d Orrery. She asked him, with reference to
a letter of Pope's, if he believed the collection genuine, and slight as
were her doubts, the question would have been absurd if she had
professedly the originals of the correspondence in her hands. She
declared her conviction that the poet had been betrayed by his own
servants, and since the letters extended over three and twenty years,
she could not have imagined that they had all the while been intercepted
on their road to the post, but must have assumed that they had been
abstracted from the cabinets in which they were stored away at
Twickenham. The main stress of her argument against the theory that the
work had been concocted in Ireland, was laid upon the presence of the
letters of the Dean, which Pope alone could command, and not upon the
letters of Pope, which might have been copied while they remained in the
possession of Swift; but she pointed out the improbability of the
supposition by remarking that no use had been made of the book in which
Swift had stitched specimens of the correspondence of various eminent
men, and which was peculiarly accessible from his habit of circulating
it among his friends. In particular, she noticed that she had formerly
his permission to take from it a letter of Pope, and she triumphantly
remarks that this letter had not been printed. The boast could have had
no force if all the printed correspondence had been the same
correspondence she had promised to return. The notion that she had
offered to send back the originals of the collection of 1741 is
inconsistent with every part of her defence--a defence in which she was
not afraid to challenge contradiction, since she authorised Lord Orrery
to pass it on to Pope. Neither could the originals have been offered by
Faulkner; for both at the time and afterwards he asserted that his
volume was only a reprint. Pope may even be said to bear testimony
against himself. He was eager to make it appear that the work was
composed of materials which must have been drawn from the papers of
Swift, and he took advantage of the erroneous phrase in Swift's
postscript of August 24, to add, in a note, "The book that is now
printed _seems_ to be part of the collection here spoken of." The
announcement that the "Dean's people" had acknowledged that they
possessed a large proportion of the originals would have decided the
question, and the silence of the poet is an admission that he dared not
repeat in public, wher