t copies and said nothing about it. Now it is that Pope set about as
paltry a job as ever engaged the attention of a man of genius. He
proceeded to manufacture a sham correspondence; he garbled and falsified
to his heart's content. He took a bit of one letter and tagged it on to
a bit of another letter, and out of these two foreign parts made up an
imaginary letter, never really written to anybody, which he addressed to
Mr. Addison, who was dead, or to whom else he chose. He did this without
much regard to anything except the manufacture of something which he
thought would read well, and exhibit himself in an amiable light and in a
sweet, unpremeditated strain. This done, the little poet destroyed the
originals, and deposited one copy, as he said he was going to do, in the
library of the Earl of Oxford, whose permission so to do he sought with
much solemnity, the nobleman replying with curtness that any parcel Mr.
Pope chose to send to his butler should be taken care of. So far good.
The next thing was to get the letters published from the copy he had
retained for his own use. His vanity and love of intrigue forbade him
doing so directly, and he bethought himself of his enemy, the piratical
Curll, with whom, there can now be no reasonable doubt, he opened a sham
correspondence under the initials 'P.T.' 'P.T.' was made to state that
he had letters in his possession of Mr. Pope's, who had done him some
disservice, which letters he was willing to let Curll publish. Curll was
as wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote and told him what 'P.T.' was
offering him. Pope replied by an advertisement in a newspaper, denying
the existence of any such letters. 'P.T.,' however, still kept it up,
and a mysterious person was introduced as a go-between, wearing a
clergyman's wig and lawyer's bands. Curll at last advertised as
forthcoming an edition of Mr. Pope's letters to, and, as the
advertisement certainly ran, from divers noblemen and gentlemen. Pope
affected the utmost fury, and set the House of Lords upon the printer for
threatening to publish peers' letters without their leave. Curll,
however, had a tongue in his head, and easily satisfied a committee of
their Lordship's House that this was a mistake, and that no noblemen's
letters were included in the intended publication, the unbound sheets of
which he produced. The House of Lords, somewhat mystified and disgusted,
gave the matter up, and the letters came out in 1735.