was a
couple of initials, sent the letters ready printed to the bookseller.
Obliged to abandon his original story of the means by which they found
their way to the press, Pope had now some powerful reason for diverting
attention from the subject, and leaving the mystery unexplained.

He speedily manifested his desire to consign P. T. to oblivion, and
reverted to his former scheme of imputing the publication to Curll. In
the very "Narrative" which showed that the bookseller had no share in
gathering together the correspondence, Pope inculcated the idea that he
had been active in the task. He charged him with having put forth an
advertisement of the letters to Cromwell, in which "he promised
encouragement to all persons who should send him more," and adds, a
little lower down, "By these honest means Mr. Curll went on increasing
his collection."[80] The accused challenged him to produce the
advertisement, and the accuser was silent. He persevered nevertheless in
misrepresenting to his acquaintances Curll's part in the business.
Writing to Fortescue, on March 26, 1736, of the volume of 1735, he calls
it "the book of letters which Curll printed and spared not," though the
poet's own witnesses, P. T. and Smythe, had demonstrated, even in their
anger against Curll, that he had nothing to do with procuring or
printing the letters, and was merely the vendor of the copies he had
bought. In Pope's complaints to his other friends, Curll is the single
culprit to whom he ascribed the injury he had suffered, and on no one
occasion did he go through the form of keeping up his P. T. fiction. His
misrepresentations to the world at large were more covertly expressed.
He spoke in his authorised edition of the "publisher's own accounts in
his prefaces," and, as his first example, quotes P. T.'s address "to the
reader," which he knew from the letters of Smythe had never been seen by
the publisher till it was shown him at the bar of the House of Lords. To
help out the mis-statement in the text his reference in a note is made
to Curll's reprint of the collection of 1735, instead of to the volume
in which the address "to the reader" was originally produced.[81] Nor
was it, perhaps, without design that in the catalogue of surreptitious
editions, prefixed to an octavo impression of his letters which appeared
in 1737, he put first in the list, as if it had been the parent of the
rest, an edition of Curll, which was taken from the volume of P. T., a