If his impatience to print the Wycherley correspondence renders it probable that he would be anxious to print the more important collection which he had sedulously prepared for the press; if the deception he practised in 1729, to avoid being taxed with the proceeding, and to throw it upon somebody else, favours the belief that he repeated the deception in 1735 with the same intention; and if the various facts connected with the publication unite to prove with accumulative force that he was the sole contriver of it, there is the further argument that no other person had the slightest interest in perpetrating the act. "The numbers," says Dr. Johnson, "offered to sale by the private messengers, showed that the hope of gain could not have been the motive to the impression." Money was so little the object that a parcel of the books was sent to Lintot, "for which no price was ever demanded, as he had made known his resolution not to pay a porter, and consequently not to deal with a nameless agent."[86] Any person in the employment of Lord Oxford, who had access to the papers, and was competent to transcribe them, would not have undergone the toil, and risked detection, disgrace, and ruin for the sake of a few pounds which he must have shared with his accomplice Smythe. The vaunted revenge of P. T. could not have been the motive; for beyond the empty profession, it was belied alike by his words and deeds. The poet in truth loved himself too well to be able to counterfeit speciously the part of a hater. P. T. published the letters which Pope meant to be published; he lauded Pope in Pope's own strain; he took the measures which were most to Pope's advantage; he reflected Pope's vanities, weaknesses, and falsehoods, and behaved throughout in a manner as identical with Pope's position as it was remote from his own. Lucre and revenge were propensities to which P. T. was a stranger, though he aspired to a reputation for the latter, and the only passion apparent in his conduct is his mania to gratify by dishonesty and deceit the literary ambition of Pope.