Pope affirmed in his preface that the two letters ascribed to Atterbury had never been seen by the bishop or himself, and to show the absurdity of the fraud he adds that "they were advertised even after that period when it was made felony to correspond with him." At length, in 1739, one of the letters was adopted in a reprint of Cooper's octavos, and undoubtedly by the order of the poet himself, since it was included in the collection he delivered to Warburton. "We have ventured," says a note in the Cooper edition, "to insert this letter, which was plainly intended for Mr. Pope, though we are informed that on second thoughts it was not judged proper to send it him. A copy was preserved and published soon after in the English additions to Bayle's Dictionary, under the article of Atterbury." Pope's assertion, in the preface to the quarto, that the letter was fabricated, was either a reckless charge or a falsehood, and there are strong grounds for believing that he was all along aware that the letter was genuine. In the catalogue of surreptitious editions we are told of Curll's second volume that it has no letters to Mr. Pope, "but one said to be Bishop Atterbury's, and another in that bishop's name, certainly not his." The distinction drawn between the two amounts to an admission that the former might be authentic; and this is confirmed in the conclusion of the catalogue, where a reprint of the P.T. collection is described as containing the "forged letter," not letters, "from the Bishop of Rochester," though this very reprint contained them both. They were introduced into all the reprints themselves in a manner which showed that they were not considered of equal authority. In Curll's work, they are represented to be alike by Atterbury, and to be addressed alike to Pope. In the reprints of the P. T. collection, the letter which Pope ultimately accepted is alone given as written by Atterbury, or addressed to the poet. Its fellow has asterisks to represent the person to whom it was sent, and neither asterisks nor name to represent the sender. Pope's ally, Cooper, is supposed to have been concerned in the volume to which the Atterbury epistles were first transferred from the publication of Curll, and it is obvious that no bookseller would have originated the alteration, and that no other person would have prompted it who had not a peculiar interest in the correspondence of the poet, and who was not aware that these stray productions would be at once appended to a current P. T. impression. The distinction between the letters was made in the reprints of the P. T. collection before Pope published the preface to the quarto, in which he affirmed that both were counterfeited. He made the distinction in the catalogue almost immediately after the quarto appeared. He did not the less preserve the passage in his preface unchanged in every edition of his correspondence, and never uttered a single word of recantation. He allowed the charge of