While the inquiry was going on before the House of Lords in May, Smythe impressed upon Curll that P. T. had his whole heart set upon the publication of the letters, not so much on account of the volume which had been seized, as because it was the precursor of a much more important correspondence with Swift, the late Lord Oxford, the Bishop of Rochester, and Lord Bolingbroke.[96] When P. T. disappeared from the scene, Pope is found to have inherited his ideas and to be animated by the desire to complete the schemes his enemy left unfulfilled. "Since I saw you," he wrote to Lord Oxford, June 17, 1735, "I have learnt of an excellent machine of Curll's, or rather his director's, to engraft a lie upon, to make me seem more concerned than I was in the affair of the letters. It is so artful an one that I longed to tell it you--not that I will enter into any controversy with such a dog. But I believe it will occasion a thing you will not be sorry for relating to the Bishop of Rochester's letters and papers." There are no further particulars to explain in what degree Pope had acknowledged to Lord Oxford that he was "concerned in the affair of the letters,"[97] nor does any record remain of the artful device of Curll, or of the new director who had succeeded to P. T. and Smythe. The want of all foundation for the allegations against the bookseller is probably the cause of the vagueness of the allusions. The single palpable circumstance is that, in spite of his lamentations at the publication of his letters, Pope was already designing to send a fresh instalment of them to the press. Whatever may have been the "excellent machine" to which he darkly referred, Curll had furnished him with the pretence he sought. The bookseller put forth a new edition of the printed copies he purchased from P. T., and called it the first volume of "Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence." Partly, perhaps, to vex Pope, and partly to attract purchasers, he affixed the same title to future volumes, which were principally a medley of trash that had no relation to the poet. Among the promised contents of the second volume were "Atterbury's Letters to Mr. Pope." Pope cited the announcement as a reason for publishing his correspondence with the bishop, which P. T. had enumerated among "the much more important correspondence" that was intended to follow, and which, the poet, in precise agreement with him, declared was "of a nature less insignificant" than the printed collection.[98] The coincidence of opinion between these bitter antagonists is especially remarkable, because others have not been struck with the superiority of the letters of Atterbury. Mr. Croker thought them, with one or two exceptions, dull, pedantic, and common-place, and Warton complains that they are, many of them, crowded to affectation with trite quotations from Horace and Virgil. The excuse for making them public was weak in the extreme. On the 12th of June Cooper replied to Curll's advertisement of his second