which appeared in the volume must have joined with the public in ascribing the work to him, and it was of the utmost moment that Curll should absolve him from the imputation. Having entrapped his victim into a false confession, he would have loudly appealed to it to prove that he was not only innocent but injured. He would have complained to the world, as he had done to Caryll, of the "idle ostentation and weak partiality" which had caused his hasty and artless letters to be printed, and his vanity would have been doubly gratified by the appearance that his choicest compositions were the careless scratchings of his pen, and that the personal and literary merits they displayed had been forced into day to the grievous annoyance of his reluctant modesty. Every incident which arose in the progress of the controversy strengthened the case against Pope. At the same time that Smythe, on the behalf of P. T., exhorted Curll to give false evidence before the House of Lords, he informed the bookseller of the method by which a portion of the correspondence had been acquired. P. T. had been engaged with a noble friend of Mr. Pope in preparing for the press the letters of Wycherley, and had caused some extra copies to be struck off. These, he said, "put into his head the thought of collecting more," and when he printed the materials he had since accumulated he imitated as closely as possible the type and paper of the stored up sheets.[60] P. T. made a merit of the revelation, and wished that Curll should see in it a proof of the openness and confidence with which he was treated. In reality it was an endeavour to explain the awkward circumstance that the prose part of Pope's Wycherley had been done up with the letters of 1735. The publication of 1729 was entitled the second volume of Wycherley's "Posthumous Works," and contained a couple of notes referring to poems which were inserted or omitted in what was called "the present edition." But as Pope's letters were not an edition of Wycherley's Works, the absurdity of the reference might have led at any moment to the exposure of the fact that the sheets of the old book had been transferred to the new, and it was better at once, by an air of candid confession, to account for the importation than to run the risk of discovery. Curll had soon a rival version to give of the manner in which these sheets were procured. He announced that Gilliver, who published the Wycherley volume of 1729, had declared that Pope bought of him the remainder of the impression, consisting of six hundred copies, and directed the other letters comprised in the volume of 1735 to be printed to match them.[61] There can be no difficulty in deciding between these opposite statements. The assertion of P. T. we know to be a falsehood, for Pope himself, and not the noble friend, prepared the letters of Wycherley for the press. None of the inferior agents could have carried off any large