It happened that while this subject was fresh in the public mind, and within a very few weeks after he had finished his _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, the death of his mother occurred. This gave him a fair occasion of publicly asserting his claim to a good position in respect of birth. Accordingly, the following notice, which appeared in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for June 1733, we cannot doubt came from himself:--"_June 8._ Died Mrs. Editha Pope, aged 93, the last survivor of the children of William Turner, of York, Esq., who, by Thomasine Newton, his wife, had fourteen daughters and three sons, two of which died in the King's service in the Civil Wars, and the eldest retired into Spain, where he died a general officer." Pope had now said all that he proposed to make public; and accordingly we find nothing more concerning his descent in the _Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope, Esquire_, published by William Ayre in 1745, the year after the Poet's death. He might, or might not, have been acquainted with the letter to Curl with the signature P. T., in which a person professing to be well acquainted with Pope's family, undertakes to inform Curl respecting them. This letter has, strangely, been attributed to some actual friend of Pope, and even to the Poet himself writing thus anonymously to Curl, with whom he was at the time in open war. Who P. T. specifically was, has, perhaps, not been discovered; but that he was a person with whom Curl had unfair dealings respecting the collection of Pope's letters, will be seen in Mr. Ayre's _Memoirs_, p. 300. The information in this letter has been generally received by later writers on the life of Pope, as worthy of the same acceptation which is yielded to the Poet's avowed statements respecting his family; and, undoubtedly, it proceeds from some one who was acquainted with facts in the history of the family a little beyond those which the Poet himself had divulged. To those facts it adds the following:--That Pope's father had an elder brother who studied and died at Oxford: that the father was himself a posthumous child: that he was put to a merchant in Flanders, and acquired a moderate estate by merchandise, which he quitted at the Revolution, and retired to Windsor Forest, where he purchased a small estate: that he married one of the seventeen children of William Turner, Esq., formerly of Burfit Hall, in Yorkshire: and that two of his wife's brothers were killed in the Civil Wars.