he promised contents of the
second volume were "Atterbury's Letters to Mr. Pope." Pope cited the
announcement as a reason for publishing his correspondence with the
bishop, which P. T. had enumerated among "the much more important
correspondence" that was intended to follow, and which, the poet, in
precise agreement with him, declared was "of a nature less
insignificant" than the printed collection.[98] The coincidence of
opinion between these bitter antagonists is especially remarkable,
because others have not been struck with the superiority of the letters
of Atterbury. Mr. Croker thought them, with one or two exceptions, dull,
pedantic, and common-place, and Warton complains that they are, many of
them, crowded to affectation with trite quotations from Horace and
Virgil. The excuse for making them public was weak in the extreme. On
the 12th of June Cooper replied to Curll's advertisement of his second
volume by a counter-advertisement, and offered him ten pounds for any
letter of Atterbury to Pope, or of Pope to Atterbury, of which he could
produce the original or a voucher. P. T.'s copy, if it existed, must
have been demanded when he made his confession, and it is among the
circumstances which show this confession to have been a fiction, that
the poet in his Narrative omitted to mention the surrender of the
important transcript, and never subsequently alluded to its existence.
Without copies or originals Curll could not violate the secrecy for
which Pope affected to be anxious. The poet, in fact, did not put forth
his pretence for printing the correspondence till he had received
practical evidence of the poverty of the bookseller's resources. Curll's
volume was published on the 14th of July,[99] and Pope's advertisement
did not come out till the following day. It was drawn up on the
13th,[100] when he had probably seen an early copy of the book, or he
would have waited till the next morning, when he could have read in
conjunction with the rest of the public the letters which Atterbury was
alleged to have written to him. They were three in number. The longest
was a statement printed by the bishop, and addressed to the entire
world, refuting a charge of having corrupted the manuscript of
Clarendon's History. The remaining two were pronounced by Pope to be
forgeries, and of these one had already appeared in a Biographical
Dictionary,[101] and the other consisted chiefly of poetical
quotations. Not a line had oozed out f