the anomaly is that, after the quarto in its original form had passed through the press, Pope saw reason to cancel the opening part of the volume which preceded Swift's correspondence with Gay. The materials in their second form occupied more space than in their first, and instead of filling only 88 pages in the quarto, and 84 in the folio, run on to 115 in the one, and 108 in the other. The consequence is that the pages in excess bear the same numbers with the succeeding uncancelled pages which could not be altered. The process is rendered further apparent by the signatures to the sheets. In both folio and quarto, those on the surplus pages, in the cancelled division of the volume, have an asterisk affixed to denote that the signatures had been already employed;[151] but though the sheets have this mark of repetition, they are placed in the volume before the uncancelled sheets which retain the primitive signatures, and which did not admit of any change. In the quarto, again, a half sheet precedes the letters to Gay, which could not have happened unless it had been a subsequent interpolation, when the matter was insufficient to make the sheet complete. The half-sheet, the duplicate paging, and the duplicate signatures, are all the result of the insertion of fresh materials after the work was struck off, and betray that there was an earlier form of the quarto of 1741, which contained less than the Dublin edition, and which, therefore, being prior to it, is a proof that the correspondence was originally printed by Pope. The letters in the quarto are numbered, and since the series is unbroken throughout, the original cancelled division must ostensibly have comprised as many letters as when it was subsequently enlarged. But a letter to Gay, dated Nov. 23, 1727, is found by the copies preserved in the Oxford papers, to be compounded of three distinct letters, and this system of fusion would have permitted the introduction of large additions without deranging the continuity Of the numbers, which Pope would have been anxious to preserve. The cancels he made to suit his varying views were in accordance with his practice. The miscellaneous prose works, which follow the letters, have in one place alone a cancel of upwards of a hundred pages. Equally characteristic was the desire to preserve any of the old sheets which could be retained, regardless of the blemish to the book, and the trace they might afford of his manoeuvres. It was a repetition of the paper-sparing policy which led him to incorporate the suppressed sheets of his Wycherley into the volume of 1735.[152]