ave revealed to Pope that the new
letters it contained were those which had been returned to him,--the
letters to Gay, Digby, Blount, and Caryll; that it comprised letters
_to_ as well as _from_ him,[57]--letters of which he was the sole
depositary; that the text was not taken from the originals, but from the
copy he had amended and re-cast; and that it was, therefore, impossible
that his acquaintances should have furnished materials which could only
have been derived from one source,--the bound book in the Oxford
library. His pretence that his letters were hasty and insignificant
expressions of civility, when he had spared no pains in collecting and
editing them; his affected indignation at his friends "for keeping such
wretched papers as they ought to have burned," when he himself had
preserved them in duplicate, and designed them for publication; his
transparent fiction that almost the entire circle of his
correspondents,--Addison, Steele, Congreve, Gay, Walsh, Trumbull,
Craggs, Digby, Blount, and others,--had been guilty of "idle ostentation
or weak partiality," in showing these "wretched papers" to somebody who
transcribed them for the press,--are all so many additional arguments to
show the conscious guilt of Pope, and the gross and clumsy inventions by
which he endeavoured to divert suspicion. The fable he concocted is, in
its essential circumstance, identical with the fabulous story of P. T.
While P. T. on his part is telling a falsehood to the public in the
preface, and begging the bookseller to tell it in the House of Lords,
Pope on his own behalf is telling the same falsehood in private to
Caryll. This concurrence of misrepresentation between the letter of the
poet, and P. T.'s address "to the reader" and instructions to Curll,
could not have proceeded from independent and hostile persons.

Curll did not choose, when he was before the Committee of the House of
Lords, to father the lie which had been suggested to him. The
proceedings were adjourned from the 14th to the 15th, that the clerk
might search through some more copies of the book for the missing letter
to Jervas, and P. T. employed the interval in again pressing Curll to
assume the entire responsibility of the work. He gently rebuked him for
owning that the books were sent by an unknown hand which might, he said,
"be thought shuffling, and induce inquiry and suspicion of some dark
transaction;" and he assured him that the lords would consider him more