ss to particularise
any real forgery, he in effect accredited the entire collection of P. T.
He had far greater interest in showing that it was not authentic than in
damaging the trumpery volumes of Curll, and his forbearance to select a
single instance of imposition from its pages is a plain proof that none
existed for which he himself was not responsible. The charge of
interpolation, which he had twice put forth in his advertisements,[111]
and subsequently repeated to Allen,[112] was still more openly
abandoned; for he tells us in his preface that the passages he omitted
were "improper, or at least impertinent to be divulged to the public,"
and he no longer pretended that they were any of them spurious. He did
not, in short, disown in his genuine edition one sentence of the volume
of 1735, but practically receded from his previous allegations, which
were mis-statements intended to persuade Caryll that he was not
answerable for the garbling of the letters, and the world that he was
not a party to their publication.

His acts continued to confirm his guilt. A little while after the quarto
was published there appeared the 5th and 6th volume of the octavo
edition of Pope's works, which the title-page says "consists of Letters,
wherein to those of the author's own edition are added all that are
genuine from the former impressions, with some never before
printed."[113] This edition bears internal evidence of having been
printed concurrently with the quarto itself. A sheet signed *Dd, the
pages of which are numbered from 215 to 222, is interpolated in the
quarto between the two last leaves of Dd, and the numbers are of
necessity repeated on the succeeding eight pages. The interpolated
letters of the quarto are equally an interpolation in the octavo, where
they follow p. 116 of Vol. VI., on a duplicate half-sheet signed *I, and
the paging is repeated on the half-sheet which follows. Consequently the
octavo must have been struck off before the letters were interpolated in
the quarto, or they would not have been printed in the octavo on an
interpolated half-sheet. A second insertion tells the same tale. A few
letters are added at the end of the quarto with the announcement that
they had been published "since the foregoing sheets were printed off."
These letters appear in like manner at the end of the octavo after
_finis_. At the very moment, therefore, that Pope was compelling his
reluctant friends to subscribe to his expurgate