Edmund Curll is, perhaps, as a name, better known to casual readers than any other bookseller of this period, and it is not a little comforting to find that the obloquy with which he has ever been associated was richly merited. He was born in the west of England, and after passing through several menial capacities, became a bookseller’s assistant, and then kept a stall in the purlieus of Covent Garden. The year of his birth is unknown, and the writer of a contemporary memoir, _The Life and Writings of E. C--l_, who prophesied that “if he go on in the paths of glory he has hitherto trod,” his name would appear in the _Newgate Calendar_, has unluckily been deceived. He appears to have first commenced publishing in the year 1708, and to have combined that honourable task with the vending of quack pills and powders for the afflicted. The first book he published was _An Explication of a Famous Passage in the Dialogue of St. Justin Martyr with Typhon, concerning the Immortality of Human Souls_, bearing the date of 1708; and, curiously enough, religious books formed in aftertime a very large portion of his stock, side by side, of course, with the most filthy and ribald works that have ever been issued. In 1716 began his quarrel with Pope, originating as far as we know in the publication of the _Court Poems_, the advertisement of which said that the coffee-house critics assigned them either to a Lady of Quality, Mr. Gay, or the translator of _Homer_. It is not clear now whether Pope was really annoyed by the appearance of the volume, or whether he had first secretly promoted it, and then endeavoured to divert suspicion. At all events, he had a meeting with Curll at the “Swan Tavern,” in Fleet Street, where, writes the bookseller, “My brother, Lintot, drank his half-pint of old hock, Mr. Pope his half-pint of sack, and I the same quantity of an emetic powder; but no threatenings past. Mr. Pope, indeed, said that no satire should be printed (tho’ he has now changed his mind). I answered that they should not be wrote, for if they were they would be printed.” Curll, on entering the tavern, declared he had been poisoned, and for months the town was amused with broadsides and pamphlets relative to the affair. Pope afterwards published his version of the story in his _Miscellanies_; the “Full and True Account” is, however, as gross and unquotable as Curll’s own worst publication. Later on in the same year the bookseller fell into a fresh scrape. A Latin discourse had been pronounced at the funeral of Robert South by the captain of Westminster School, and Curll, thinking it would be readily purchased by the public, “did th’ oration print, Imperfect, with false Latin in’t,”