He did this without much regard to anything except the manufacture of something which he thought would read well, and exhibit himself in an amiable light and in a sweet, unpremeditated strain. This done, the little poet destroyed the originals, and deposited one copy, as he said he was going to do, in the library of the Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do he sought with much solemnity, the nobleman replying with curtness that any parcel Mr. Pope chose to send to his butler should be taken care of. So far good. The next thing was to get the letters published from the copy he had retained for his own use. His vanity and love of intrigue forbade him doing so directly, and he bethought himself of his enemy, the piratical Curll, with whom, there can now be no reasonable doubt, he opened a sham correspondence under the initials 'P.T.' 'P.T.' was made to state that he had letters in his possession of Mr. Pope's, who had done him some disservice, which letters he was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was as wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote and told him what 'P.T.' was offering him. Pope replied by an advertisement in a newspaper, denying the existence of any such letters. 'P.T.,' however, still kept it up, and a mysterious person was introduced as a go-between, wearing a clergyman's wig and lawyer's bands. Curll at last advertised as forthcoming an edition of Mr. Pope's letters to, and, as the advertisement certainly ran, from divers noblemen and gentlemen. Pope affected the utmost fury, and set the House of Lords upon the printer for threatening to publish peers' letters without their leave. Curll, however, had a tongue in his head, and easily satisfied a committee of their Lordship's House that this was a mistake, and that no noblemen's letters were included in the intended publication, the unbound sheets of which he produced. The House of Lords, somewhat mystified and disgusted, gave the matter up, and the letters came out in 1735. Pope raved, but the judicious even then opined that he protested somewhat too much. He promptly got a bookseller to pirate Curll's edition--a proceeding on his part which struck Curll as the unkindest cut of all, and flagrantly dishonest. He took proceedings against Pope's publisher, but what came of the litigation I cannot say. The Caryll copy of the correspondence as it actually existed, after long remaining in manuscript, has been published, and we have now the real letters and the sham letters side by side. The effect is grotesquely disgusting. For example, on September 20th, 1713, Pope undoubtedly wrote to Caryll as follows:--