Such was the series of stratagems which ushered in and accompanied the collection of 1735, from its first appearance in the volume of P. T. to its final shape in the volumes of Cooper. Pope's skill in deception was not equal to his passion for it. Audacity was the chief characteristic of his contrivances, and equivocation and lying his weapons of defence. When a trick or a subterfuge was detected, and could no longer be denied, he yet remained unabashed, and dropping all allusion to the points which had been proved against him, he continued to rely upon the falsehoods or fallacies which had been less completely exposed. His pertinacity in reiterating that he was sinned against when he was sinning, derived support from his literary fame, which gave currency to his representations, and in some degree gained credit to them. But his duplicity and his artifices were known to many, and it would be difficult to say whether his effrontery or his hypocrisy was most conspicuous when he affixed to the preface to the quarto of 1737 the punning motto, _Vellem nescire literas_, bewailed in the preface itself the necessity for the publication, hoped that no honest man might be reduced to a similar dilemma, talked with injured indignation of thefts, forgeries, and piracies, and exhorted the legislature to provide a remedy against the evil. His tone was not moderated by the suspicions he had roused, and the humiliations he had undergone. They had just as little effect in abating his love of treachery, or blunting his appetite for epistolary fame, and he was no sooner clear of one plot than he engaged in another of the same description, and for the same ends. His correspondence with Swift appeared in 1741. The English edition was a sequel to the quarto of 1737, and formed part of what was called on the title-page, "The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope, in Prose, Vol. II." In a prefatory notice to the reader, the letters are stated to have been "copied from an impression sent from Dublin, and said to have been printed by the Dean's direction," an impression, it is added, "which was begun without our author's knowledge, and continued without his consent." Pope held the same language in private to Allen and Warburton, and professed to be extremely annoyed at the step. His account has been almost uniformly accepted as true till the critic in the Athenæum showed that the publication of the correspondence with Swift was no exception to the previous proceedings of the poet, and that, as in the case of the Wycherley letters of 1729, and the miscellaneous collection of 1735, he himself had sent the manuscripts to the press, and charged the act upon others.