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 custody."[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.