"The engineer was hoist with his own petard," and Curll, the intended victim, had the satisfaction of being the executioner. The poet plainly considered him to be a scoundrel whom he had a right to damage by any means, foul or fair. Walter Scott believed that his inveterate persecutor administered the emetic to him, and extraordinary as it may seem that a celebrated man of letters should adopt this method of punishing an obnoxious bookseller, the language of Pope obliges us to accept the conclusion[87]. The trick was puerile and degrading, but it inflicted no injury. The prosecution in the House of Lords, and the subsequent effort to fasten his own misdeeds upon his enemy was an outrage of a different description. To lure him into purchasing a book, and then to employ the influence conferred by genius in founding charges upon the act which were absolutely groundless, and in branding him with the disgrace which belonged to his accuser, was a baseness of which the lowest Grub-street scribbler satirised in the Dunciad would probably not have been capable. A spirit of unfairness, which, bad as it might be, was less injurious, pervaded his commercial dealings with Curll. The bookseller paid ten pounds in money, and twenty pounds in promissory notes, for three hundred copies of the work. Two hundred and forty only were delivered, and of these one hundred and ninety wanted the letters to Jervas, Digby, Blount, and others[88]. P. T. and Smythe stated in their advertisement of May 23 that Curll's notes "had proved not negotiable," which they seem to have designed as an excuse for not completing the imperfect books[89]. Curll maintained that the defence added slander to treachery; for the notes were not due till the 12th of June, and he indignantly declared that they would be honoured if the terms of the bargain were fulfilled[90]. But these terms were never intended to be performed. Smythe had contracted to reserve the whole impression for Curll, and assured him on May 10 that no one else should sell a single copy.[91] The pledge was violated as soon as made by sending a parcel of the books to Lintot, and one of the artifices which marked every part of the transaction was employed in public to counteract the promises which had been given in private. As Curll was to provide his own title-page and preface, and the copies seized by the order of the House of Lords had a title-page and preface by P. T., Smythe wrote to Curll on the 13th of May to explain this departure from the arrangement. A "wonderful caution" had suddenly seized P. T., who, apprehending that an injunction might be obtained in Chancery against Curll, had furnished a preface which "threw the publication entirely off him," and a title-page, in which, substituting the entire trade for an individual, it was said that the volume was "printed and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster."[92] This was pronounced by Smythe to be "as lucky as could be," and it was certainly a curious