sincere if he professed that he had the letters from different hands,
and had printed them himself.[58] Curll repudiated the notion of
evidencing his sincerity by deposing to a falsehood, and of silencing
inquiry and suspicion by pretending that he had procured a quantity of
manuscripts from a variety of persons whom he must have refused to name.
"My defence," he replied, "is right; I only told the Lords I did not
know from whence the books came. This was strict truth and prevented all
further inquiry."[59] The pertinacity of P. T. in endeavouring to
persuade the bookseller to commit himself to a lie was as gratuitous as
it was shameless, for he had no interest in the deception he urged.
Curll had several weeks before announced to Pope that this mysterious
agent was the collector of the letters, and Pope in communicating the
intelligence to the public declared that he knew no such person. The
renewed mention of a couple of fanciful initials could not increase P.
T.'s risk of detection, any more than it could signify whether he had
sold the correspondence to Curll to be printed, or had printed it first
and sold it afterwards. But what would have been purposeless in P. T.
was important to Pope. The friends who had returned him the letters
which appeared in the volume must have joined with the public in
ascribing the work to him, and it was of the utmost moment that Curll
should absolve him from the imputation. Having entrapped his victim into
a false confession, he would have loudly appealed to it to prove that he
was not only innocent but injured. He would have complained to the
world, as he had done to Caryll, of the "idle ostentation and weak
partiality" which had caused his hasty and artless letters to be
printed, and his vanity would have been doubly gratified by the
appearance that his choicest compositions were the careless scratchings
of his pen, and that the personal and literary merits they displayed had
been forced into day to the grievous annoyance of his reluctant modesty.

Every incident which arose in the progress of the controversy
strengthened the case against Pope. At the same time that Smythe, on the
behalf of P. T., exhorted Curll to give false evidence before the House
of Lords, he informed the bookseller of the method by which a portion of
the correspondence had been acquired. P. T. had been engaged with a
noble friend of Mr. Pope in preparing for the press the letters of
Wycherley, and had caused so