nown
person who wrote a feigned hand, and who signed his letters with the
initials P. T., then opened a correspondence with the bookseller, and
furnished some information upon the genealogy of the poet. He vindicated
him from the charge of plebeian descent, and affirmed that he sprung
from the same stock as Lord Downe.[27] This assertion was repeated by
Pope in one of the notes to his "Prologue to the Satires," though Mr.
Pottinger, his cousin, ridiculed the "fine pedigree," which had never
been heard of in the family, and which there is nothing to confirm.[28]
There is thus at starting a curious identity between the apocryphal
statements of P. T. and the apocryphal statements of Pope. But as P. T.
must have had access to the manuscripts in the keeping of Lord Oxford,
he might be supposed to have found the account among the memoranda of
the poet, and no great stress could be laid upon the coincidence to
prove that P. T. was Pope in disguise, if the general tenor of the
correspondence did not indicate its origin.

There was a feud between Pope and Curll. The bookseller believed that
the poet had drugged him with an emetic, he had been subsequently
satirised in the Dunciad, and he had lost no opportunity of retaliating.
An uncompromising panegyric upon his antagonist would have run counter
to his prejudices, and while P. T. is careful to tell nothing which is
not for the honour of Pope, he has the precaution to consult the
antipathies of Curll. He pretends that the poet, with whom he was
formerly well acquainted, has treated him like a stranger, and that he
cannot give so good an account of his manners as of his parentage. He
promises, if he receives encouragement, to make these moral deficiencies
the subject of a future letter, "without entering into anything in
anywise libellous." He omitted, however, in his next communication, to
keep this part of his engagement, and never reverted to it. He had
spoken of Pope's family in the same flattering and perhaps fictitious
terms as Pope himself; but, in spite of his pledge, and his animosity,
he forbore to relate the minutest particular to the discredit of the
poet. The inconsistency between the assumed character and the actual
conduct of P. T. is much too glaring. An enemy would have been far less
partial and considerate.

The first communication of P. T. was dated October 1733. He directed
Curll to signify the acceptance of his offer by inserting in the Daily
Advertiser the