ar morality, a deceptive quibble. Though he knew that his readers
must infer that the epithet "piratical" was applied to all the printers
who had put forth an edition of the volume of 1735, he may yet have
justified to himself the assertion that he had never given the least
title to any of them, by the reflection that as he had given a title to
Cooper he was not a piratical printer.

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 t