he 12th, before the power of the House of Lords was put in
motion, contained the letter. Those which were furnished in the middle
of the day, as if to meet the messenger sent to seize them, were all
defective, and in every case the letter to Jervas was among the
omissions.[43] Nor had the leaves which contained it been simply kept
back, but every trace of it had been obliterated by an alteration at
the printing-press. In the complete work the missing letter commenced on
p. 115 of vol. ii.[44] and ended on p. 117. In the imperfect books a
note on Trumbull, which began at p. 114, is carried on to the top of p.
115, and Pope's epitaph upon him, which appears in no other copies of
the correspondence, is added to cover a little of the vacant space. The
word "Finis" follows the note, though, in spite of this indication that
the whole is concluded, the work recommences on p. 117 with the letters
to Gay, which continue to p. 154.[45] The coincidence was far too
extraordinary to be undesigned. Pope, who had incited the prosecution
the very hour the book was published, and who had been in such haste to
instruct Lord Hay that the debate in the House of Lords was concluded,
and the sheets seized by two o'clock, could alone have adapted one batch
to afford a pretext for the proceeding, and another batch to render the
proceeding abortive,--he alone could have arranged the delivery of the
respective parcels, and sent the fifty copies which contained the
obnoxious passage, in time to be sold in the morning, and the one
hundred and ninety copies in which it was wanting, just in time to be
captured by the messenger from the House of Lords. His object was not to
procure the confiscation of the correspondence, and stop the sale. He
wished to simulate indignation, and divert suspicion from himself
without interfering with the success of the work, and he conducted the
prosecution with so much care to ensure defeat that we may readily
credit the assertion of Curll, "that the lords declared they had been
made Pope's tools."[46]

While the copies seized by the messenger had not the letter to Jervas,
they contained in compensation an address "to the reader," which was not
in the first fifty copies sent to Curll. This preface betrays throughout
the hand of Pope. The original proposition was that it should be
furnished by Curll; and, notwithstanding the revenge by which he
professed to be actuated, P. T. maintained that the poet ought to be
mentio