tters from peers, and the whole farce would
have ended at once but for a further trick. Lord Ilay said that a
certain letter to Jervas contained a reflection upon Lord Burlington.
Now the letter was found in a first batch of fifty copies sent to
Curll, and which had been sold before the appearance of the Lords'
messenger. But the letter had been suppressed in a second batch of 190
copies, which the messenger was just in time to seize. Pope had of
course foreseen and prepared this result.

The whole proceeding in the Lords was thus rendered abortive. The books
were restored to Curll, and the sale continued. But the device meanwhile
had recoiled upon its author; the very danger against which he should
have guarded himself had now occurred. How were the letters procured?
Not till Curll was coming up for examination does it seem to have
occurred to Pope that the Lords would inevitably ask the awkward
question. He then saw that Curll's answer might lead to a discovery. He
wrote a letter to Curll (in Smythe's name) intended to meet the
difficulty. He entreated Curll to take the whole of the responsibility
of procuring the letters upon himself, and by way of inducement held out
hopes of another volume of correspondence. In a second note he tried to
throw Curll off the scent of another significant little fact. The sheets
(as I have mentioned) were partly made up from the volume of Wycherley
correspondence;[15] this would give a clue to further inquiries; P. T.
therefore allowed Smythe to say (ostensibly to show his confidence in
Curll) that he (P. T.) had been employed in getting up the former
volume, and had had some additional sheets struck off for himself, to
which he had added letters subsequently obtained. The letter was a
signal blunder. Curll saw at once that it put the game in his hands. He
was not going to tell lies to please the slippery P. T., or the short
squat lawyer-clergyman. He had begun to see through the whole
manoeuvre. He went straight off to the Lords' committee, told the
whole story, and produced as a voucher the letters in which P. T. begged
for secrecy. Curll's word was good for little by itself, but his story
hung together and the letter confirmed it. And if, as now seemed clear,
Curll was speaking the truth, the question remained, who was P. T., and
how did he get the letters? The answer, as Pope must have felt, was only
too clear.

But Curll now took the offensive. In reply to another letter from
Sm