. He alone could have furnished several of the particulars, together
with the letter which Curll wrote to him in March, 1735; and the
statements, the misrepresentations,[79] the reflections, and sometimes
the words, are the same which he employed in the preface to the quarto
of 1737. Hitherto, P. T. had been so fearful of detection by the poet,
that in the language of Smythe, he suspected his own shadow. He now
unmasked himself without a motive, and without reserve, to the man he
had injured. He had nothing to tell of Curll but what Curll had insisted
upon relating before the House of Lords, and the only novel information
he could give was the details of his own thefts and frauds. This,
indeed, was what Pope would chiefly have cared to learn. He would have
been eager to ascertain who the person could be that had got access to
his letters, and the means by which they were copied and printed; and he
certainly would not have called anything "a discovery of the _whole_
transaction," which contained no revelation upon the only points of the
least importance. But it is extremely improbable that the wary P. T.
should have wantonly turned self-accuser. To the last this fabulous
personage continued to act in the manner which was most convenient to
Pope, and the true explanation of the pretended confession is, that it
was a fiction of the poet to account for his possession of the
correspondence with Curll.

More inexplicable than all was the forbearance of Pope to produce the
facts in his "Narrative." He might feel bound to suppress the names of
culprits who had volunteered a confession of their crime; but he might
have told the manner of the theft, and specified the printer employed by
P. T. He refrained, on the contrary, from revealing the particulars
which would have absolved him from an odious imputation. He kept back
every tittle of evidence which would have acquitted him if he was
innocent, and have implicated him if he was guilty. His story has none
of the circumstantiality of an actual occurrence; his statements are as
indefinite as the agents were shadowy. He disclosed the dealings of P.
T. with Curll, which Curll had noised abroad, and was about to publish,
but he does not bestow a thought upon the far more essential question
of the mode in which the correspondence was purloined, and seems to be
satisfied himself, and wishes that the world should be satisfied
likewise, with learning that a person, whose only designation