Fortescue, who a few months later was raised to the bench, and informed him that he had bid Cooper send him the document for his legal opinion, begged to be acquainted with the steps which were necessary to be taken, and acknowledged that he had connived at Cooper's publication. In a subsequent note he asks for further directions in the conduct of the case. The poet and the bookseller were therefore working in conjunction, or to speak more correctly, the bookseller was the agent of the poet. It must have been by Pope's authority that he appropriated the copyright of the letters, and threatened proceedings against any one who invaded it. When Curll took up the gauntlet Pope adopted the cause, engaged Fortescue in the defence, and carried on with him the correspondence respecting it. His sanction of the publication is confirmed by the catalogue of surreptitious editions, since this impression of Cooper is omitted from the list, notwithstanding the insertion of a later impression by the same bookseller, containing some slight additions that had not been ordered by Pope. Thus while the poet pretended that he could not own the P. T. collection, with its mutilated, interpolated, and forged letters, he had secretly authorised a reprint which was identical with the collection he denounced. His actions evince the insincerity of his words. He had the power to erase the forgeries and interpolations with a stroke of his pen, and unless he had approved of the book in its primitive state he would not have entered into a league with Cooper to produce it unaltered. He afterwards seemed to disclaim the republication he had espoused. In the preface to his avowed edition in 1737, he spoke of the "piratical printers" of the surreptitious editions, without making any exception, and said that there was "not one of them to whom he had ever given the least title, or any other encouragement than that of not prosecuting them." This was either a direct untruth or, what was more in accordance with his peculiar morality, a deceptive quibble. Though he knew that his readers must infer that the epithet "piratical" was applied to all the printers who had put forth an edition of the volume of 1735, he may yet have justified to himself the assertion that he had never given the least title to any of them, by the reflection that as he had given a title to Cooper he was not a piratical printer.