After the collection had been consigned to Faulkner, Mrs. Whiteway wrote her sentiments at large to Lord 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, where it would meet the eye of the persons implicated, the fable he had palmed off upon Allen in private. Nay, when stating in the quarto that Mrs. Whiteway and her son-in-law charged the whole proceeding upon the corrupt practices of the London printers, he still did not venture to retort that the originals had never left the custody of the "Dean's people," who detained them in Dublin until, according to