of novel intelligence, bears the date of
February 4, 1741. "They now offer," Pope tells Allen, "to send me the
originals, which have been so long detained, and I will accept of them,
though they have done their job." A few months later he reverted to the
subject and says to Allen, "It will please you to know that I have
received the packet of letters safe from Ireland by the means of Lord
Orrery."[147] He has not the candour to acknowledge that the letters
were voluntarily tendered him by Mrs. Whiteway long before the printed
collection had been heard of. He wished to have it believed that they
had only been offered to him since the booksellers "had done their job,"
and the motive for this deception must have been the desire to identify
the letters from Mrs. Whiteway with the letters in Faulkner's volume,
while he had a secret consciousness that they had nothing in common. It
might be conjectured, indeed, that he was speaking of a distinct
occurrence, and that Lord Orrery was the bearer of two sets of letters,
though Pope mentions only one, if it were not certain, as I shall now
proceed to show, that the originals of the printed collection sent to
Dublin were never offered to him at all.

After the collection had been consigned to Faulkner, Mrs. Whiteway wrote
her sentiments at large to Lor