know no reason why, at this distance of time, the Examiners, and other political papers written in the queen's reign, might not be inserted. I doubt you have been too negligent in keeping copies[1]: but I have them bound up, and most of them single besides. I lent Mr. Corbet[2] that paper to correct his Gulliver by; and it was from that I mended my own. There is every single alteration from the original copy; and the printed book abounds with all those errours which should be avoided in the new edition.'
"Had Dr. Swift attended to this advice, the present publication would undoubtedly have been superseded; or, could the editor have fortunately obtained the collection so diligently made by Mr. Ford, it would have been a collateral proof of authenticity, and have probably increased the number of the Dean's political pamphlets. Those which are now printed are all which the editor has met with; and each of them is separately left to vouch for its own excellence, and for the authority on which it has been admitted into this volume.
"The lighter prose parts of the collection have been selected, by various accidents, from different
- ↑ Mrs. Whiteway, in a letter to Mr. Pope, May 16, 1740, says, "A few years ago he burnt most of his writings unprinted, exeept a few loose papers which are in my possession, and which I promise you (if I outlive him) shall never be made publick without your approbation. There is one Treatise in his own keeping, called Advice to Servants, very unfinished and incorrect; yet what is done of it has so much humour, that it may appear as a posthumous work. The History of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne's Reign I suppose you have seen with Dr. King, to whom he sent it some time ago, and, if I am rightly informed, is the only piece of his (except Gulliver) which he ever proposed making money by, and was given to Dr. King with that design."
- ↑ Dr. Swift's successor as dean of St. Patrick's.
