wretched papers as they ought to have burned," when he himself had preserved them in duplicate, and designed them for publication; his transparent fiction that almost the entire circle of his correspondents,--Addison, Steele, Congreve, Gay, Walsh, Trumbull, Craggs, Digby, Blount, and others,--had been guilty of "idle ostentation or weak partiality," in showing these "wretched papers" to somebody who transcribed them for the press,--are all so many additional arguments to show the conscious guilt of Pope, and the gross and clumsy inventions by which he endeavoured to divert suspicion. The fable he concocted is, in its essential circumstance, identical with the fabulous story of P. T. While P. T. on his part is telling a falsehood to the public in the preface, and begging the bookseller to tell it in the House of Lords, Pope on his own behalf is telling the same falsehood in private to Caryll. This concurrence of misrepresentation between the letter of the poet, and P. T.'s address "to the reader" and instructions to Curll, could not have proceeded from independent and hostile persons. Curll did not choose, when he was before the Committee of the House of Lords, to father the lie which had been suggested to him. The proceedings were adjourned from the 14th to the 15th, that the clerk might search through some more copies of the book for the missing letter to Jervas, and P. T. employed the interval in again pressing Curll to assume the entire responsibility of the work. He gently rebuked him for owning that the books were sent by an unknown hand which might, he said, "be thought shuffling, and induce inquiry and suspicion of some dark transaction;" and he assured him that the lords would consider him more sincere if he professed that he had the letters from different hands, and had printed them himself.[58] Curll repudiated the notion of evidencing his sincerity by deposing to a falsehood, and of silencing inquiry and suspicion by pretending that he had procured a quantity of manuscripts from a variety of persons whom he must have refused to name. "My defence," he replied, "is right; I only told the Lords I did not know from whence the books came. This was strict truth and prevented all further inquiry."[59] The pertinacity of P. T. in endeavouring to persuade the bookseller to commit himself to a lie was as gratuitous as it was shameless, for he had no interest in the deception he urged. Curll had several weeks before announced to Pope that this mysterious agent was the collector of the letters, and Pope in communicating the intelligence to the public declared that he knew no such person. The renewed mention of a couple of fanciful initials could not increase P. T.'s risk of detection, any more than it could signify whether he had sold the correspondence to Curll to be printed, or had printed it first and sold it afterwards. But what would have been purposeless in P. T. was important to Pope. The friends who had returned him the letters