his wit is hardly blunted by a pun. He
who talks of Pope's "stealing a sound," seems to have
practised that invisible art himself, for the verse is musical
as Pope's.

TO THE AUTHOR OF THE DUNCIAD.

"With rueful eyes thou view'st thy wretched race,
The child of guilt, and destined to disgrace.
Thus when famed Joan usurp'd the Pontiff's chair,
With terror she beheld her new-born heir:
Ill-starr'd, ill-favour'd into birth it came;
In vice begotten, and brought forth with shame!
In vain it breathes, a lewd abandon'd hope!
And calls in vain, the unhallow'd father--Pope!"

The answers to this epigram by the Popeians are too gross. The
"One Epistle" is attributed to James Moore Smyth, in alliance
with Welsted and other unfortunate heroes.

[207] The six Letters are preserved in Ruffhead's Appendix, No. 1.

A NARRATIVE

OF THE EXTRAORDINARY TRANSACTIONS RESPECTING THE PUBLICATION OF POPE'S
LETTERS.

JOHNSON observes, that "one of the passages of POPE'S life which seems
to deserve some inquiry, was the publication of his letters by CURLL,
the rapacious bookseller."[208] Our great literary biographer has
expended more research on this occasion than his usual penury of
literary history allowed; and yet has only told the close of the
strange transaction--the previous parts are more curious, and the
whole cannot be separated. Joseph Warton has only transcribed
Johnson's narrative. It is a piece of literary history of an uncommon
complexion; and it is worth the pains of telling, if Pope, as I
consider him to be, was the subtile weaver of a plot, whose texture
had been close enough for any political conspiracy. It throws a strong
light on the portrait I have touched of him. He conducted all his
literary transactions with the arts of a Minister of State; and the
genius which he wasted on this literary stratagem, in which he so
completely succeeded, might have been perhaps sufficient to have
organised rebellion.

It is well known that the origin of Pope's first letters given to the
public, arose from the distresses of a cast-off mistress of one of his
old friends (H. Cromwell),[209] who had given her the letters of
Pope, which she knew how to value: these she afterwards sold to Curll,
who preserved the originals in his shop, so that no suspicions could
arise of their