These things are all tied up, endorsed and locked in a cabinet, and I have not one servant who can properly be said to write or read. No mortal shall copy them, but you shall surely have them when I am no more." Since Swift persisted in believing that he could protect private papers from Curll quite as efficiently as the poet, who had signally failed in the attempt, Pope reversed his petition, and disclosing his real intention, begged that he might have them to print. "I told him," he says, in his account to Lord Orrery, "as soon as I found myself obliged to publish an edition of my letters to my great sorrow, that I wished to make use of some of these, nor did I think any part of my correspondence would do me a greater honour, and be really a greater pleasure to me, than what might preserve the memory how well we loved one another. I find the Dean was not quite of the same opinion, or he would not, I think, have denied this." When Pope affected in 1729 to depreciate his correspondence with Swift, that he might mask his design in gathering together his other letters, he had even smiled to reflect "how gloriously our epistles would fall short of every ingenious reader's expectations." He now maintained that "our epistles" would confer upon him a vast deal of honour, which he could not suppose would be obtained by balking expectation. But though none of these inconsistencies are immaterial, the most important circumstance, and one which bears upon the whole of the subsequent evidence, is that Pope was pining for the publication of the letters, and Swift would not consent to it.