The
documents show that the lying and trickery rested with P. T., while the
bookseller was veracious in his assertions and straight-forward in his
proceedings. "That Curll," says Johnson, "gave a true account of the
transaction it is reasonable to believe, because no falsehood was ever
detected."[76] It was his boast that falsehood had been his abhorrence
throughout the discussion, and he drew vaunting comparisons between
Pope's addiction to the vice, and his own detestation of it.[77] His
very failings in one direction had helped to sustain his virtue in
another. He had too much effrontery to care to descend to duplicity, and
it is impossible to read his many controversial manifestoes without
perceiving that he was in general as truthful as he was impudent. In the
instance of Pope's letters, there is the original blot, that he saw no
discredit in publishing papers which he supposed to be purloined; but he
had already avowed the fact before the House of Lords, and the crime was
more than shared by P. T. In everything else the acts and language of
the bookseller contrast favourably with the meanness and falsehoods of
his correspondent, who would not have assisted to disseminate the record
of his own misdeeds. But it was different with the poet. He must have
seen that the inevitable tendency of the "Initial Correspondence" would
be to convict him of the offences he had tried to fasten upon Curll. His
single chance of diminishing its disastrous effect was to promulgate it
as evidence upon his own side, and not to allow it to come forth solely
as the hostile statement of an opponent. The proceeding in P. T. would
have been to aid in propagating the proofs of P. T.'s "baseness and
foul-dealing." In Pope it was an effort to throw upon the initials the
stigma which would otherwise have fallen upon Pope himself.

The resolution of P. T. to proclaim his own disgrace was less
extraordinary than his manner of doing it. It was announced on the 24th
of May, that "the clergyman concerned with P. T. and Edmund Curll to
publish Mr. Pope's letters hath discovered the whole transaction, and a
narrative of the same will be speedily printed."[78] Hence it appears
that Smythe had made a full confession to the author of the "Narrative,"
and P. T. must be presumed to have been a party to it, since he
transmitted the originals of the communications he had addressed to
Curll, together with Curll's replies. This "Narrative" was the work of
Pope